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(camera whirring)
(cat meowing)
(static buzzing)
- [Man] Okay, John.
Can you hear me all right?
- Yes, sir.
- [Man] I'll be talking to you over this intercom
when I'm out here.
I'm going to pump up that cuff now.
- Okay.
- [Man] The test is about to begin.
Is your first name John?
- Yes.
- [Man] During the first 53 years of your life,
did you ever do anything dishonest, illegal, or immoral?
- Yes.
- [Man] Before 1981, did you ever engage
in an improper business practice
or put false information
on an official form or document?
- Yes.
- [Man] Before age 54,
did you ever cheat someone
or take advantage of anyone in a business deal?
- [Man] Yes, I would say.
- [Man] Okay, John,
how was it that time,
a little nervous?
- Well, like, when you get into those general questions,
you start thinking back
about bad used cars you sold people--
- Oh, yeah.
- About the maybe the time you--
- [Man] Yeah, I noticed that you answered false--
- Committed a little adultery.
You know, I must say that if you, it really--
- [Man] Causes you to think back.
Well, you go through your whole life.
(upbeat electronic music)
- [Man] John DeLorean is one
of the maverick rogues of his day,
and there are very few
of those guys around today.
- [Man] He was a dreamer.
He wanted to push things
beyond where other people had taken them,
and in a way that's a marvelous
and appealing characteristic,
but it's also extremely dangerous.
- [Man] John DeLorean was a winner,
a loser, a champion,
a relentless fool.
This guy was the quintessential leading man
that Hollywood producers dream of,
and he was real.
- I've always wondered why a feature film
hasn't been made of John's life.
I think it'd be a great movie.
- Obviously I'd had this dream.
I wanted to build this automobile company.
Everybody said it's inconceivable
that any new automobile company could survive.
- I'm always interested in the story
of the quintessential outsider,
full of ambition and hope,
and works his way up
and ascends to the position he was in.
- He had it all,
his own auto empire,
a beautiful wife, children.
He was a golden boy.
- [David] And, of course, his colossal fall
is almost Shakespearean.
- [Man] John DeLorean, who gave up a shot at the presidency
of General Motors to build his own futuristic sports car,
is in jail this morning.
- The thing that's remarkable about DeLorean's story
is that it has all of these incredibly powerful elements.
It's got a marvelous celebrity couple.
It's got drugs.
It's got drug dealing.
It's got FBI guys.
It's got this incredible political backdrop.
It's the sort of story that's,
if it hadn't happened,
you wouldn't dare to make it up.
- The interesting thing is all of a sudden now
a number of people have been back at me
wanting to do a movie of my life.
- It had always seemed to be a story
that had been around Hollywood
as early as probably the early '805.
- [Man] Often good ideas produce several films
at the same time.
With John DeLorean,
I think it was taken to a new level.
- Every single one of these movies
had different people from John's life,
different family members,
different underlying material,
which made it this fascinating race
to get the movie made
because each one would have been
a decidedly different story.
- Still to this day,
not one's been made yet.
- Every so often you hear,
"Oh, somebody's gonna make a movie about DeLorean.
"Somebody's gonna make a movie about DeLorean."
Knock on wood, it'll happen,
- He was this kind of chameleon like figure
who could appear one thing to one person
and another thing totally to a different person,
and I think in a way,
that's why so many scripts have been written about him
because he is open to interpretation.
- You get the impression that he is either a beleaguered man
who was discredited and manipulated
by big business in this country,
or he was the greatest conman
to ever come down the pike.
(dramatic instrumental music)
We have an opportunity this morning to visit with him.
Would you welcome Mr. John DeLorean?
(audience applauding)
(upbeat instrumental music)
- You shoot him for your purposes
over the arc of how many years?
He ages in the piece.
- [Man] Mostly early '705 to early '805--
- [Woman] To early '805.
- [Alec] Right, so there's a spread,
and he ages during that time.
- [Man] Yeah, that's--
- And I want to see how his behavior ages.
I need to see clips that are a range of that.
- And driving you all this time
was this desperate need
to make this car thing go.
- My pride is so intense that nothing in the world
would let me let this business,
this car with my name on it, go down.
- That's the corner of his eye.
You draw a straight line up the brow
overlaps the corner of the eye.
- Well, I think it's got to come in a little bit.
- It's got to come over?
- Yeah.
- [John] Anybody (mumbling).
- [Woman] All right, the involvement with cocaine.
Talk about that--
- [John] Well, it's a peculiar thing
because, you know, in my life,
I have never, ever seen cocaine,
touched cocaine, used cocaine,
or been in the presence of anybody--
- All the time I've looked at DeLorean before,
I thought, where is he manipulating,
and where are the peeks
behind the curtain of who he really is?
And then when you play the person,
you say to yourself,
well, forget about me looking at DeLorean
as a viewer on a TV show
and saying, what's behind the curtain with him?
When you start to play him,
you go, no, no, no, no, no, no.
He's not guilty of anything.
He didn't do anything.
In fact, it's the opposite.
He's a hero in his mind.
He's a hero,
and you have to play that.
You have to play who he thinks he is,
and you present him as who he thinks he is to the world,
and you let the audience
make up their mind.
- [Woman] And that you suddenly thought
you were involved with the mob
and you were frightened
for your life and your children's lives--
- [John] Really what happened--
- Let me just show my wife.
She just thinks it's funny.
She thinks this whole thing.
She's like, "Alec, like I can't believe
"this is what they,
"they pay you to do this."
- Oh, God.
(laughing)
Wait, what are you doing?
You're doing a movie?
- We do re-enactment footage of DeLorean's drama,
his caper, his escapades,
and shoot them as a movie
and cut re-enactment footage
into documentary footage
of a movie about DeLorean
and what he did and what he went through,
and the good news is,
I don't have to bother with any of that.
They do.
I'm gonna just go put the make up on
and go try to be DeLorean.
(gentle instrumental music)
- For John DeLorean,
growing up in Detroit,
every kid's dream was to go into the auto industry.
- One thing you have to understand about John DeLorean
is he was a brilliant engineer,
and so to start with,
he had some really good instincts,
and he had great talent.
- DeLorean thrived in the car business first at Packard,
for a short while at Chrysler,
and somebody sought him out at General Motors
and offered him his choice of five divisions.
- He took on Pontiac,
which was the old ladies' division at the time,
and it was really the place
where he could shine the most.
- [Man] General Manager, Mr. John 2. DeLorean.
(audience applauding)
- In those days, the late '505
and early '605 at GM,
Pontiac particularly was exciting to be there
because they were almost ready to be dropped,
and of course that was the kind of thing that gave you
the incentive to come up
with new ideas and make them happen.
- And I started as a very unsophisticated young engineer,
and I was given an opportunity to attain a success
in a business world far beyond anything
I had ever imagined I was capable of.
- You know, this was a special guy
who was gonna change the industry forever
and truly become a legend at the company.
- [Man] Scene two, alpha, take three.
(mumbling)
Marker.
- The story on the GTO is that we were about ready
to do a brand new line,
and we had the '64 Tempest to be
in the garage there with John
and a couple other guys.
- [John] Hey, Bill.
- John, you heading home?
- Yeah, I was about to.
Wanted to stop by and see how you were coming along.
- Well, I think she's about as good
as we're gonna get her.
He would encourage everybody
to do something new and different.
- Was hoping maybe we'd have something,
I don't know, sexier?
- You mean sportier?
- Yeah, more high performance, you know?
- Well, our bigger 389 engine
has the exact same dimensions as the 326 in here,
so we could swap that out, no problem.
- Well, how would the car handle the extra power?
- That's the thing.
Have to fit the appropriate transmission and rear axle,
but we do that,
it'd definitely be sexier, John.
Shoot, we could even run this in NASCAR.
- I say we do it.
- Really?
- Yeah, absolutely.
- But then what?
You think you can actually sell it?
- You let me worry about that, Bill.
(upbeat instrumental music)
(brakes squealing)
- [John] I was just gonna drive it back and forth to work,
and I had a marvelous time with it,
and I found that every time
I lent it to somebody
to use for a day or two,
I couldn't get it back,
and I said, "Well, there may be a market
"for something like that."
- What the hell is this?
That's the GTO.
It stands for Gran Turismo Omologato,
which I think is Italian for fast as hell,
but it'll beat every car
on a track or American street,
and it's still a Pontiac.
- Hold on a second.
Turn that off.
The 14th floor is never gonna go for putting
such a large engine in such a small frame.
- Well, GM forbade putting
a so called big block beyond,
I believe, 350 cubic inches in a medium size car.
- The guys upstairs approve this?
- I don't need their approval.
- It's a new product, John.
All new products need upper management approval.
- [Man] And John was interesting.
He loved really just figuring out ways
to bend the rules as much as possible.
- But it's not a new product.
It's an options package on the new Tempest
and one that puts a real tiger under the hood.
- It's manipulative.
- It's marketing.
- Pontiac is primarily the division for older buyers.
What are they gonna want with a hot rod?
- We're the division for older buyers
because that's how we view ourselves.
We've got to anticipate what younger buyers want
before they even know what they want,
and once they realize it,
give them this.
- So how many you wanna produce?
- You're the sales manager.
You tell me.
I was thinking about 30,000.
(laughing)
- You're out of your damn mind.
- John, be reasonable.
- I can't imagine us selling even close to 5,000,
but let's start with that number,
and let's hope that they don't rust on the lot.
- At that time, the sales manager of Pontiac
thought it was stupid,
and he refused to schedule more
than I think about four or 5,000 for the year.
- [Man] It was an outlaw move.
by a sort of sleight of hand.
It was just an options package.
- Despite his feeling it wouldn't sell,
I think we sold like 45,000 the first year.
