August 7, 1988 | Had Preston Tucker never existed, Francis Coppola easily could have invented him.
 
Tucker, whose dramatic rise and fall is the stuff of legend, was a  visionary entrepreneur who dared to compete with Detroit's Big Three automakers.  In the years immediately following World War II, when newly confident Americans were famished for new cars and other consumer goods, he created his masterwork, the Tucker Torpedo. It was a sleekly designed, aerodynamically inspired road machine, boasting many innovations -- disc brakes, padded dashboard, seatbelts, a water-cooled rear engine, safety pop-out windshields -- that Big Three roadsters would not have for years, even decades, to come.

But being newer, and better, was not enough for Tucker to succeed. The Securities and Exchange Commission delayed his initial stock offering, and later charged Tucker with securities violations. The bad publicity turned even worse when it was revealed that, for his first stockholders meeting, Tucker wheeled out for display a poorly-built prototype that could barely run.
 
Even though he was eventually cleared of all criminal charges, Tucker was forced to shut down his Chicago manufacturing plant in 1948, after only 50 Torpedoes had rolled off the assembly line. Forty-five still exist, and Francis Coppola owns one of them.

Until his death at age 53 in 1956, Tucker insisted he had been driven out of business by a conspiracy funded by the Big Three. Still, Tucker remained an American Dreamer of the most diehard kind. At the time of his death, he was dickering with officials of the Brazilian government for funding to manufacture another ''car of the future.'' It was to be called the Carioca.

Francis Ford Coppola remembers well the initial excitement about the Tucker Torpedo. His father, Carmine, then first flutist for conductor Arturo Toscanini, invested $5,000 in Tucker stock, and placed an early order for a Torpedo.  Little Francis, a sickly child who had survived a bout of polio, was fascinated by the bold, ambitious designs of postwar technology, and eagerly awaited the day when his dad would steer a Torpedo into the family driveway.
 
But the day never arrived.
 
One day, Francis, almost in tears, asked his father why their Tucker car hadn't been delivered. ''They drove him out of business,'' his father replied. ''His car was too good.''
 
By now, 40 years later, Coppola has established himself as an American Dreamer in the Tucker tradition. A maverick with a mantelpiece laden with Oscars, he launched a grandiose plan for a Hollywood renaissance with his very own state-of-the-art studio, Zoetrope. The dream died, but Coppola endured. And now, perhaps inevitably, he has made Tucker: The Man and His Dream. The film, which stars Jeff Bridges and Joan Allen, opens Friday in Houston. It has been called a largely autobiographical work. The director doesn't dispute the description.

Coppola spoke about his own dreams -- some fulfilled, others dashed -- a few days ago in the quiet suite of a posh Los Angeles hotel. He was dressed simply -- black suit, white shirt, navy-blue tie with small white polka-dots. With his brown-rimmed glasses and thick, gray-flecked black beard, he could have passed as a studious rabbi.

Joining him for the conversation with a visiting reporter was his long-time friend and frequent collaborator, George Lucas. In the days when Coppola was his mentor and producer, Lucas directed THX-1138 and American Graffiti. Then the student struck out on his own, directing or producing several of Hollywood's biggest hits (Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Empire Strikes Back, etc.) and a few clunkers (Howard the Duck, Labyrinth ).

Now the roles have been reversed, and Lucas is serving as Coppola's producer on Tucker. For the interview, Lucas wore faded blue jeans, white Reeboks, a light blue shirt open at the collar. Somehow, the attire for both men seemed ironically inappropriate. After all, Lucas is the one with the serious, button-down image, the filmmaker with, as he puts it, ''an unflinching focus on the story.'' He mixes well with the more volatile Coppola, Lucas said, because ''Francis is very good at just wandering around. He'll say, 'Well, let's jump on the moon right now.'”

But what about the clothes? Did the costume girl hand out the wrong outfits?

Coppola laughed heartily, then replied: ''I made a decision a few years ago that, whenever I'm working, I'm gonna wear a tie. And whenever I'm not working, I'm not gonna wear a tie. And that way, I know whether I'm working.''

''And that's the difference,'' Lucas said, maintaining a perfectly straight face. ''When I'm working, I wear my Levis. And when I'm not working, I wear my tuxedo.''
 
