Myth & Mogul: John DeLorean (2021) s01e02 Episode Script

1
[John DeLorean] We're growing, prospering.
We were starting to prove
that Northern Ireland
can be viable economically,
and that may have been injurious
to somebody's ideas about the country.
I don't know. I'm only speculating.
As I said,
I'm just an engineer who builds cars.
I don't understand these things.
[explosion]
[clamoring]
[alarm ringing]
[Jeremy Paxman] Whatever naive beliefs
the Americans may have cherished
about Northern Ireland being much the same
as anywhere else
in which to start making cars,
they were quickly shattered
as the ceremony began.
Local dignitaries turned out in force.
[crowd chanting]
[Jeremy] And so did the campaigners
for the restoration of political status
for convicted IRA prisoners.
[chanting]
[Margaret Thatcher] Once again,
we have a hunger strike at Maze Prison
in the quest
for what they call political status.
There's no such thing as political murder,
political bombing, or political violence.
There is only criminal murder,
criminal bombing, and criminal violence.
[reporter] So far, only one prisoner,
Bobby Sands, has refused food.
Chosen, apparently, because Sands
is felt to be a particularly hard man,
ready to face death alone.
[man] John was probably the most
charismatic man I've ever met in my life.
The word charisma was almost invented
for John.
[lounge jazz music playing]
This is gonna be
a very successful project.
Since we heard this factory was coming,
the people have got kind of a hope.
It's a hope that, if they're lucky,
that they'll get a job in the plant.
[explosion]
[theme music playing]
[Jeremy] Who in their right mind
turns down a salary of $600,000 a year?
John Zachary DeLorean did.
Five years ago, he dreamt a dream,
set up on his own,
and today finds himself cast
as the savior of the jobless
in one of the worst areas of unemployment
in Western Europe.
[reporter] This is a map of Belfast.
Roman Catholic West Belfast
at the top marked green,
the Protestant areas below, orange.
Despite enormous efforts
by British ministers,
few companies have been prepared
to bring factories
to this political minefield.
But now Delorean's plant is built here,
in no man's land,
between the two communities.
[Chris Hegedus] I knew
very little about Belfast,
so it was quite shocking for me
when we went there for the first time.
I wasn't expecting tanks
patrolling the streets,
and there were soldiers,
you know, on the street
doing kind of, like, active combat moves.
Meanwhile, a mom would kind of roll by
with the baby in this carriage.
[baby crying]
[gun firing]
[explosion]
[Jeremy] The two communities
had grown apart, Protestant and Catholic.
And it was a particularly brutal
kind of war in Northern Ireland,
where indiscriminate people were murdered,
where people were tortured.
The whole DeLorean project did give
the people a sense of optimism and hope
and engagement with the future,
that it could be something new
and exciting.
I have a very deep feeling
that most social problems
have economic solutions.
We went to Northern Ireland
on the understanding
that we were primarily going
on a commercial basis.
I'd say at this point,
we've fallen in love with the people,
and every one of our guys
would do anything in the world,
including skidding on his eyebrows,
to make sure this is gonna be successful,
because we feel such a terrible obligation
to succeed.
It transcends anything in our lives.
[Ivan Fallon] John, when he arrived
in Northern Ireland, they loved him.
He was hugely popular in Belfast.
Here he was building this factory,
which was going up incredibly fast,
people working seven days a week
to put that factory up.
This was a state-of-the-art factory,
but it was actually
the most modern car factory in the world.
So let's turn to this sheet first, please.
It's the Contracts of Employment Act 1965.
The terms and conditions of employment.
A large proportion of you will be
unemployed, and you'll no doubt have
One of the stipulations was they had
to have an entrance for the Catholics
and an entrance for the Protestants
until everybody got used to each other.
Thought that was a very noble cause,
and I was proud of that.
[Gavin Esler] The fact that there were
Protestant and Catholic workers
in the same building
might not seem like a big deal
to people thinking about it now,
but it was a very big deal then,
because those same workers
would go home to houses where,
between Catholics and Protestants,
there was a wall maybe,
you know, 15 feet high,
called the Peace Line,
to keep people apart.
And bearing in mind that for most people
in Northern Ireland at that time,
schools were not even integrated,
so if you didn't meet at school
and you didn't live in the same street,
but you could work together,
that was, I suppose,
an extraordinary social experiment
that was at the heart
of the DeLorean car factory.
We're so pleased
with the attitude of the people.
Everybody wants it
to be as successful as we do,
and that's really what it takes.
