Articles
Cinema: On The Road to Utopia TUCKER: THE MAN AND HIS DREAM - Time Magazine
August 15 1988
They meet with the Spruce Goose looming dramatically behind them -- two legends from the lunatic fringe of American capitalism. Howard Hughes (Dean Stockwell, in another of his sharply incised cameos) gestures toward history's largest airplane. "They say it can't fly," he intently whispers, "but that's not the point." We in the audience laugh, poor conventional souls that we are, brought up to believe the goal of invention is not self-satisfaction but marketability and, just possibly, the chance to improve mankind's general welfare. How boring!
Preston Tucker (Jeff Bridges, in the performance of his life) knows better. He just nods sober agreement with Hughes. He is in the process of creating a utopian automobile that will get no further off the ground, commercially speaking, than the Goose did. But who cares? He is not in the business of building empires; he is in the business of building dreams. And for him, as for Hughes, it is necessary to reproduce his fancy only once in reality to achieve fulfillment. Indeed, after seeing Francis Coppola's marvelous Tucker, one believes that if the inventor had been forced to replicate his car endlessly on a production line, promote it and warrant it and tweak it around to create a little novelty each new model year, Tucker might have ended up running on empty, one of those corporate windbags booming the virtues of an individualism he has long since mislaid.
Read the rest of this article...
Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites
Subscribe to this comment's feed
LOVE YOU CORIN
Star-ving