- [Man] What he figured out before anyone figured it out
was that this exploding youth movement
had interest in cars as something
that would represent
the way they wanted to look to the world.
(tiger growling)
- It's the perfect moment
in which John was able to marry
both his brilliant engineering
as well as his marketing prowess
to create the muscle car.
- [Man] The muscle car era really advanced Detroit.
It made money.
It made Pontiac.
It made those three letters, GTO, legendary.
There's an odd parallel between the Pontiac GTO
and John 2. DeLorean.
The GTO was a risk taken,
and I think it convinced DeLorean
that taking a risk no one else was willing
to step up to and making it work
at all costs was how you did it,
and after you do it once, why stop?
(upbeat instrumental music)
- What I see about DeLorean for me,
he took such risks,
and the problem with people
who take risks like that
is that when they win,
when they make their calculated risk,
they become emboldened.
They take more risks,
and then they take risks outside
of their normal sphere.
- Between this and the other,
it'll generate about four and a half,
not less than four and a half mil.
- [Alec] Risk taking in the automotive industry
and risk taking with a bunch of drug dealers in a hotel
are two different things,
but your confidence in yourself is very, very high.
You don't make mistakes.
You don't see them coming.
- That's better than gold.
- No, just say it's better than gold.
This stuff weighs more.
Gold weighs more than this.
Gold weighs more than this,
for God's sakes.
- [Man] Yeah, better than gold--
- Better than gold.
Gold weighs more than this, for God's sakes.
- Hi, John.
Hi, John.
- Hi.
- Jerry West, we're the FBI.
- But in the end, when he's arrested
and he tilts his head back,
and you have a shot hopefully looking down
from the ceiling,
and his head should crane up
and look right up into a thing
and look off camera,
and he's thinking,
and what are you thinking?
We should cut to what he's thinking.
He's worried about his family.
He's worried about losing everything,
and there were like four or five things
if he just made a little adjustment here
and made this decision differently there--
- With the FBI.
- [Alec] All of it would have turned out
completely differently.
(upbeat instrumental music)
- [Man] DeLorean was clearly a fast mover
at GM in the early '705.
- Whoever makes the most money at GM
is the most important person,
and everything he touched turned to gold,
so by the time John reaches the 14th floor,
better known as the executive level,
he's in his mid forties.
If he just plays his cards right,
he's poised to be the next president of General Motors,
the largest corporation in the world.
- [Man] GM was very intentional
on making executives colorless,
and DeLorean was a highly Technicolor person.
- [Man] He wore open collars.
He wore side burns.
He spent his weekends in California,
and you know what an evil influence that is.
- [Man] He gets significant plastic surgery on his face
to give himself a stronger jaw.
He starts weight lifting and losing weight.
- [Man] He and his first wife separated,
and then he started dating actresses and models,
women that were a lot younger than him
and who a lot of GM executives
and their wives thought were age inappropriate.
- I have a reasonably strong sex drive,
which I happen to think is an important part of any guy.
No man who ever accomplished something
didn't have that one characteristic.
- [Tamir] He married his second wife,
Kelly Harmon, blond bombshell.
She was 19 at the time.
- [Man] The General Motors PR Department
added a couple years to her age
when the press releases first went out about the marriage.
- [Tamir] She lives there in Detroit for two or three years,
becomes disillusioned with the marriage,
and leaves him,
and within a year and a half,
he's married to Cristina Ferrare,
the, at that point, world's top super model.
- [Man] Then he ended up, of course,
in the fashion magazines and that kind of thing,
and while that enhanced his image outside of the company,
it created problems for him within.
- GM can't stand this.
It's pissing them off,
and he goes back to them and says,
"Hey, what are you guys worried about?
"Look at the sales numbers."
- Tom, how do you feel
about our retail sales job this past year?
- How do I feel?
John, I feel great.
- Both at Pontiac and at Chevrolet,
he was making so much money for the company,
and all the executives that he reported to
who were upset with his lifestyle, upset with him,
couldn't quite figure out
how he was doing so well,
but they could see the numbers,
and they knew that showed up
in their bonus checks,
and that was the interesting dilemma
for GM with John DeLorean.
(gentle instrumental music)
- [Man] This is Boston Harbor,
and those are Volkswagens.
They're coming in.
- One of the tragic flaws of GM,
and again this is something he knew,
is that the company was all too willing
to do what it was doing year after year after year
because it was working
even though they were ignoring, for instance,
the small car market
and let it go a lot of time to foreigners.
- He saw what was coming
from a lot of these imports,
these smaller, more fuel efficient,
better quality cars,
and he knew the writing was on the wall.
- Obviously, I saw the trends very clearly,
and I wanted to react to them
a little bit perhaps more aggressively
than other members of the industry management.
- He had big aspirations.
He wanted to stay at GM.
He wanted to be president.
He wanted to do things,
take the company in directions
that they weren't willing to do
because they were so comfortable
being the fat cat at the time,
being the number one car company in the world,
and that leads to his demise.
(gentle instrumental music)
- [Man] There were executives who resented him.
Probably the most prominent
is a guy named Roger Kyes.
- It was just a total difference of opinion.
I think he considered me capricious and superficial,
and I considered him a pompous ass.
- [Man] Those enemies in the company slowly developed
kind of a cabal, if you will, against DeLorean.
- In 1972, they tasked John
with putting together a speech
to talk about GM's quality,
the infamous Greenbrier Speech.
They pre-read all the speeches weeks in advance.
They noticed that the speech not only criticizes
the quality of the cars,
but it criticizes a lot of the executives
that are currently there,
some of his own bosses,
and they censored a lot of the stuff
that he could say in the speech,
but he wasn't gonna let it just rest at that.
- There's nothing.
There's something you forgot.
- Well, that's the one I'm actually giving
at Greenbrier on Saturday.
This is the speech I should be giving.
What I should be saying is in here.
It's somewhere buried like Kyes wants.
- You think it's personal, then?
- Oh, sure it's personal.
I wonder how much longer I can do this dance.
I mean, at this rate,
it'll be 10 years of me pushing papers
that I didn't write before I'm named president,
and that's not gonna work at all.
- Any thoughts on how you might accelerate that?
- As a matter of fact,
I've got a few ideas, yeah.
If this original speech were to be leaked,
there would be some blow back, sure,
but I'd be vindicated.
- And in this particular situation,
what he wants is for the public and the press
to sort of shame GM
and push them in the direction that he wanted
the company to go in.
- Good to see you, Roy.
- And you, John.
- [Tamir] And he felt that by calling these people out
that this was gonna somehow prop him up
and propel him even faster into the presidency.
- [Man] His initial speech leaked to the press,
and it was all over the news
that John DeLorean is highly critical
of General Motors' quality.
- DeLorean claimed his enemies
had leaked the speeches out.
Became apparent that people close to DeLorean
had leaked these speeches out.
- You got to remember this is a person
who was only rewarded for taking big risks,
dangerous moves.
It didn't work.
- [Man] No doubt, DeLorean was booted
by members of the board
and the corporate directors,
and that forced him out very abruptly in 1973.
(gentle instrumental music)
- [Man] DeLorean is ejected from the company
in what should have been
a very embarrassing event.
However, he finds a way at making it all heroic.
- Being fired or being 1/7th
or 1/ 10th of some committee
is a very unappealing thing to me.
Obviously, it was very rewarding financially,
and it would have been easy to sit there
for another 17 years collecting a half a million
or three quarters of a million dollars a year,
but that really didn't appeal to me very much.
- A full career would have been another 15 years.
Well, what's he gonna do?
He's going to count beans
with the other executives.
Compared to creating new, cool products like GTOs,
it's completely different.
There's no way DeLorean would have lasted to age 65.
- Wow, I can't imagine us selling
even close to 5,000
but let's start with that number.
- I've got another car, a stainless steel car.
You're gonna be crazy about it.
- Yeah, okay.
Good luck with that, John.
(laughing)
- [Man] And cut.
- No, that's what the line should be.
The bad version, you'll be going,
"Next thing you're gonna be telling us
"you want to build a stainless steel car."
(laughing)
(upbeat instrumental music)
- In the back of his mind,
this concept car was always stirring,
what he called an ethical car.
- Oh, we're doing a sports racing car here.
It's gonna be designed to have an eternal life,
and so we're using a non-corrosive material
so that it'll just stay together forever and ever,
and so it's gonna be very beautiful aesthetically.
- [Tamir] He wanted to build a sophisticated,
contemporary looking sports car for the masses.
That wasn't the norm.
If you're gonna get something
that's that exotic and interesting,
you're gonna have to get a Ferrari
or a Lamborghini where they only make
a few hundred cars a year.
John was trying to make a mass produced car.
He set out to compete with the big boys.
- It's difficult, if not impossible,
to start up a car company.
Really, the last one you could name
was Chrysler in the 19205,
and even Chrysler went through bankruptcy.
There aren't many people who'd do that,
who want to risk it all.
- [Man] When he left GM
and more or less was forced to leave,
that became the driving force in his motivation.
I'm gonna show them,
and so it was part dream and part revenge.
(pages rustling)
(birds chirping)
- There it is,
what we always talked about.
What do you think about being named
the head of the entire product program
for the first mass produced car since Chrysler?
- John, look, obviously I'm flattered, but--
- No buts, Bill,
and I'm not flattering you.
This is what you and I were built for.
This is real innovation.
- Does innovation include a pension?
- (laughing) Well, who's asking?
- My wife.
- Well, you tell Nina that the greater the risk,
the greater the reward,
and besides, this finally puts you in the driver's seat.
- Lemonade, boys?
- [Bill] Thank you.
- Honey.
- Thank you.
- And you've got the money for this?