“And you look good in that tuxedo, too,'' Coppola remarked.

Both men smiled at their friendly give-and-take. If, as has long been rumored, there once was a rift between them, a rift only recently healed by their collaboration on Tucker, you couldn't tell on this Sunday afternoon. Maybe that's because the rumors weren't, and aren't, true.

Like most adults, Coppola said, he and Lucas ''have had a couple of minor beefs between us that were extremely minor. We just had different opinions on something. But compared to the 10,000 areas of agreement -- I mean, look, I've had bigger beefs with my brother, by far, than with George.”

  ''There's a certain mythology that develops, unfortunately'' Lucas said. ''And in that particular case, we never really had a falling out.'' But when writer Dale Pollock wrote Skywalking, a Lucas biography, ''he saw the situation, and made it very dramatic,'' Lucas said. ''Which means he exaggerated it, wildly. And then everybody else used that as the bible, without questioning whether it was true or not.

''Francis and I have been friends for over 20 years. And we've always helped each other . . . We're more than friends, we're like family. And in that, there is obviously controversy that comes and goes. Just like it would in any family. But it never has affected our friendship.''

Chalk it up, then, as another chapter in the continuing saga of Francis Coppola, the eternal enfant terrible, the graying wunderkind. Coppola, like Preston Tucker, has always had to deal with controversy.
 
Part of the first wave of American moviemakers to roll in from university film schools, Coppola first gained a firm foundation in theater studies, earning at B.A. degree in drama from Hofstra University (1959). Before he moved west, to do graduate work at UCLA, he considered writing a play about the life of the man who designed the Tucker Torpedo.

But Coppola soon was distracted by the work of creating his own legend. While still a student at UCLA, Coppola enrolled in the Roger Corman College of Fast-Serve Schlock. Working as an assistant to the notorious low-budget filmmaker, Coppola served as soundman, dialogue director, associate producer and general jack-of-all-trades for various Roger Corman quickies. Corman, suitably impressed by his student's diligence, bankrolled Coppola's first feature, Dementia 13 (1962), a cheapie-creepie filmed in Ireland. It was not an auspicious debut.
 
Back in the United States, Coppola zipped onto the fast track, landing a staff position as scriptwriter for Seven Arts Pictures, a company later consumed by Warner Bros. (Among the scripts he helped write, during and after his Seven Arts days: This Property is Condemned and the Oscar-winning Patton.) Back at UCLA, according to legend, someone posted his photo on a bulletin board with the label: “Sell-Out.'' True or false?

''Probably, it was someone who was very jealous who wrote that,'' Coppola said.

One thing led to another, and Coppola directed a second, more prestigious film, You're a Big Boy Now (1966), which helped him earn his Master of Fine Arts degree. In 1968, Coppola directed, unsuccessfully, yet another film, a movie based on the Broadway musical Finian's Rainbow.  During production, he was impressed by the work of an eager young production assistant, George Lucas. So impressed, in fact, he brought Lucas along for the wild ride when he filmed, on the run, The Rain People, a road movie about a runaway wife (Shirley Knight) who can no longer endure the constraints of middle-class comfort.

''That was a very peculiar time,'' Coppola recalled. ''We capitalized on   the fact that one company [Warner Bros.] had bought the other company [Seven Arts], and no one knew who was in charge for six months. So we made ourselves in charge. Really, that's what happened, don't you think?''

Lucas nodded in agreement, adding: ''We were also in a period when avant-garde films were vaguely acceptable. And we took advantage of it. I mean, when I did THX-1138, I knew, and I said, 'I'll never get another chance to do this again. And I'm gonna do it for all it's worth.' ''
 
Coppola continued: ''Our technique in those days -- and I remember this very vividly -- was that we just announced to them that we were making a movie. And we went off and started making it, with our own money. And they said, 'Well, what are you making? Oh. All right, we'll do it.' So they came in two weeks later.''

Which was a good thing, Coppola admitted, ''because we didn't have the money to get past two weeks.''

''That was Francis' theory of making movies,'' Lucas said. ''You start the movie, and then figure out how to pay for it later.''