Everybody's gotta believe in
I think there was a level of sincerity.
I really do.
And I don't think he could've
been effective if there was not.
I think he definitely wanted people
to like him.
And I think there must have been something
in his past, you know,
winning over people, becoming popular.
These were important things to him.
When you look at DeLorean growing up,
uh, especially in his high school years,
he was that pencil-necked geek, you know.
And he literally had this very long neck.
Very awkward-looking, skinny young guy,
but who was, clearly,
an excellent student.
When DeLorean did draftsmanship
and did his blueprints in the high school,
they were just so meticulous
and so perfect.
They were like a piece of art.
They would be posted on the wall,
and when you walked in that school,
you would see them there.
So he was that kind of a student.
I mean, he obviously
had the academic piece down, you know,
he had the draftsmanship down,
but now it was, you know,
the Dale Carnegie "How to succeed" piece
that he had to get down.
And that was becoming
a popular individual.
And he truly reinvented himself
to this wild party guy.
He would make pronouncements about,
and jokes about, the girls he was with,
the parties he was at,
intimating he was drunk, here and there,
all of that in this column he wrote
for the Lawrence Tech newspaper.
And he called himself
"William Deloreanspeare,
the Immoral Barge."
What I did see in the newspaper
that I thought was very striking
was a poem he wrote,
"Know You What It Is To Be An Engineer."
"It is to have a dream
without being conscious you are dreaming,
lest the dream break."
"It is to be trapped
in a terrible tower of pure science."
"It is to live in a mean bare prison cell
and regard yourself
the sovereign of limitless space."
"It is to turn failure into success,
mice into men, rags into riches,
stone into buildings, steel into bridges,
for each engineer has a magician
in his soul."
You see a couple of things.
You see, first of all,
he is what you would call,
for someone like that, a deep thinker.
And I think the metaphor of being trapped
in the world of physics
is very astute
and very poignant in some ways.
There really was this intense solitude
about the man
that you have to figure out, you know,
to fully understand what he was about.
[motor revving]
[Hillel Levin] By the time DeLorean
was running the car company,
he had crafted
that perfect image of success.
[Ivan] When DeLorean signed his contract
with Northern Ireland,
he basically didn't have a car.
He had a prototype just
to have something to show people.
But if you're trying to build a car
in a place where no cars
have been built before,
and to engineer a car requires
an enormous amount of engineering skills
and refinement and so forth.
The average car company
takes nine, ten years to do it,
but DeLorean's contract
with the British government
was that he would guarantee the car
hit the American market in two years.
[man] Have you had any experience
with cars before?
No.
I once had my own car,
you know, but that's about all.
That's the only experience I ever had
with cars, you know?
[Ivan] Now, he came
with a very good engineering team,
but the idea of putting it together
in two years, from scratch,
was impossible.
And the man he found
to do it was Colin Chapman,
the creator and owner of Lotus.
[engines roaring]
[Ivan] Now, at that stage,
Lotus was the number one
Grand Prix racing team in the world.
Actually, ever.
Absolutely dominating
Grand Prix racing at the time.
And Chapman was actually genius.
It's slow running up a sniff.
How difficult is that?
- [man] Uh
- Oh, no, we'll do that in the paddock.
You can get out again now.
Chapman was certainly
the most colorful figure in the
I mean, you must've seen him
endless times throwing his hat in the air,
just hugging everybody and
And really, he had the beginnings
of the celebrity team,
no question about that.
Probably the finest automobile engineer
I've ever met in my life, Colin Chapman.
He won the World Championship
competing against the richest,
best-financed people in the world,
and he did it on a shoestring.
He was just a plain,
pure, unmitigated genius.
[Colin Chapman] The basic car was done
by DeLorean Motor Company,
and the concept of the gullwing doors
and the stainless steel body and so on
was originally evolved by John DeLorean.
And what we've done
is adapt the engineering side of it,
the chassis and the suspension
and the details to suit that concept.
[man] John had named Colin Chapman
to undertake the engineering
of the DeLorean motorcar.
But there was a genuine problem.
John already had an engineering chief,
Bill Collins,
who'd been responsible
for all the engineering work
that had been undertaken,
to the point that he had two prototypes.
[Bill Collins] John had
a contract with Chapman.
I ended up going to Lotus,
and that was where things started
to go wrong.
Chapman treated us very shabbily,
and eventually ended up putting us
in that building across the street,
which was an old Air Force,
World War Two metal building.
Bill was probably, of the group,
he was probably more responsible
for the automobile
than anybody other than John.