- Oh, yeah, we've got several sources
of initial investment.
- You two are quite persuasive.
(laughing)
- The lemonade was my idea.
- It's delicious.
- You talk to your wife.
- I probably thought about it,
and my wife would say we should
probably not have done it.
Having been at GM where money
was never a problem,
you were sort of gambling,
and you hoped the thing was gonna work out.
- The company really has its founding in two people.
That's John DeLorean and Bill Collins.
- [Man] Collins never reached for glory.
He didn't have so much ego
that he needed his name on the product.
He was always behind the scenes.
He was the guy who made DeLorean look good many times.
- Bill is a super, wonderful gentleman.
He is one of the world's finest men.
He really is.
He is a good man,
and it was like his dream
was to do this.
- I think from the beginning,
John's major concern always was fundraising,
so my objective was to start out
building the first prototype.
- This was definitely Bill's baby.
I mean, if there was an issue
that had anything to do with the car,
Bill Collins was the guy leading the charge.
That played out basically for the first three years
of the project.
When we finished the first prototype,
it was a huge event
because now we could say,
this isn't some dream kind of fakery here.
This is the real McCoy.
- [Bill] We hadn't solved all the engineering problems yet,
but it was exciting.
It turned out to be a great car, in my opinion.
- To be part of this thing
that might grow into something
that who knows where it would go,
it was electrifying.
- [Man] This is a presentation
of the DeLeorean Motor Company.
(gentle electronic music)
Imagine how many of the men who have headed
each of the major automotive manufacturers
have wanted to create a product starting
with a clean sheet of paper.
That is what the DeLorean Motor Company intends to do.
- We were basically a company
with no foundation,
and the less you have to secure an investment,
the more risky you are to an investor,
and we were pretty risky.
Our asset was John's background experience,
and so he really had to be
what we initially were selling.
- [Man] John DeLorean wants to build a car--
- [Jerry] You have to portray him
as being on the top of the mountain,
being adored by the world as a savior
of the auto industry,
- [Man] (mumbling) is very popular.
- [Jerry] And we were the dog and pony show experts,
and we'd do the set up.
We'd do the show,
and then at the precise moment,
John DeLorean would come in.
They'd actually see the man,
and it looked like he was levitating.
(audience applauding)
(camera shutter flashing)
- Most of you have already seen my lovely wife, Cristina.
I know she's likely the real reason
you're all here tonight,
(laughing)
but in all seriousness,
I do have her to thank,
along with many others.
In particular, I'd like to recognize
the man I handpicked,
essentially stole from GM to head up
the entire DeLorean Motor Company private program,
perhaps the finest automotive engineer
I've ever met in my entire life, Bill Collins.
(audience applauding)
I know that we may be the new boy on the block,
but I also know that on this,
the bicentennial of the American Revolution,
we can start making our version
of the American dream a reality.
Allow me to introduce the first incarnation
in the evolution of my dream,
our first vehicle,
code named the DMC-12,
the DeLorean Motor Car.
(audience applauding)
- [Man] In the early stages,
this was all but the second coming.
It was described in Detroit as significant
as the invention of the Ford Model A,
(camera shutter flashing)
that this was gonna change everything.
(camera shutter flashing)
(birds chirping)
- I don't think I've sat in one of these
probably since my dad had one on the farm.
There's not much of a tie
for me to the car as much as people would think.
I don't know if that makes sense.
Being young when this car was built,
you just don't understand
the magnitude and the gravity of it.
It's flying over your head at 1,000 miles an hour,
and it's like my dad built this car.
It's got our name on it.
I mean, when I'm in it or I see it,
I see my father.
I feel my dad,
but between me and this car,
I think it's a love hate relationship, probably.
Half the time, I don't even know what to think of it,
to be honest with you, so,
probably the closest person I've ever been close
to my whole fucking life was my father.
He adopted me when I was,
I mean, two weeks old.
As far as like DeLorean
or DeLorean Motor Company,
it was just dad going to work.
Dad's building a car.
I had no clue how famous he was,
had no clue how famous my mother was.
I think we moved to New York
probably I would say in '74
because then my sister was born in '77.
- Throughout my life,
I understood that there was
this man John DeLorean,
and with this man John DeLorean
came this history of all the things
that are again iconically
encompassed by the car,
and then there was my dad,
and I understood that they were two different people.
When I was little,
my dad was at the peak of everything.
There are pictures of us,
and I used to say,
it's the royal family.
My mom was always so perfect and put together,
and my brother always in his perfect little suit.
Oh, we were so cute,
like seriously, we were just so cute.
My dad was my best friend.
He taught me everything.
He taught me how to fish.
He taught me how to drive.
He taught me how to ride a motorcycle.
- This is everything he had been working for.
This was his dream, I mean,
being married to my mom,
having a family,
having an apartment on Fifth Avenue,
buying a farm out in New Jersey,
having the car company.
(camera shutter clicking)
That was probably the best time of his life.
- Can you see this well?
Is this lit well enough for you?
Because, I mean, I'm a firm believer
that that can't be faked,
and now how happy she is, I don't know,
and she seems pretty happy,
but she's a kid.
They're always fairly happy as a rule,
but look at how happy he is himself,
the subject of the film.
I don't think that can be.
I think he's very happy,
and I have a picture of my family,
and I'm a couple of years older
than my wife than he is from his wife,
so I get this.
I get this,
and the problem is that he wanted both,
and when you want both,
you can have both,
but that's very tough to do.
- [Man] Cristina, you have been married
to this man for seven years.
Tell me about John.
- Well, I, unfortunately for everyone else,
all of our other friends,
they do not know John the way I do,
and if they did--
- [Man] Well, that may be better.
- No, no, let me be more specific about,
because most of the people
know John as a businessman and an executive,
but I know him as a husband
and a loving father,
and he is a totally unselfish,
gentle, giving human being.
I grew up and married Prince Charming.
- [Man] Really?
- That's exactly how I feel.
Yes.
- All right, John.
Describe her to me.
(laughing)
- Yeah, of course.
it would take days,
but I never in my wildest dreams
ever believed that my life
could be so complete and so happy,
and when there's any kind of a family crisis,
she suddenly becomes the Rock of Gibraltar.
She really is the solid,
stable part of our relationship,
whether it's--
- She was very perky,
peppy, upbeat,
and she is that way in a lot of the footage
that I've seen.
- Do you want me to walk you to the elevator
like I do every morning?
- [John] No.
- No?
Okay.
Good bye, sweethea rt.
Have a wonderful day.
Goodbye, darling.
That's John.
Anyway--
- [Morena] But every woman who has it all
and who works and who has children
and who is in love
and who has a loving family,
like you cannot be 100% at everything.
When I was watching footage,
it was to sort of see,
what was the public Cristina
versus what was the personal,
- [Man] They arrested John DeLorean.
- I just found out a few hours ago.
I know nothing.
I caught a plane.
I'm here.
(mumbling)
- She's so composed.
It's amazing, right?
I mean, I feel like she was caught in between
what she wanted things to be like,
and this is just me speculating obviously,
but like what she wanted things to be like
and then what the reality was.
(mumbling)
Not yet.
We were just rehearsing.
Sit down.
- What are you doing--
- Sit down, you little.
And obviously with what happened in their lives
with John being arrested,
I think that's sort of like the culmination of it all,
and along the way I'm sure
that in their relationship,
there were moments where she was very much in love,
but wondering, he's incredibly driven and ambitious,
and how does she fit into that picture?
- Eventually the car will get built,
but right now I'm trying to build a brand.
- Well, it concerns me
where we're gonna raise the children.
- Well, wherever we set up shop,
we won't have to spend much time there.
All that matters is which government
gives us the most money.
- Well, it matters to me,
and it matters to the kids.
- Don't worry.
It's gonna be great for all of us.
(weapons exploding)
- [Man] Northern Ireland's now experiencing rioting
on a scale not seen for many years.
- Why pick Belfast, Ireland,
to build your motor plant?
- Oh, it's very simple.
Nobody anywhere in the world
would come up with the financing we needed.
Now, nobody else would go to Belfast
because it was such a terrible,
dangerous place to be.
- I read in the newspapers
that John DeLorean had secured
the investment he needed to establish his car project
in Northern Ireland against the background
of the famous troubles
that was rife at that time.
(yelling)
- [Man] Prolonged civil unrest between Catholics
and Protestants scares off industrialists,
depriving Northern Ireland of jobs,
which it needs more than any other area of Britain.
- The unemployment was insane.
It was 30, 40%,
and John had something to offer, jobs.
The Labor government in Britain at the time
was willing to put in subsidies, loans,
a piece of land,
but here's the catch.
It's got a population
that has never built a car before.
There's no pre-existing structure
to build a car company there,
and you have to do it in two years.
I mean, are you kidding me?
And all they have at this point
is a hand built prototype,
so it was a long list of things to accomplish
to eventually be able to productionize the car.
It became clear to everyone
that they needed to have help
to weed out all the problems
and actually engineer this car to be mass produced.
Well, Colin Chapman comes into the picture.
- Probably the finest automobile engineer
I have ever met in my life, Colin Chapman.
I'll introduce Colin now.
(audience applauding)
- [Tamir] Colin Chapman is the founder of Lotus Cars.
He was a pioneer in the racing industry.
He dominated Formula One.
- [Man] A deal had been struck with Lotus Cars as a company
and Colin Chapman as a named individual
to engineer and develop DeLorean cars
that could enter production.
- Well, the idea of working with Lotus
sounded like a good idea.
We would all get together,
and we'd become a joint organization
and go finish the production design work.
- Well, when we first got to Lotus,
I mean, right out of the chute,
it was kind of awkward.