 Preston Tucker would have been proud.
 
 Coppola's stock enjoyed a spectacular rise with The Godfather (1971), winner of the Oscar as Best Picture and arguably the greatest American movie of the past two decades.

He followed up with The Conversation (1974), a low-key thriller Coppola considers one of his two best works. (His other favorite, oddly enough, is the critically lambasted Rumble Fish.) Then he made The Godfather, Part II, earning another Best Picture prize. For a while, it looked as though, unlike Tucker, Coppola would fulfill the American Dream.

But dreams have a way of turning into nightmares.

Coppola suffered a nervous breakdown during the long ordeal of filming his Vietnam fantasia, Apocalypse Now, in the Philippines. Even though the finished production was impressive, it took years to turn a profit, and branded Coppola as a reckless spendthrift.

In 1980, Coppola purchased a 10 1/2-acre studio in Hollywood, and set about creating an alternative filmmaking center, Zoetrope Studio. He considered filming Tucker, a long-cherished project, as a musical, and signed Betty Comden and Adolph Green to write songs.
 
But then, in a gamble even Preston Tucker might have considered foolhardy, Coppola pumped millions into a technically lavish but dramatically thin romance, One from the Heart. The movie wasn't a Torpedo. It wasn't even an Edsel. Audiences stayed away in droves, creditors demanded repayment, and Zoetrope went on the auction block.

Crushed by the failure of Zoetrope, and determined to free himself from debt, Coppola became a hired gun of a director, accepting studio projects and working toward some sort of personal rehabilitation.

Most of the post-Zoetrope films -- The Outsiders, The Cotton Club, even Coppola's beloved Rumble Fish -- were neither critical nor financial hits. But Peggy Sue Got Married was popular and modestly profitable. And last year's Gardens of Stone, Coppola's moving account of the war at home during the Vietnam era, ranks with his very best work.

Even now, however, Coppola finds it difficult to talk about Gardens of Stone, the story of a military man (James Caan) who trains a young protégé for combat, then endures the grief of the protégé’s death. Three days into filming, Coppola's 22-year-old son -- Gian-Carlo, known affectionately as Gio -- was accidently killed while boating with Griffin O'Neal, son of actor Ryan O'Neal.

''I have to say, honestly, that Gardens of Stone is so associated with my boy, and the fact that the movie was about a man who loved a boy whom he lost -- that I almost have not even seen it.

''I made Gardens of Stone with my heart. So maybe it's a beautiful film . .” But it’s also, in Coppola’s mind, an elegy.

In contrast, Tucker: The Man and His Dream is a celebration. In the closing credits, Coppola says the film is ''For Gio, who loved cars.'' The dedication is an apt one, for it was Gio who persuaded his father to call on George Lucas for help when it appeared the movie would never be made.

Lucas, who knew Coppola had long cherished the dream of filming Preston Tucker's life story, agreed to serve as producer. And when Hollywood turned thumbs down on the project, Lucas himself raised the $24-million budget. Only after production began did Paramount Pictures agree to pick up the tab. The art of moviemaking, like history, often repeats itself.

Is Tucker: The Man and His Dream the story of Coppola: The Man and His Movies? Yes and no.
 
''The irony of it is,'' Coppola said, ''I first chose to make the Tucker story (as a film), and bought the Tucker rights, and bought the Tucker car, after I made The Conversation -- which was a good five years before I bought the studio in Hollywood. So, yes, my life did fall in a certain way similar to this. But unknowingly, and after I'd already made the decision to make the movie.

''Of course, if you think about it, whenever you choose a movie, you're choosing something you're attracted to. And it reinforces choices that you make in your life. So that, in other words, it's not that uncanny that this happens. Because you are in control as a director. I mean, I could make a Western, or I could make a movie about rocket ships. And, obviously, I'm interested in science, personally. So I'd make the movie about rocket ships.
 
''The thing about this picture is -- well, what would happen, George, if, tomorrow, I had an uncle in Brazil I didn't know I had. And he left me $500 million. Would I go right over and buy Paramount or something like that? Would I do it again?''

Lucas didn't miss a beat: ''Yes,” he replied. “You probably would.”