- What do you think of these side lines?
- Yeah.
[Walter Strycker] The sad part of that was
John went with Colin Chapman and Lotus
on the production design
and relegated Collins to a backup,
and that was a loss of Bill's position
in the company.
[Bill] I just realized that we
were being aced out of this whole thing.
Chapman just wanted to go do it himself,
and he laid that on John and said,
"You know,
you gotta get rid of your guys."
I felt that John let me down. Yeah.
I dealt with it as best I could,
but my heart really wasn't in it anymore.
So, I left in March of '79.
[Colin] That was John through and through.
While you're a favorite,
you can do no wrong,
and the minute you're not
any longer a favorite,
and that can happen overnight,
you're either in or you're out,
and, uh, Bill was out.
[Chris] Very early on,
I felt things could go wrong, you know,
especially when I was privy
to board meetings,
you could see
how much DeLorean was behind.
[man] We have problems
on the upper control arm.
We're getting cracking
of the upper control arm
around the ball joint.
But we also had a torsion rod failure
at 41,000 cycles.
I think, uh
How much of this do you guys want?
[man] There were hitches over the weekend.
I'm waiting for a final report.
[Ivan] The Labour government
gave DeLorean, without much argument,
£54 million.
It was supposed to be enough
to take the project all the way through
to the point of profitability.
But DeLorean ran out of money
after about a year
and desperately needed more money.
[crowd cheering]
Now you had a Conservative government
under Mrs. Thatcher,
much less sympathetic
to that kind of project.
There is no such thing as public money.
There is only taxpayers' money.
We have a duty to make sure
that every penny piece we raise
in taxation is spent wisely and well.
John was under incredible pressure.
He needed more time and money.
All of a sudden, he saw something
he could take advantage of.
[announcer] Now, the news at nine o'clock.
[reporter 1] IRA hunger striker
Bobby Sands has starved himself to death,
refusing food and medical intervention
for 66 days
in support of a demand
for political status
for IRA prisoners in the Maze.
[reporter 2] Within the hour, the clamor
of dustbin lids in West Belfast
[reporter 3] Violence erupts in Belfast
at news of Bobby Sands' death.
During the night, an Army post at the top
of the Springfield Road was besieged.
[reporter 4] During rioting
around Twinbrook Estate,
a petrol bomb was lobbed
into portable office buildings
at the DeLorean site.
Bobby Sands came from the Twinbrook Estate
on the edge of the DeLorean factory.
When he died, the night he died,
the whole of Belfast exploded
and the factory was attacked.
People broke in the front gate,
and they hurled petrol bombs
over the wall,
which burnt down
a number of big Nissen huts.
And DeLorean, watching this, said,
"A-ha. I've got her."
"She can't now refuse me
the money I've been lobbying for."
[John] Naturally,
all the people are nervous.
And as you know, we also had
one of our office buildings was burned,
I don't think as a target area,
but more as a random happenstance,
and that hurt our efficiency quite a bit,
too.
[Ivan] So he worked out that
the total cost to him of the damage done,
these are all wooden huts,
was about £450,000.
But he went for 14 million.
- [crowd clamoring]
- [horns beeping]
[man] The Northern Irish situation
was extremely tense.
We had hunger strikes.
And DeLorean, by that time,
was running out of money.
And the cabinet backed his request
that we should put a further sum
into the company
in the hope that it would turn it round.
But one has to see this
as a very political decision
in highly-charged political circumstances.
[guns firing]
We've gotten our act back together now.
We signed an agreement with the government
where our factory's back in operation.
[Barrie] Everybody told us
that it was impossible.
We kept hearing it was impossible.
Firstly, we couldn't get the car
into production at all.
Then we couldn't get it done in 24 months.
We did it. It was achieved in 28 months.
Remarkable.
In the toughest market in the world.
[man] The first car we done,
when we heard her firing and turning
it was fantastic.
[motor revving]
When we seen the first couple of bits
of smoke coming out the back exhaust,
I couldn't tell you, you know,
the delight that was on people's faces.
It was the first engine in the DeLorean.
That was the first engine in the car.
That was the first engine
that ever turned over.
[funky music playing]
- [man 1] And that is the finish?
- [John] Yeah. It's stainless.
[man 1] They'll all be like that?
[man 2] It's truly
representative of what we'll produce.
It sort of goes back
to Henry Ford's old thing,
"You can have any color
as long as it's black."
Well, here it is.
[John] We're gonna offer
a 25-year body warranty,
which we haven't told British Steel yet,
but they're going to stand behind it.