Here Bill and I and some others had spent years
getting us to this point,
and then now it was like Bill Collins and Bob Manion
and whoever else was involved,
they can kind of like just watch us,
and that of course isn't what I was gonna do,
and it certainly wasn't gonna be what Bill was gonna do.
- This is Bill.
Johnin?
- [John] Bill, how the hell are you?
- Look, John, I got the contract you sent over,
and I have to say it raises some questions.
You've got a lot in here about Lotus, John,
but nothing about me.
- Oh, you don't have to worry about that, Bill.
It's just a lot of paperwork.
You know what you're doing.
- I understand that, John,
but I thought this was supposed
to be a collaboration on the redesign,
but Chapman's nowhere to be found.
- Well, they're doing a lot of R and D, aren't they?
- That's the other thing.
This company in here, this GPD,
I've never even heard of it.
- You don't need to worry about that, Bill.
It's not going to affect you at all, okay?
- Well, I don't see how that's possible.
They got a hefty line item
in here on engineering,
but that's what we're supposed to be doing.
It just seems like you're paying twice
for the same thing, John.
- Well, it must be some kind of a tax shelter, Bill.
I don't know.
I'm not a CPA.
I'm sorry.
- John, what am I doing here?
Why am I even here?
- I liked Bill.
I think he'd done a tremendous job,
but the moment I found him reading the contract,
it was quite clear that what he'd already decided
in his own mind was true,
that he was out of a job.
Colin Chapman was not gonna have anybody
looking over Colin Chapman's shoulder.
- [Man] To do business like this,
don't you have to be pretty ruthless?
- I don't think you have to be ruthless.
I think you have to be prepared to make
some unpalatable decisions at times
because frequently you're faced with making a decision
between two evils,
and you're gonna hurt somebody.
- John DeLorean himself, he knew.
He'd arranged with Chapman
that this is the way it's gonna be.
Nobody had told the guys from the U.S. team.
- [Tamir] It becomes painfully clear that Bill
and his engineering team are out of a job,
and not only that,
there's something very fishy going on
with the finances of this deal.
Colin Chapman was gonna be willing to do things
that Bill would never have been comfortable with,
and for John, I think that was an important aspect
to this partnership,
and it was the type of thing
that was so important to him at the time
that he was willing to sacrifice Bill.
(metal clattering)
- Dear, John, after much deliberation on my part,
I feel it is obvious to both of us
that my participation in your venture
is no longer the same as intended.
Under the current circumstances,
I feel the only alternative for me
is to tender my resignation
in all my present positions at this time.
I wish you and the rest of the team the best of luck.
All these years later,
it still looks great,
and it would be nice to have a brown interior.
Well, it'd been a long, long time
that we'd been working on the project,
and I felt that I was being totally undercut by John,
and he really owed me a hell of lot more
than to treat me the way he did,
and itjust seemed like the time to move on.
- [Woman] Do you remember having the conversation
with John where you said,
"I'm resigning?"
- No, I don't remember.
I think he was happy to see me go.
- [Woman] Do you really?
- Yeah.
- [Woman] He didn't try to stop you at all?
- No.
We're all males,
but there's something to be said
about being the guy that's sort of the guy
that bore the baby, as it were,
with the DMC-12.
(metal thudding)
(mumbling)
(plane engine running)
- Before we started filming,
we knew nothing about John DeLorean really.
(upbeat instrumental music)
We basically came to the project
because a British television station
wanted to do something on Ireland.
- And I was thinking, oh, boy,
They said, "No, no, we want it to be about automobiles
"because everybody in England
"just loves automobiles."
- [Chris] Like most of our films,
the idea was to kind of watch somebody
who wants to fulfill a life dream,
and that's who John was.
- [Man] John Zachary DeLorean certainly doesn't smile much.
The reason is simple.
The most important project in his life
is yet to be accomplished.
- He was very guarded
because he had so many things, I guess, on his mind
to get figured out all the time.
- We've had some kind of criticism right from day one.
First, we were never gonna get the program together.
Then we'd never get the financing.
Then we'd never build the plant.
- I don't think the motor car manufacturing industries,
whether it be America, UK, mainland,
actually ever thought that it could be done.
- Now the critics are forecasting our failure
two or three years from now,
so I think as long as you can
always keep your failure two
or three years in the future,
you're probably gonna do okay.
- I think DeLorean's problem
was at that time he needed cars,
and he needed cars in a hurry.
- You got to pick the three or four big markets
We can't wait 14 months to start selling.
- It was a constant panic of racing the clock,
and it was damn the torpedoes
and full speed ahead.
- [Woman] It was such a process of building the car
and seeing what was working
and what wasn't working.
- We've had problems on the upper control arm
around the ball joint,
but we also had a torsion rod failure at 41,000 cycles.
- Everybody knew that there were gonna be problems.
The view you took was, well,
yeah, we expected this.
Fine, let's get on and fix it.
- It was crazy, absolutely crazy,
but it was exciting.
You were an operator on the floor
seeing that lovely stainless steel car
going together the way it should go.
That was very rewarding.
- You felt part of a family when you went in there.
There was absolutely no trouble,
no Protestant, Catholic divide.
- One of the proudest achievements, I think,
of DeLorean is that it was a form of social experiment.
You had for the first time in Northern Ireland
Catholics and Protestants
working alongside each other.
The social experiment was beginning to work.
You can have a mixed work force and be successful.
- In two years and 11 months,
we had built a factory.
We had designed a car.
The cars were built,
and that was the best time
I've ever had working in any company.
- [Man] When the first six cars came rolling out,
the news crews were all there.
John was the biggest hero
in Northern Ireland that day.
- It's incredible that he got 3,500 cars
into the United States on a boat,
and we actually sailed on the damn boat too
because I just was so excited to see that happen
'cause I knew he showed them that he could do it.
- [Man] Buyers are reported to be
queuing up in the United States
for the company's futuristic Goldwing DMC-12.
- [Tamir] And D.A. and Chris,
you watch their movie,
and the perception you get at the end
is this is a success.
- Everything was hunky dOI‘Y:
and it was great, you know?
We'd succeeded in October '81.
(camera shutter clicking)
- [Woman] How is it?
- DeLorean is four or five little moves
away from victory.
(upbeat instrumental music)
He's on the doorstep of that victory.
In the music of it, it's like Bolero.
John just says (singing).
We don't migrate from that.
He's played a pretty high stakes game,
and he really, really stays calm
and very contained,
and the drama is in him being contained
while everything collapsed around him.
- Things started to go south very quickly.
Around the fall of 1981,
there was a series of monumental cockups.
- [Man] So everything's going really smoothly, but it's--
- Well, I wouldn't say smoothly.
I don't want to give the appearance
that everything's just absolutely perfect.
- When those cars first came off the boat,
they were just a product warranty nightmare.
- The door won't close.
The gaps are all wrong.
The window wiper won't work.
The door mechanism won't work.
That happened.
It happened to me once, getting stuck in the car.
Couldn't open the door, you know?
(car engine running)
- We reviewed the car.
(brakes squeaking)
It COStS more than a corvette.
It didn't handle that great.
It was kind of slow.
- [Man] It was not the car he promised,
this fuel efficient, high performance car.
- It started to go south
when this happened in the teeth
of a diminishing economy.
- [Man] Now the dream seems to be fading.
Sales are way down in the United States
perhaps for economic reasons,
perhaps because of some dissatisfaction with the car.
- In a scenario where there's a few thousand cars
coming to the U.S.,
there's these quality control issues.
The lesson that should have been learned from this
is let's slow production down a little bit more.
Let's figure out a way
to work out all these issues.
Unfortunately, that's the opposite
of what John decided to do.
He pulled the trigger on basically doubling production.
- [Man] And what happened?
These cars were backing up like plague rats on the docks.
- And it was just the wrong, wrong move,
so the question has to be,
well, why did he do this?
It was a typical John move
because he saw a little angle
in the contract where if you upped the amount
of people that were working there and increased jobs,
then the government was
supposed to be giving him an infusion of cash,
and so he thought he was gonna take advantage
of this little clause.
- Anyone who deals with the government knows
that that's a risk in itself.
What if the politics change?
What if the administration changes?
Well, Margaret Thatcher happened.
- We'd had a change of government by now.
The Conservatives were in power.
Margaret Thatcher, the arch privateer, was prime minister.
Between Margaret Thatcher as prime minister and us,
there was a secretary of state
for Northern Ireland, James Prior.
- Well, I suppose my role with DeLorean
was to keep him under control.
The Labor government had started off the DeLorean business.
The Conservative government took a tougher line
towards subsidies for Northern Ireland, for DeLorean.
- [Man] DeLorean wanted another $76 million
from the British.
If not, he said, "There would be layoffs."
- I don't care about the British taxpayers' money
or my own money.
I think the most important thing
is we have some people there.
This is a very, very important part of their life,
and nothing in the world
should be permitted to interfere with it.
- John overestimated the fact
that we had created jobs
and that it was the jobs that would secure
even more money to keep us alive.
That was not the way Margaret Thatcher saw it.
- She genuinely took the view
that we couldn't go on
pouring a lot of money after bad,
and in the end, we had to say no.
- The result?
We ran out of cash.
Therefore, we were heading for insolvency,
and that's at the point
when things got very serious indeed.
(tape whirring)
- [John] We have a group right now
that has got the ability
to come up with for sure 30 million
and upwards of there.
- And during this whole process,
John's back was really up against the wall.
He had to figure out a way
to pay some of the money back
to the British government
as well as present to them
a feasible way to keep the company open
and make it profitable,
or else they were threatening
liquidate the assets,
and everyone was gonna be out of a job.
- [Man] Today DeLorean said he is looking
for outside financing.
- [John] All I want to do is keep the factory open
so that people can work, nothing else.
