Francis Ford Coppola’s Tucker 48 Was Just Sold For $1.545 Million
Francis Ford Coppola is one of the few filmmakers who has had the opportunity to make a movie about a car that they own … and it wasn’t a Ford.
Coppola directed the 1988 biopic “Tucker: The Man and His Dream,” starring Jeff Bridges as Preston Tucker, because he was fascinated by the tragic tale of the ill-fated automaker and owned one of the handful of cars that rolled off the assembly line before Tucker went out of business.
The Detroit native purchased his Waltz Blue Metallic example in 1979 and has owned it ever since. It was one of the authentic Tucker 48s that was used on-screen in the film.
The sleek, rear-engine Tucker 48 was filled with innovations like a central headlight that turned with the vehicle, a perimeter frame for crash safety, a padded dashboard and a shatterproof window designed to pop-out in a crash.
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The company’s funding was also innovative, but turned out to be part of its undoing. Tucker pre-sold accessories for the car before it entered production to raise money, which raised the ire of the U.S. Security and Exchange Commission instead. The charges were eventually dropped, but the company’s reputation was tarnished and the money dried up.
Just fifty cars and a prototype were ever built, but 47 remain intact. Coppola’s was the 14th built and was rebuilt during the making of the film when it partially dismantled for an assembly line scene.
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The 86-year-old Coppola finally decided to part with it this year and put it up for auction at the Gooding Christies Pebble Beach event during Monterey Car Week, where it sold for $1,545,000.
That’s roughly the going rate for Tucker 48s these days and far from the record price paid for one, which was $2.9 million at the Barrett-Jackson Scottsdale auction in 2012.
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The buyer of Coppola’s car did get a little extra, however, as the lot included a bottle of Rubicon red wine from Coppola’s Inglenook winery worth $265, plus a private tour and wine tasting at the estate.