[funky music playing]
[Cristina] It was an exciting time.
You know, we flew by private jet.
He bought me jewelry.
He came home one day with six fur coats.
One afternoon, he said,
"I'm going to take you
for a drive into the country."
So, we ended up in New Jersey,
and as we got further into the state,
it changes,
you know, all the foliage, the trees,
the countryside was beautiful.
We turn into I remember,
we turned left into these two big gates
and drove a mile up the driveway,
and in the horizon
over a hill was a house.
And I said, "Where are we? What is this?"
And he said, "This is your new home."
And I'm saying, "Where are you getting
the money for all of this?"
And he said,
"Well, the company's doing really well,
and I don't have to worry about anything."
"Everything is fine."
And I trusted what he told me.
Hi, David. How are you?
Everything's perfect.
[Ed Lapham] It's 1980.
John DeLorean was on the top of the world.
He had all kinds of things
that he wanted to do.
You know, he wanted to buy Alfa Romeo.
He wanted to buy Jeep.
He wanted to merge
with American Motors and Chrysler.
He wanted to merge with Ford.
He wanted to buy
an oil transport shipping company,
and he wanted to buy a bank.
He always had big ideas.
I covered him very closely.
He was a big part of my beat
for a long time,
and I did a financial analysis
of what he was doing.
John did not like
to spend his own money on stuff.
Every time they would get
in a tranche of funding from someplace,
John would come up
with a bunch of invoices
saying the company owed him
for this or that or the other thing,
and it was, uh
It was predictable, you know?
They called him a "ten percenter."
Every time he got money, he had
to take ten percent of it for himself.
[Walter] John paid himself a lot of money.
He took half a million a year
and he spent all of that.
I've been around some crazy people
in spending
in different points in time in my life,
and John wasn't any different than
You know,
he had a high, uh, consumption rate
and he had a wife
that had a high consumption rate.
[Ivan] He was buying pictures.
He had his own picture dealer
buying him wonderful pictures,
which he hung on the walls.
And people became very uneasy about that.
He ran through a whole series
of finance directors who just didn't
they were very, very uneasy
the way money was coming and going out.
[Walter] I told him,
"John, I think you're making a mistake."
"A horrible mistake."
"You're taking monies out of the company."
And it didn't register.
He didn't change anything.
Talking to my lawyer,
Al Coen, you know, and Al said,
"You know, it's going to come out
at some point in time,
and you don't have any voice."
So that's why I left.
[Zach] You couldn't
tell my father what to do.
It just wasn't gonna happen.
I don't really necessarily think that's
an outstanding quality in my father.
And if John could get away with something
when nobody was looking, he would.
Basically,
I live the same way I've always lived.
When I worked for General Motors,
that's the way I lived.
Most of the things I owned
I owned long before I ever came
to this company,
and so I didn't
I don't believe I lived extravagantly.
I live the way I've always lived.
[man] Isn't it different when
you're working for a profitable company
like General Motors
to have that lifestyle,
from when you're working for a company
that's starting from the ground up,
trying to make its way in the world?
That's possible.
[Ivan] And then out of nowhere,
DeLorean's secretary,
called Marian Gibson,
packed all the files
and all his private correspondence
and all sorts of things
into a satchel one day
and actually went to the press and said,
"This man is pulling
a great fraud on the British public."
The Prime Minister
has called in Scotland Yard
to look into the affairs
of the government-subsidized
DeLorean car company.
[reporter] News of the investigation
seems to have come as a shock
to the company officials
at the DeLorean plant
on the outskirts of Belfast.
They told me this morning they'd no idea
what the allegations were about.
I was very surprised to read that
because, you know, to my mind,
this is the kind of thing,
if there is a valid inquiry in progress,
and certainly we agree everything
about our company is an open book.
It should be done
in a quality and confidential manner
so that you don't really destroy
the viability of the business.
Of course, Marian worked for us.
We found we had to change her job
a number of times,
first from a secretary to a clerk,
and then later to just a typist.
We never cut her salary.
We were going to terminate her,
but she pleaded hardship so badly
that we elected to keep her on,
and of course, as is always the case,
no good deed goes unpunished.
You know me,
I'm about as subtle as a sledgehammer.
If I start being subtle or lying,
I always get caught.
So for the last 20 years, I quit doing it.
I'd rather be honest and be wrong.
I remember when his secretary said
that he was misappropriating funds
and all that,
and she came to me and told me.
And at that time, I was still at a place
when he told me that she was lying
that I believed my husband.