- [Man] You last said that you'd keep the factory open
if it was your last breath.
Do you still stand by that?
- [John] I'm still trying.
- During the months of sort of August, September,
we'd had periodic contact with John DeLorean.
He on a regular basis was coming up with potential funders.
- [Man] It's been a lot of time and effort,
but I think we're now just
starting out on a very successful relationship.
- [John] Oh, I think so, too.
- [Man] It just took a while to put it together,
and that's all.
- The workers and the people closest to him at DMC
were being told,
"Hey, listen, everything's gonna be fine.
"I definitely have the sources coming through."
- And we were still at the stage
where we were hoping and hoping
that it would go all right.
- [John] In terms of having that,
the first 10 million,
it sounds like that's gonna be Tuesday, right?
- [Man] I would say I should be able
to get that going very quick.
- [Barrie] The impression we got at that time
was that John had pretty well
gotten the money by the 17th of October, 1982.
(dramatic instrumental music)
(phone ringing)
- Hello?
What?
What are you talking about?
- We were in the city in the apartment at 8:34.
The phone rings.
Mom, who was that?
And one phone call,
my life changed forever.
(camera shutters flashing)
- [Man] John DeLorean was arrested yesterday
after he met with undercover drug agents
who DeLorean apparently thought
were going to help him make
a huge profit in a cocaine deal
involving more than 100 kilos of cocaine.
DeLorean's wife, Cristina Ferrare,
an actress and model,
arrived in Los Angeles early this morning.
- Wait a minute.
Wait a minute.
I just found out a few hours ago.
I know nothing.
I caught a plane.
I'm here.
I'm--
- Everybody was in total shock.
Nowhere in our wildest dreams did we think
anything like this would occur.
- [Man] John DeLorean may be the perfect proof
of the old saying,
"The bigger they come,
"the harder they fall,"
and we might add,
"the more people want to hear about it."
- It was just disbelief,
and then the news just progressively
got worse and worse and worse.
- He was expressing an interest in financing
some type of operation
that would produce quickly large sums of money
on return from the investment.
- I was shocked out of my socks
to see him there in this position that,
I'd never seen him in anything
except being pretty much on top of the world.
- The sensational case involves
more than 200 pounds of cocaine,
an elaborate undercover investigation,
the end of the DeLorean car,
and much, much more.
- It's been said, it's a cliche now,
that the dream had turned into a nightmare.
Could you imagine how we felt
seeing John DeLorean,
our angel, I feel like?
There he was going away,
and everybody was downtrodden
because we felt sure that he had done so much.
He'd come through again,
but this time, unfortunately, he didn't.
- [Woman] Well, you're walking out of the plant
for the last time today.
How do you feel about it?
- We got nothing.
- Pretty upset.
- [Woman] What're your chances of getting another job now?
- None at all.
- [Man] Not very good at all.
- I had to go into the plant that morning,
call the people together.
They'd all heard the same thing, of course,
and it really was the end.
- I was going around with a auctioneer,
and he was putting tags
on every piece of equipment,
and that was my last day.
- The expectation of everybody
working their hearts out over there
to get these cars built to a good standard,
and they felt it was gonna be their life,
and it all fell apart,
and it was incredibly sad.
- I meet up with people now and then
that either they worked there
or their dad worked there
or their granddad worked there,
and you get the same questions.
"What was it really like?"
It was the best job that we ever had,
and it was the worst day of their lives
when it finally closed.
- [Man] After entering a plea of not guilty
to all nine drug charges against him,
John DeLorean came out of the federal courthouse
in Los Angeles with his wife,
model Cristina Ferrare,
and the four lawyers
who are now putting together his defense.
DeLorean said nothing today,
but he is reported to have told his lawyers
he was desperate to save his company.
DeLorean's lawyers are preparing to argue
the government entrapped DeLorean.
- [Man] Give him some room, guys.
Give him some room.
Come on.
- It was the case of the century for that year
'cause every year has a case of the century,
trial of the century,
so we were the trial of the century for 1984.
- [Man] The sidewalks in front of the courthouse
will be jammed with reporters
and camera crews from all over the world.
- Unless you were there and you lived it,
you don't know how captivating
it was for the nation.
- [Man] A young entrepreneur started
hanging around the courthouse steps today
hawking buttons that say,
"John 2. DeLorean Cocaine Trafficking Trial,
"Los Angeles, '84."
- Our public views these as if it's a bad guy,
get them, and if it's not a bad guy,
get the government.
It's all really kind of entertainment to the public.
- John DeLorean had some bad news today.
(audience groaning)
The Automobile Association named him dealer of the year.
(audience laughing)
- A businessman down on his luck
tries to make money in a dope deal.
I mean, that's the John DeLorean that I knew.
- [Man] Okay, you know how--
- [Robert] The case was of overwhelming strength.
(mumbling)
Here's the cocaine,
and here's your target,
and he's holding up a glass of champagne, toasting.
- To a lot of success for everybody.
- And says that this is better than,
what was it?
Better than something.
- Is it better than gold?
(laughing)
Gold weighs more than that, for God's sakes.
- Everybody believed that the events
were showing John DeLorean
in the middle of a drug deal.
One of the things I asked
the jurors very early on was,
would it surprise you if I told you
you weren't seeing a drug deal?
And just hang on and watch the whole movie,
and at the end,
you're gonna see it isn't what it appeared to be,
a real thriller, of course,
which it turned out to be.
(upbeat instrumental music)
(phone clicking)
- The case starts with a guy named James Hoffman.
He was the informant.
He was somebody who had been a major narcotics trafficker
who had the bad luck of being caught,
and he decided to cooperate.
- [John] Valestra.
- Mr. Valestra.
It's Jim Hoffman, your favorite CI.
- [John] Uh huh.
- You're not gonna believe who I had a call with.
John DeLorean.
- When I got the call from the CI,
who's a neighbor of his.
- We were neighbors out here in California.
I was across from his ranch in Pauma Valley--
- He says to me, the CI,
that John needs some money,
and the inference of drugs was right there.
- [Jim] You seen the kind of dire straits
his company's in right now.
- [John] Uh huh.
- He needs cash bad,
and he doesn't care where it comes from.
He's gonna be back in Pauma Valley
at his ranch next week.
He wants to meet me.
We've already set it up.
- [John] Seriously, Jim?
You're kidding me.
- My hand to God.
This is happening.
- I said, well, see what he's got to say.
Go ahead.
See what he has to say.
- Have I ever done you guys wrong before?
I'll be in touch.
(upbeat instrumental music)
- [Ronald] (mumbling) bring to the attention of (mumbling).
- [Tamir] So at this point, it's 1982.
Reagan's just announced the war on drugs.
- Together in a comprehensive attack
on drug trafficking and organized crime.
- [Tamir] In this time period,
a confidential informant like James Hoffman
can actually make a living
by introducing the DEA to high level criminals.
- John.
(mumbling)
John, great to see you.
- You too, Jim, been a while.
- [Tamir] And in this case,
it's the perfect storm for John DeLorean.
- Bring problems in these areas to my attention.
- When Jim first approached John,
it seemed like a very farfetched idea
that he'd be actually able to help John out.
- These investors--
- [Tamir] But Jim was throwing out some numbers
that seemed very alluring to John.
- 10, 20, 50 million.
- I thought your investors might like
to see these brochures that we have made up
that really can show you how we're all set to--
- Yeah, there's no need.
They're not exactly the kind of guys
that get hung up on paperwork, you know?
They're Colombian.
(singing)
- They in the coffee business?
- You might say that.
(laughing)
- They met, and the first conversation was not recorded,
so we don't really know what was said.
- And it was when Hoffman then met with DeLorean.
At that point, Hoffman comes back to Valestra,
and says, "Yeah, he wants to talk dope."
- I say, really?
I mean, well, if he said that,
we'd better let him say it again somewhere,
which we did.
(mumbling)
- [John] How you doing?
- [Man] We're great.
- [John] What am I doing,
interrupting your lunch?
- [Man] No--
- [John] And on September 4th,
the meeting at the Lafont Plaza takes place.
That's a one on one meeting
with the CI and John.
- There aren't many people
that can pick up the phone
and get $30 million in three or four days
without a lot of hassle.
- [John] I can't think of any,
to be honest with you.
- That's right.
- That video, that's pretty explicit stuff.
The CI writes it all out,
and the scenarios are right there on the paper.
- [Jim] So we can take 34 kilos.
When you initially asked me what it would take,
and I said, well, about 1.75 to two,
here this would be coming,
so you're really gonna receive 40--
- During this period of time,
John now is supposed to come up with the 1.8 mil.
That was where it was left,
so he'd have to put some skin in the game.
- Nobody wants you to do something
that you're uncomfortable with.
- I'm relying on you saying
that there is no way to connect me
to this at the end.
That's why--
- Well, you're not gonna be handling the product.
(mumbling)
- Government attorneys in the John DeLorean trial
today introduced a videotape
The tape was played as part
of the testimony of James Hoffman,
a paid undercover informer
who was the government's key witness against DeLorean.
Defense attorneys describe the meeting in Washington, D.C.,
between John DeLorean and the undercover informant
as a clever lure,
and as for DeLorean's participation
in that discussion,
the defense team says,
"There's no harm in listening to someone else
(birds chirping)
(mumbling)
- For three months during the trial,
we moved to my grandmother's,
grandfather's house in Brentwood.
I play it all out in my head all the time.
Something will come up,
and I'll start thinking about stuff,
and it'll spark a memory
or trigger something.
- Guys, no matter what happens,
hey, we're gonna be fine.
Everything's gonna be fine.
- My father was looking at hard core time,
and to my parents' credit,
they did what they could
to make it as best a situation as they could.
