Hybrid movie on carmaker DeLorean
Alec Baldwin plays entrepreneur in mix of documentary and drama
Zachary DeLorean wonders why it took so long for a film to be made about his larger-than-life father, inventor of the car bearing his name.
“Dad’s story has it all — cocaine, hot chicks, sports cars, hard-core drug dealers and the FBI,” he says.
Well, it’s not like Hollywood didn’t try. More than a dozen attempts were made over the years to capture the car mogul on celluloid, including one by John DeLorean himself. Among the actors mentioned for the role over the years were George Clooney and Richard Gere.
But all those potential productions failed to bring John DeLorean to the big screen until “Framing John DeLorean,” a unique film opening in theaters Friday, June 14. The movie is part documentary, based on 55 interviews with DeLorean’s friends and co-workers, and part drama, with scenes starring Alec Baldwin. It also, oddly, consists of behind-the-scenes looks at making the movie, in which Baldwin speculates about the motivations behind DeLorean’s actions, particularly the self-destructive ones.
“Alec is so smart and thoughtful and engaging that we were having these great conversations about John as a man and how to prepare to play that character,” said Sheena M. Joyce, who made “Framing John DeLorean” with her longtime filmmaking partner Don Argott. “We thought we should have these in the film too, that they would elevate it in some weird way.”
As a subject, “John was hard to crack, in that we like to paint people with a single brush,” Joyce said while in San
Francisco for a screening of the film at SF DocFest. “But his story is just so big that it is hard to boil down the life he lived in 90 minutes.’’
DeLorean started as a brilliant car engineer and the youngest person to head a division of General Motors. He left in 1973 to found the DeLorean Motor Company, whose single product was a sports car featuring gull wing doors that, in the “open” position, gave the impression the car could fly. But building it proved time consuming, and when it finally was introduced in 1981, the market for new autos was in a slump.
Desperate to save his creation, DeLorean decided to sell drugs, agreeing to bankroll cocaine smugglers, but the deal was videotaped in an FBI sting operation and he was charged with drug trafficking. Although he was found not guilty, the trial destroyed his reputation and his name was permanently tarnished. (A second film about DeLorean, “Driven,” opening in August deals only with this episode in his life.)
But the trial also brought the DeLorean unexpected fame. The movie “Back to the Future” was in production at the same time the tabloids were reporting DeLorean’s legal problems. “In the original script the time travel machine was to be a refrigerator,” Argott said. “But when they were reworking it, the director, Robert Zemeckis, said we need something better than a refrigerator. Because John was in the news Bob (Zemeckis) said it should be a DeLorean.”
“The car is so rooted in film history you get a lot of people who fell in love with it because of the film,” said Tamir Ardon, the producer of “Framing John DeLorean” who is also a DeLorean owner and historian of the one-of-a-kind auto. “As the movie was about to be made, the studio got an offer from Ford to substitute a Mustang. The company was willing to pay $75,000 for placement of its product.”
When Bob Gale, a “Back to the Future” producer, heard about the offer, he reportedly said, “Doc Brown doesn’t drive a f—ing Mustang.”
A problem of subjects with such rich stories is that it’s hard to show all their lives in a film. Which is why an important incident is mentioned only briefly in the movie: DeLorean was charged with defrauding his company of $8.5 million as part of an embezzlement plot. He was acquitted because jurors didn’t realize they had the option of declaring a hung jury; they thought they had to acquit if a unanimous verdict couldn’t be reached.
“It would have been boring to show one trial after another,” said Ardon, who believes DeLorean was lucky to get off so easy. “John was only in prison for 11 days while bail was being raised. He says he actually found religion in the prison cell, that there was a moment of revelation that he needed God and that he had gone off the path of where he should be.”
Joyce said that Baldwin agrees DeLorean had strayed from his skill set. “Alec liked to say he should have stayed in his lane. I think that is true, too. Just because you are good at one thing doesn’t mean you are good at everything. I think John became so successful so quickly and was so charismatic that he began to think he could work in any world at the same level and be above other people and outsmart them at their game. When he started to make those decisions, that is when he got himself into trouble.”
In the end DeLorean lost almost everything: his marriage to supermodel Christian Ferrare, his mansion in Morristown, N.J., his company and most of his money. But not his dreams. In the years between his second acquittal in 1986 and his death two decades later at age 80, John DeLorean sat in a small room in his one-bedroom apartment attempting to resurrect his car company. He told the press he was designing a new vehicle to be called the DMC2. Without any investor interest, he sold highend watches of his design on the internet.
His son Zachary suggested that the filmmakers end “Framing John DeLorean” with his father alone in that room as the lights go out.
“He gave us our ending,” Joyce said.