Although she did plant a seed in my brain
about what was going on.
Yeah.
[reporter] After a week
of what they call routine inquiries,
the police are closing their investigation
into the DeLorean car firm.
Both the Director of Public Prosecutions
and the Attorney General
say there's no evidence
of criminal conduct by the company
or its American founder, John DeLorean.
We got the all clear.
There was nothing undue.
Whether that is to do
with the fact at that time
our production was at the highest
it ever was going to achieve,
which is 80 a day,
and the government didn't wanna
rock the boat, I don't really know.
I have to say
that I was suspicious about John,
just because he always had a sense,
to me, that he was hiding something.
And I don't know why I felt that way,
but I did.
And he was somebody
who seemed uncomfortable in his own skin
and, you know, he would twitch,
and, um, he was a complicated guy.
I think everything in John's life
was motivated by status and money
and accoutrements and all of the things
that made life worth living.
Perhaps it was because he came
from a working-class childhood.
He didn't know that kind of stuff.
He wanted everything the very best.
[sprightly music playing]
[J. Patrick Wright]
You have to understand,
DeLorean was raised
in the east side of Detroit.
He was from a working-class neighborhood.
He told me that,
at the elementary school he went to,
one of the kids invited him over
to his house for lunch.
This kid lived in a mansion
and he said he sat down at the table
and he wasn't sure what fork to use,
what knife to use.
This was kinda unlike anything
he ever saw.
He said he did that a couple of times
and started to think,
"This isn't a bad way to live."
And I think
that became a huge motivation in his life.
[Gail Sheehy] It had the biggest effect
of anything in his life.
That was like "Bingo!"
Off went the hopes and dreams and became,
uh, a vision of his own.
[Hillel] Unfortunately,
out of that experience,
money became more important
to him than anything.
And, in particular, what seemed
like his rush for a quick buck.
I discovered that myself when I talked
to several people who knew him
back in his days in college
in the late '40s.
While everything seemed
to be going so well for him,
you see this whole other side
to John DeLorean.
While he's at Lawrence Tech,
he had this, um, scheme
that he could go around
and sell ads for the Yellow Pages.
Now,
what were the Yellow Pages in those days,
your phone book came in two colors.
The biggest part of it
were the white pages,
and the white pages
had all the residential listings.
The Yellow Pages
had all the business listings,
and they'd also have little business ads
to them.
He went out thinking he could pretend
to be the Yellow Pages.
He could sell ads
and just print up a few books
on his own and distribute them.
And obviously he wasn't gonna be able
to distribute them to every home
like the real Yellow Pages.
And anyway, he was caught
and he was, evidently,
facing serious charges of fraud,
and it took a college professor
to intervene and said,
"I'll get you out of this."
What he learned from this experience
was that a little charm and a quick wit
could get you off the hook
in the worst of circumstances.
For the last 18 months, this car's been
one of the biggest talking points
not only in the car industry in Ireland,
but indeed throughout the world.
Now it has come about.
And how much of you
is actually in this car?
Well, quite a bit, Gloria. I've been
Obviously, I've been working on this
for over five years now,
and many of the concepts are ideas
that I've generated
throughout my business life,
so this is really representative
of many of those thoughts and concepts.
[Gail] John DeLorean reminds me
of George Bernard Shaw,
famous aphorism, saying,
"There are two tragedies in life."
"One is not getting your heart's desire."
"The other is getting it."
[motor revving]
[Gloria] People want to know
when it will be available in Europe.
You already say that you've had
tremendous reaction from the States.
Well, as you know, all of our dealers
in the United States,
and we now have over 330,
are investors in the company,
so we feel we have a moral obligation
to provide the first product to them.
So we plan the first year's production
will all go to North America.
[lounge jazz music playing]
We've committed ourselves
to purchase 75 per year for two years.
[man] How much markup
are we talking about?
We've marked this one up $5,000
and we understand the owner
in Beverly Hills marked his up ten.
[man] If you had 20,
could you sell 20 today?
Yes, I could. I could sell 20 very easily.
On the next ship, you know,
we were gonna send the second shipment
to California, too.
Oh, I see.
[Dick Brown] Third shipload to Wilmington.
Okay?
The next ship is leaving on the 23rd
and it's going to both ports.
California as a whole
should prove his most lucrative market,
with something like 45%
of all DeLorean cars being sold here.
I was fortunate enough to have the
on my showroom floor
for a few days, the prototype.