How the fuck do you tell your kid
that shit ain't okay?
- He just asked me if we're
both coming back from court or--
- I am not going away for this.
The jury will see how asinine
this whole thing is
and how they set up an innocent man, for God's sakes.
What do you think about this tie?
- It's fine.
- You're sure the brown works?
I mean, I had a blue one on
when they snapped this picture,
but they can't tell
'cause it's in black and white.
- Either way.
- I don't want it to read black.
I mean, I don't want to send the wrong message.
- To who, the judge?
- No, to everyone.
Next time they snap my picture,
it could be a magazine cover.
- John, either one works fine.
- 'Cause it'll be in color if it's a magazine.
- Hey.
You have to talk to the children.
- Kathryn, come and give Mommy a hug, sweetie.
She seems pretty upset.
Zach, I know you're worried,
but I need you pulling
for your old man to win this thing all right?
- I just want to go back to New Jersey.
- So do I, and we will
as soon as this thing is over, all right?
Zach, look at me.
Your dad's a winner, right?
- For me, it's a double edged sword
that I walk all the time.
The evidence is there that they set him up,
but common sense and reality tells me
that he's not a fucking idiot,
that he must have known something
was fucked up at some time.
- Come here, sweetie.
- [John] I'm gonna wear the blue tie, okay?
- [Zach] So it's like, you know,
how the fuck could you put our family
in jeopardy like that?
- [Man] 21 days into the John DeLorean cocaine trial,
Defense Attorney Howard Weitzman says
there's no question that
John DeLorean can be seen and heard on tape
talking about narcotics,
but he says, "The question is
"how far can the government go in dangling a lure
"in front of a desperate man?"
- When I look back at this case,
Hoffman had said if you give me a million and a half,
$2 million, $3 million,
I can get you 10, 15, $20 million back.
John didn't have the money,
and logic would tell you that that's the end
of the investigation.
(mumbling)
(phone ringing)
(liquid pouring)
- Are you sure he can't put any cash in?
- At this point,
I don't think DeLorean could scrounge 20 Gs,
let alone two million.
- Listen, I've been pouring through all these tapes,
and I just don't think we have him yet.
- I think he's got it in collateral.
- Okay, but if collateral's all we get,
then it's got to equal at least that much,
and listen to me.
We have got to get it on tape.
- This is not my first rodeo, Jerry.
I know how it works.
- I'm just saying.
Until now he's been real careful
about how he parses all his words, so--
- Well, it's different than a phone call now.
He's about to walk into a real bank.
He knows your IC is legit,
so he won't for one second think that I'm not.
- Still, the more drug references
you can slip in, the better.
- We got this, Jerry.
(laughing)
- [Tamir] Throughout the entire thing,
they had to continue changing the script.
It wasn't gonna be,
"Here's the $2 million.
"Here's the drug money back."
Boom, you're arrested,
so then it turned into James Hoffman,
the CI, convincing him,
"Hey, I know this crooked banker."
- Hey, John.
- Hi, Jim.
- Great to see you.
- [John] You too.
- Have you been here in this area before?
- [John] I've been in San Jose,
and, of course, San Francisco--
- The DeLorean case was just one of other cases
that I was involved in
from the standpoint of being an undercover operator
working at a bank,
so the bank provided the perfect undercover front.
We finally, shall we say,
got together after all this time.
- Yeah, after so many conversations, right?
- Can I get you a cup of coffee?
- [Tamir] At this point of the story,
John's not gonna put any actual money into the game.
He can potentially put up collateral.
Ben Tisa is the one that's supposed to now set up
an alternative situation for John.
- Let me just background
what I intend now,
the background on the individual I had in mind,
and how I think it may help you,
and this other transaction.
We had a particular suspect.
His name was Hetrick,
who was a pilot who flew cocaine in from Colombia.
This particular individual has been very successful
in his business, okay?
So the idea came in.
Well, maybe the dope dealer would invest
in John DeLorean's company,
John DeLorean being told that the money was going to come
from sale of cocaine.
And just so the cards are on the table,
and you know exactly what's going on,
he's very successful bringing in cocaine and putting it out.
Would it be possible
to allow this gentleman to have,
say, some stock options?
Here's what I have in mind.
- Oh, sure.
I don't think we can do that in our public company,
but I see no reason why I couldn't do it
from my private company.
- Great, that's great.
That works.
- In John's mind,
once again the genius at bending the rules,
finding the little loophole,
"Hey, I'll take this money
"even if it comes from drug folks,"
but it's coming through a legitimate bank.
- [Ben] Hello, John Delorean.
This is Morgan Hetrick.
- [John] Hi, Morgan, how you doing?
Nice to meet you.
- [Ben] How are you?
- Enter Morgan Hetrick.
He was somebody that was flying in hundreds
and hundreds of pounds of cocaine from South America,
so the government felt that at that point
that was the best opportunity
to bring both John and Hetrick down
is to merge the cases.
The government told Hetrick that John
had put in $2 million
and that he wanted to do
this drug deal with Hetrick.
- [Ben] 'Cause he's already given me, I've mentioned.
I've told him.
I have the 1.8, and I'm sitting on it,
and it's cash in hand.
I have it,
so there's no problem there.
- And he was given an opportunity
to stay in the deal without putting money in,
and he took it.
- [Ben] You can't go wrong
with something you make a lot of money at.
- Yeah, you can.
- [Ben] Well, a little bit of common sense
and you don't get too greedy.
- There's a risk, reward ratio,
and that's what you're playing.
- That's what life is,
(tape whirring)
and I think it's a great opportunity for me
from that standpoint.
- [Tamir] So in terms of the drug case,
you've got hours of phone conversations,
hours of videotape showing John
with these drug dealers and crooked bankers.
- Is the feed secure?
- You sure he's not gonna be able to hear anything
through this wall?
- [Tamir] John still hasn't given the government anything,
so they have to introduce this new character,
this sort of mob drug dealer guy.
- Show time.
- [Tamir] He's really gonna crank the pressure up on John.
- Thanks again for coming here.
- Oh, it's my pleasure.
- You got some food coming, huh?
- It's coming, Jim.
It's coming.
- Okay.
- When I meet him at the hotel room,
I would be the one that would
be handling the drugs.
All Jim had to do was put it together,
get a finder's fee, whatever,
and me and my network
would be going out to quadruple our investment.
We're ready to consummate the end of the deal
where the turnover is for your purposes
within 48 hours.
- Great.
- I'm asking for, what are you putting up?
There's no more money from you.
There's no free lunch either.
You know, there's no free lunches.
Basically, I want to know what's in it for me.
- [Tamir] At this point of the story,
each participant in this deal
is trying to outsmart and outmaneuver
the other person for their own gain.
(upbeat instrumental music)
John wants to get money to save his company.
You've got Jim Hoffman,
who's leeching off of the government.
He begins to enjoy this lifestyle of working
with the feds,
and then the feds,
they're trying to have that big, big case
for Reagan to tout his war on drugs,
so everyone is hungry for that one thing
that they want out of this.
- [Howard] When you analyze a case like this,
you realize, "Wait, the informant kind of created this
"with the government working with him,
"and it didn't work,"
so they went to a savings and loan, legitimate bank,
got them to let them use the premises,
you know, like the set in a movie.
Phase three, they put John together with Morgan Hetrick,
a legitimate, by legitimate,
I mean a real smuggler.
Then they bring in the DEA,
and John Valestra becomes kind of a mafioso,
and what they finally came up with
so John would get his 10, 15, $20 million
is they got him to put up stock certificates.
- The stock certificates should be
in Eureka Federal Savings and Loan
in a trust account,
and then eventually, I would see us
being 50, 50 partners.
- John with his lawyers, corporate lawyer,
gives them worthless DeLorean stock
in a defunct company that had no assets,
worthless paper,
and the con was reversed in John's mind,
so he's putting up zero.
Mr. Hetrick, the smuggler,
goes and gets the cocaine,
and then they call DeLorean.
- You're still on the East Coast?
- [John] I'm on the East Coast,
and I can do anything you want.
- It might be conducive to you being close by
when this thing goes down so that--
- And they say to him,
"Come to Los Angeles.
"We have $10 million for you.
"Come get your money."
- Maybe we'll pop a bottle of champagne someplace.
- [John] That would be wonderful.
- And sit back and relax.
(plane engine running)
- [Howard] And DeLorean, who can only think about,
"I got to get the money to the company,"
comes to LA,
(static crackling)
and the government picked him up,
took him to a hotel room,
opened a bottle of champagne,
toasted to their success.
- Here's to a lot of success for everybody.
- [Howard] And one of the agents said,
"Now, John, here's the fruits of our efforts."
- So, John, what we're talking about,
what we're talking about,
it's gonna be like a magic act, John.
- [Howard] And went to the closet
and brought out the suitcase of cocaine
and opened it up.
- Between this and the other half,
it's gonna generate about four and a half,
not less than four and a half mil.
(plastic crackling)
- This is better than in gold.
Gold weighs more than that, for God's sakes.
(laughing)
- [Howard] That's when DeLorean said,
"This is like gold.
"This is better than gold."
- This is better than gold.
(laughing)
Gold weighs more than that, for God's sakes.
- Classic line on that tape.
- Hi, John.
Jerry West, I'm with the FBI.
- [Howard] And then he was arrested,
so he wasn't gonna take the drugs.
He didn't get the $10 million.
- [Jerry] Will you stand up, sir?
- [Howard] And he never was supposed to take the drugs.
He was only supposed to get the money.
- I don't understand it.
- Please turn around.
- [Howard] So why would they bring the drugs out
and show them to him?
And the answer is pretty simple.
Well, if you're dealing with 12 laypeople
in the jury box,
you're gonna make them think
this was all part of the deal.
- John DeLorean says, "It's all in God's hands."
That was his reaction today when six men
and six women began deliberating his case.
- [Man] The jurors, who appeared relaxed
when they arrived for court today,
began their deliberations shortly before 10:00 AM.
Los Angeles time.
Outside court, John DeLorean's attorney, Howard Weitzman,
expressed the mood on the defense side.
- This is a very difficult time
when a case goes to the jury
'cause you never really know what they're thinking
or what they're interested in.
These are very hard cases,
and it requires a unanimous verdict.
If he got convicted,
he would have received
a pretty stiff prison sentence for sure,
and the government was very confident in their case.
- [Man] Throughout the case, the DeLorean defense
has hammered away at the tactics used
by federal agents in their undercover investigation
of John DeLorean.
Weitzman asked for acquittal,
saying, "The government is in a sense on trial here."
- We did not believe there was an entrapment defense
in this case.
That was a throwaway defense.
- [Woman] After the long trial,
DeLorean's lawyer said he'll be stunned
whichever way the jury votes.
- [Man] John, how do you feel?
- It's in the hands of the Lord.
(mumbling)
(gentle instrumental music)
- In the matter of the United States
versus John Z. DeLorean,
the jury finds the defendant
not guilty on all eight counts.
(mumbling)
- Praise the Lord.
Howard.
Well done, Howard, well done.
Thank you, thank you.
(mumbling)
(crying)
(birds chirping)
(dogs barking)
- Come on, boys.
Back up, back up.
We got a guest.
Yeah.
What's up, buddy?
Ah, fucker.
Water everywhere.
Sit.
You guys gonna chill?
Sit.
Yeah, this is where I live.
(laughing)
It's a shitty little apartment.
The paint's fucking peeling,
and if you find my housekeeper,
tell her she's fired
'cause she doesn't do a good job
of cleaning the fucking place,
but so it's kind of like,
you guys, I don't know if you've seen
the apartment or any of that stuff,
but so when people know who I am
and who my family is,
and then they come over,
they're like, "What the fuck?"
Even today, I'll see the car going down the street,
and I'm just like,
"It's just fucking weird, man."
For me, there's a lot behind
the meaning of that car,
not just my family name on it,
but what that fucking car did to our family.
- [Woman] Are you surprised that a feature film
hasn't been made about your dad and his life?
- Yeah, yeah.
I mean, it's got all the good shit in it.
It's got cocaine.
It's got fucking hot chicks.
It's got sports cars.
It's got fucking war torn,
bombed out buildings overseas.
It's got fucking Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan,
the war on drugs.
You got FBI agents.
You got fucking hardcore drug dealers, but,
my fear with Hollywood
is they're gonna end it
with him coming out of the courthouse with Cristina.
"Whoo hoo, fucking acquittal.
"Yeah, yeah, yeah."
Fucking credits, you know?
While that coming out of the courthouse,
ticker tape parade shit is real,
look at what it cost him.
(gentle instrumental music)
- The sting operation fell through.
You were acquitted.
Your wife Cristina stood by you
throughout the entire trial,
and then not but several weeks later, left you.
- Several days later.
- [Woman] Ah.
- You claim to have been shocked
that your wife Cristina
announced her intentions to divorce you
shortly after the trial.
She appeared on this program,
spoke of you in most wifely of terms.
Here's what she said.
- Can't make a judgment right now.
It's not fair.
It's not fair for John,
and it's not fair for you either
because if you were in a situation like this
or any one of your loved ones,
you will find yourself defending them
as ardently as I'm doing with John.
- That must make you feel at the very least
mixed to see that.
It makes you cry, does it?
- Yeah, it's pretty painful.
- At the time, if I was my mom,
the carpet just got pulled out from underneath me.
She's 31 years old, man.
She's still got another eight, nine,
10, 12 years of being top dog.
and that whole fucking career
pulled out from underneath you.
- Your whole career has fallen apart.
- I was at the top of my modeling profession.
I've been doing it for 20 years.
The last 15 years,
I've been at the very top of it,
commanding top money,
and this is July,
and since January I've had one booking,
and I've made $105,
and no one will have anything
to do with me or my name,
not at all.
- I try not to ask my mom about my dad,
not because I think that she doesn't have any good memories.
More because again I don't want
to draw up any painful ones.
It was terrible and tragic
what she had to go through,
so she had to do something different with her life.
She had to leave all that behind.
Shortly after all of that,
she had her show, AM LA.
She defined who she was.
She rebuilt her life,
and she rebuilt it in a fantastic way.
- And credit to her, I get it.
I understand it,
that you're trying to keep a roof
and keep a normal, stable household for your kids.
Guess what?
It's fucking gone.
Stability and sanity left the fucking house
two years ago when he got arrested.
- I had to do an art project for school,
and we had to do appropriation,
so I appropriated this painting.
On this side, there's photographs of everything perfect,
and as it goes on,
I started to put in the articles
from this perfect life
to this destroyed life,
and on the bumper, it says,
"Destroy my childhood," for DMC.
- [Man] All right, man, you good?
- [Man] Yes--
- [Man] We get any last looks on Alec?
- [Man] I got some--
- [Man] We're good.
We're ready to go.
- [Man] That's fine.
Let's go.
Let's shoot it.
- I'd love to figure out, what's the actual turning point?
When does DeLorean get to a point
where he could have turned back
and maybe avoided everything?
And whether he went on to complete the car project or not,
he would have lived to fight another battle
or try another iteration of all that
and probably succeeded
'cause he's a very clever guy.
What's that moment where you sit there and go too late?
Is it the cocaine deal itself?
Is it before that?
Is it a series of things?
Is it a period of time where he's doing a few things?
When does John put in all the chips on the table,
and he loses?
(gentle instrumental music)
- I saw the drug trial as a sideshow.
To me, much more substantial was how DeLorean
was handling the money
that he had gotten to build
the car in Northern Ireland.
- Every piece of paper tells a story
of what people were doing
and how they were doing it.
Well, this transaction happened
before this transaction,
and that led to this transaction.
I was brought in to analyze the affairs
of DeLorean Motor Company
and go deep into its affairs
its activities and its transactions.
We didn't really understand that at first,
but it turned out to be the critical moment
in untangling the affairs of John DeLorean,
and as it became clear,
you start to see yet again another side of John.
(camera shutter clicking)
When the company was developing
in those heady days of excitement and energy
around the company, around John,
investors all wanted to get a piece of it.
(audience applauding)
- [Tamir] In trying to raise all the capital,
John was really selling himself.
He was selling his image.
The slogan, "Live the Dream,"
that's what people were supposedly buying into
when they invested in his company.
- And John, sensing that interest
and wanting to raise money if it was available,
was able to raise $17 and a half million
for the development of the vehicle,
but as it turns out,
the British government had also put up enough money by then
that their funds were actually being used
to pay for the development of the vehicle,
and therefore this money wasn't needed
so much at that point,
and John, seeing this pot of money, couldn't resist.
- [Man] Federal investigators and bankruptcy lawyers
say they have uncovered another secret DeLorean deal,
this one arranged at a hotel in Geneva, Switzerland,
long before the alleged drug deal.
- [Man] A deal had been struck in Switzerland
with Colin Chapman,
the chairman of Lotus,
and the mysterious organization called GPD Services.
- [Tamir] And what's interesting becomes very clear
that Bill Collins was onto something several years earlier
when he was analyzing the DeLorean, Lotus agreement.
- When I looked at the numbers
that they put together,
I said to John,
"What's the deal?"
GPD?
I've never even heard of it.
It just seems like you're paying twice
for the same thing, John.
Obviously looking back on it now,
there were things going on behind the scene.
John and Chapman were trying to figure out
the game they were playing with GPD
and trying to get various arrangements put together.
- In the scene we shot yesterday,
he hangs up with Collins,
and everybody who's good,
they've all got to go, you know?
Because their goodness becomes useless to John.
They just don't do me any good.
- Apart from denying that he had any of the GPD money,
John DeLorean is reluctant to discuss GPD.
- [Man] Can you give that an answer now to those allegations
about the missing $17 million?
(birds chirping)
- So now we fast forward into the investigation,
and we start peeling back the layers of GPD.
- GPD is supposedly this middleman company
to deliver certain other engineering services.
In truth, it had no other engineers.
It had no facilities
to deliver these engineering services.
GPD was a mailbox.
- [Man] GPD is a phony, a shell company,
nothing more than a post office box in a neighborhood branch
of the Geneva Post Office,
Post Office Box 33.
- [Jay] It turns out John made a deal
with Colin Chapman at Lotus Cars
that he would send the $17 and a half million
from investors into GPD,
and then Colin took the money from there,
funneled it into European bank accounts,
split it with John.
John then maneuvered that money
back to his own accounts in the United States,
therefore converting the investor money
into his own money.
- I think there's a real fascinating allegory here.
You did sell your soul, John DeLorean.
You sold it for the greater glory of John DeLorean
who was going to whip General Motors
and all these multibillion dollar,
multinational companies with your own dream car,
and in that vision,
not only did you jeopardize the well being of your family,
you've risked yourself for a jail term,
got off because the government blew it.
Now we have other indictments,
which indicate that it's possible
that your fatigue and your egomania
forced you to use money for your own purpose
rather than the original intent of the investors.
That's what seems to be most apparent to anybody
who gives a cursory review
of the evidence in this case.
- Well, as I said early on,
I think that we will prove conclusively
that every single cent was legitimately
and honestly come by,
and that all these charges are totally false.
(gentle instrumental music)
- So as these questions are being brought up
and John is preparing to have to answer these questions,
he needed to show some sort of proof
that made the deal not look shady,
and that proof was actually a loan letter
from GPD Services
and a paper trail that GPD services
was a loan to him
and that he still had several years
before he had to pay back that loan.