Without advertising or anything else,
the number of peoples we could attract
by simply calling on the phone who said,
"Can I leave a deposit for the car?"
And we said,
"No. We're not taking any more deposits."
It got to such a point, I says,
"The only way we'll take a deposit
is 5,000 cash and don't bug me." [laughs]
[Gavin] So I was offered by the factory,
if the BBC would fly me out to California,
to Los Angeles,
I'd get to drive the first
of the pre-production models
that would be shipped to the US
as part of the sales drive.
The plan was I would get in the car,
drive round the block,
come to where the camera is,
and I would open the door of the car,
'cause it was a gullwing door,
look in the camera and say,
"This is the DeLorean Dream."
What actually happened was I got
in the car, drove round the corner,
and the door wouldn't open.
The door wouldn't open.
And not only would the door not open,
the window wouldn't open,
and there was no way to get out.
And eventually,
the DeLorean engineers came round
and opened the other door,
and I kind of did a Fosbury Flop
into the passenger seat
and got dragged out.
Now the engineers at the time said,
"These are teething difficulties."
It just didn't look very good.
[J. Patrick] People were getting
into cars, with TV cameras there,
then they couldn't get out. That's awful.
I mean, that something like that
can kill a car's reputation.
I was thinking,
"That is ridiculous. That just"
"You've shot yourself in one foot,
maybe both of 'em."
So that's, in one respect, that was
one of the big issues with that car.
You can't recover from that easily,
unless you got a lot of money,
and he didn't.
[man] You don't have to do
any engineering work, do you?
[Dick] Yeah, we have. Sure.
In some of the cases, we've
There's some components
that we wanted to upgrade,
and they couldn't get it done on time,
so we had it done here.
[man] I have a feeling you've been
very impatient here for some time.
[Dick] Mm.
[man] Just because of the various
slowdowns and problems.
I mean, do you sort of feel
you're off now and going?
No, we're not off and going yet. Uh
We won't be off and going
until we have a very acceptable product,
and provided that all works smoothly,
then we'll be off and going.
The question marks are still there.
Uh, what I'm saying
is we still haven't proven ourselves.
[Gail] Curiously,
after doing everything right
in setting up his business,
a man of exquisite attention to detail,
like the ultimate engineer,
he takes his eye off the ball.
He doesn't seem to be that interested.
And everybody said,
"What's the matter with John?"
"Why isn't he paying attention?"
You know, "This is his dream."
And I have to say
that he finally impressed me
as being somebody who was going to crash.
[news jingle playing]
Crucial talks
on the future of the DeLorean car company
at the Northern Ireland office
broke up a short time ago.
The company chairman, Mr. John DeLorean,
was meeting
Northern Ireland secretary James Prior
to ask for another £40 million
from the government.
[John] 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.
[tools whirring]
[Barrie] By mid-December of 1981,
when ironically, John DeLorean came across
for a Christmas dinner that we held,
which was celebratory,
congratulating everybody
on the effort that had been put in,
the success of the launch,
the success of the product,
the wonderful achievement of the 28 months
and everything else.
But those few of us that were in the know
were sitting there thinking,
"Hey, John. What are you saying?"
You know, we know
that there's an underlying problem there.
There was this sort of dark irony
that behind it was coming something
that may well be not so good.
[light jazz music playing]
DeLorean said he had firm orders
of 30,000 cars.
Well, in the total time
of the two and a half years
of the project,
less than 9,000 cars were actually made.
3,000 had sold.
There was another 3,000 in the showrooms.
There's another 3,000 in warehouses,
and 1,000 sitting on the dock in Belfast,
but nobody wanted to buy that car.
He was, very clearly,
running out of money again.
[Chris] I remember specifically
DeLorean saying something
about having to move it along or else,
you know, he'll have to steal the money
wherever he can get it,
um, because it was a matter of survival.
And I knew he didn't mean it literally,
but, you know,
in retrospect, it was very prophetic.
[Barrie] My radio alarm went off
at 6:30 that morning.
"Good morning,
the car entrepreneur John Z. DeLorean
has been arrested,
accused of trading in narcotics."
[sighs] I don't remember the rest.
Any moment now, John DeLorean is
The millionaire automaker is charged,
of course, with trafficking in cocaine
in an attempt
to save his struggling automobile company.
[reporter] Delorean's wife
Cristina Ferrare, an actress and model,
arrived in Los Angeles early this morning.
I just found out a few hours ago.
I know nothing.
I caught a plane. I'm here.
I'm here to be with my husband.
There's nothing I can say. I know nothing.
[theme music playing]