He puts together these documents
that only he and one other person would be privy to,
and that being Colin Chapman from Lotus.
Well, several years earlier,
Colin Chapman dropped dead of a heart attack,
and the only other person
in this little transaction was John.
- So while I was busy studying the records
and looking at financial transactions,
the lawyers were busy talking to Cristina Ferrare.
Cristina testified under oath
that she saw John working in a large closet
with latex gloves on, signing documents,
backdating them, and then aging the documents
under a sun lamp
so when the documents
would be forensically examined later on,
his fingerprints wouldn't be on it.
His skin oil wouldn't be on it,
and of course the paper would
have aged under the sun lamp,
and she testified that she saw him do that,
so John was very busy
creating a set of documents
in the dark of night,
but his wife was watching him.
After reviewing the records,
there came a time when the trial started
to recover this money that John had taken
from the company,
and I started to really get
a good look at John as a person
and the true nature of his character,
so he walks in court one day,
and then he looks at me,
and he says, "I was on the radio this morning.
"I was talking about you and your testimony."
He goes, "But I'm not sure I got your name right."
He said, "Is there one H in Shithead or two?"
And I said, wow,
but by then I also realized we had him.
In other words, he was acting out
because we knew we had him.
Between us having the financial evidence
and Cristina would testify
that John had been forging documents and aging documents,
John needed to settle that case,
actually cough up the money
that had been stolen from the investors
in the DeLorean partnership.
- [Man] Would you deny therefore that you had
any of that $17 million?
- Excuse me a minute.
I have to get a drink.
- [Man] John DeLorean was not prepared
to answer any further questions
about the missing $17.6 million.
- In the drug trial, John really could grasp on
to that idea of,
"I was the victim here.
"I got sucked into a situation of overzealous people,
"overzealous government, that was trying to take me down
"as a legitimate business owner.
In the case of the money trials,
it's very hard to take the approach
that he was the victim
because all of it was his own doing.
- [Man] You start to see this real true character,
this underlying nature of John,
not the public persona that he had worked so hard
to cultivate for years.
- He had built this giant bubble of an image
making him believe he could
kind of get away with anything.
This was not the little guy fighting
the Goliath like GM.
This instead was someone in his business dealings
who acted like the Goliath
and trampled on other people's dreams
and really hurt some individuals very badly.
- I'm not a psychiatrist,
but I think that he was okay in the beginning,
and I think he just got carried away.
I think that he could have saved it
if he'd had the right attitude,
but I think he thought it was more important
to make a buck than to be successful.
- That is part of the real tragedy
in going back to the what ifs.
and he had still had $17 and half million
at the time when he needed desperately cash
to keep the company open?
- We're the FBI.
- [Tamir] By stealing that money,
John really painted himself into a corner,
and he had to find the money somewhere else,
and to think if he could have only held on
for a few more years.
(car engine running)
(dramatic instrumental music)
- Doc.
- Marty, you made it.
- Yeah.
- Welcome to my latest experiment.
This is the big one,
the one I've been waiting for all my life.
- Wow, it's a DeLorean, right--
- Bear with me, Marty.
All your questions will be answered.
Roll tape--
- Yeah, okay I'm rolling--
- When Bob Zemeckis and I first wrote "Back To The Future,‘'
the time machine was a refrigerator,
and Bob Zemeckis, the director, said,
"Wouldn't it be simpler if Doc actually built
"the time machine into a car?"
And then he says, "And what if the car was a DeLorean?"
It wasn't my idea
but I know damn good idea when I hear one.
This was a damn good idea,
so I said, yeah, that's great.
- When this baby hits 88 miles per hour,
you're gonna see some serious shit.
(electronic beeping)
(car engine running)
- [Bob] We, I think, did a great job
in making the DeLorean glamorous
and endearing it to generations
of movie fans and car fans.
- 88 miles per hour.
- If only we'd stayed alive
and we'd continued for another two years.
You can't buy that publicity now, can you?
- [Man] "Back To The Futurell makes the car
and the man truly immortal.
100 years from now,
people will watch that movie,
and the last running DeLorean
may have consumed its last drop of fuel
and eaten its last piston,
but that movie will carry on.
- After the movie came out,
about two or three weeks later,
we got one of the best fan letters we ever got,
and it was from John DeLorean.
He said that he'd just seen the movie.
He thought it was brilliant,
and he said, "Thank you for keeping my dream alive."
- Back in a time when
I was lead to believe films about him were percolating,
there were a couple of them,
to my recollection,
that people were gonna make.
I get a phone call,
and it was DeLorean,
and I have to imagine he was probably
out of the house, the big house,
and living in this apartment,
the scene that we're gonna shoot today.
Yeah, I was on the phone with him,
and he was like, "Alex, this is John DeLorean calling."
He's very old.
He sounded older.
He said, "I understand they're making
"this motion picture about me,
"and I would be very flattered
"if you were to portray me in the movie."
I thought, wow,
I mean, to have the guy
who's the real guy pick you,
and then it went away.
(laughing)
I never heard from him again,
but, I mean, to me,
DeLorean is a lot of things.
Every day, I think about who is he,
I have a different answer.
Today my attitude about DeLorean,
you watch historical footage,
and you get kind of inflamed
of bad things to some people,
and he hurt a lot of people,
and he stole from people,
and at the same time,
I feel like he was somebody who,
like a lot of great American stories,
he just perverted some dream that he had.
(gentle instrumental music)
You remember the DMC, don't you?
Yeah.
How could you forget it, right?
It was one of a kind.
It really was one of a kind.
- As full as John's life was those first 60 years,
the last 20 years are actually more simple.
This is one of John's Bibles
which he actually gave to his nephew Mark.
He became a born again Christian.
It was a very important part of his life.
He dated several women throughout the years,
and then ended up re-marrying late in life,
and then in 2000, had to declare bankruptcy,
in which he lost his Bedminster Estate
and lived the last five years of his life
in a one bedroom apartment.
- His whole fucking life, his whole dream,
everything that he worked for
from the time they broke ground
till the time of the arrest, gone.
- [Man] Was it a blow to your pride
to you trying to shape your life again?
- Well, I felt terrible about it for a long time.
who've this has been an extremely
difficult thing for them,
but life is life.
It goes on.
- Your father is shamed and goes to jail.
Your family loses all their money.
Your parents get divorced.
Everything in your world changes,
and for the next 15 years of your life
you get chased by,
"Is your father in jail?"
And cocaine jokes,
and all of these things
that just followed along with it.
My entire life I had to live it down.
It followed me for a very long time.
It followed me around until I started
to get involved into the DeLorean community.
People used to invite my dad
to all these car shows all the time,
and I asked him.
I said, Dad, Dad, let's go.
You have to experience this.
Knowing how much he was still loved
would definitely make a difference in his life.
- Thank you.
- [Kathryn] It was an amazing experience.
It was everything I hoped it would be
and then some.
- I just met John DeLorean for the third time.
Document that.
The man is unbelievable.
- [Kathryn] He really did get to bask
in his glory a little bit again.
(mumbling)
- Do you consider the whole DeLorean dream
to have been a failure?
- Oh, I think that I showed a lot of people
that whether you survive or not,
the key is it's like Shakespeare said.
"It's better to have loved and lost
"than not to have loved at all."
I gave it the best shot I had.
I tried as hard as I could,
and I think that I did reasonably well.
It's a tragedy--
- I think DeLorean was very much alone.
Part of the fallout from compartmentalizing
his life the way he did
is that he really didn't have anybody
who knew him through and through.
This is not a man who's looking at his family life
or his friends to qualify
his reason for living.
It's, "What have I accomplished?
"What have I done?
"What am I doing next?"
That in his mind,
this is what really reflects on him
as a human being.
- When we come around here,
what I'd like to do is repeat this action
and just put this down here
and then look up at the car,
and I want to say something very
specific to him about the car.
- [Man] Cool.
- No film can tell the definitive story of anybody's life.
Anyone's life is just too vast
and complex for one film,
but a film could certainly create
the legend of John DeLorean,
and we print the legend.
The legend is what we love.
That's what we should have.
- [Zach] Let's just hypothetically say
that when he went into the hotel that night,
he knew he was walking out
with a suitcase full of cocaine.
I can't necessarily blame him.
How far would you be willing to go
to save something you worked
your whole life for, your life's dream?
What would you do to see that succeed
no matter what?
- He always kept trying.
He never gave up the dream.
He never quit believing
that there was a potential
for him to recover,
that he was going to invent
the next great thing,
that he was going to be able
to reclaim his former glory.
He was John DeLorean,
and he was John DeLorean until the day he died.
- I think he was still
trying to make fucking deals on that DMC-2
when he got the heart attack,
and I think that would be a good way to end the movie.
You could have him
on the phone eating some breakfast
with an open notebook thing
that you'd show investors
with all the nice little pictures and stuff,
talking on the phone,
and then it just fades to black
because then that last image would just be him
working to get that deal done,
and God pulled the plug on his ass, man.
You're out of here, buddy.
Then it just goes black,
and then John DeLorean died
in Morristown, New Jersey,
at fucking 80 years old on this date, you know?
Never to have fulfilled another car company,
build another car company,
and I'd be okay with that.
- [Man] And slate, that's good.
(mumbling)
- [Man] Scene 28 alpha, take two.
- [Man] Great, thank you.
- [Woman] Action.
(gentle instrumental music)
- I mean, if we can't get the money
to distribute this movie,
would we sell cocaine to try
to get this movie distributed?
- [Woman] Sure.
- We don't want to lose either.
- [Woman] No.
- I'm counting on you, Sheena.