Myth & Mogul: John DeLorean (2021) s01e01 Episode Script

1
[instrumental music playing]
[man 1] You know,
my dad's probably the largest guy in life
that I've ever met.
I'm proud to be his son.
My dad took me over to the factories.
It was on a spring break.
I remember the jacket a little bit.
My dad had a bunch of them made up
for him and for me and
The nice thing about that trip
was it was just me and my dad.
- [John DeLorean] Smart enough, squirt?
- Yeah.
And if he was gone a lot, um
It That kind of bothered me.
But, you know, um,
as I look back, it makes sense
that he was traveling so much
and he was a very busy man,
because he was trying to do something
that a lot of people hadn't really done
in a very long time.
[suspenseful music playing]
Wait a minute, Doc.
Are you telling me
that you built a time machine
[tires squealing]
out of a DeLorean?
The way I see it,
if you're gonna build a time machine
into a car, why not do it with style?
[tires screeching]
[man 1] It's a very bizarre experience
for me to see that car.
It's a flood of emotions,
and it has our family name on it.
But it represents a whole lot of, um
turmoil in my life.
I see it and I just wish I had,
like, a fucking hand grenade
and just toss it in the thing, you know.
[reporter] A new player, perhaps even
a potential superstar, is coming.
The car,
the brainchild of John Z. DeLorean.
[lounge jazz music playing]
[woman 1] John was born in Detroit,
in a ghetto.
This country,
you have wonderful opportunities
to become whatever you want to become.
[John] I was the youngest
head of Chevrolet General Motors ever had.
The youngest vice president they ever had.
[man 2] He was irreverent.
He was a socialite.
He liked pretty women.
[woman 2] He wanted it to be
a hot and sexy sports car.
This was his dream.
[reporter 1] Britain invested
more than $160 million in the car.
[bombs exploding]
[reporter 2] In Belfast,
a series of explosions
- [man 3] Hi, John.
- Hi.
Jerry West. I'm with the FBI.
You're under arrest
for narcotics smuggling violations.
[reporter] Auto executive John DeLorean,
free on $10 million bail,
today pleaded innocent
to charges of trafficking
in a $24 million
cocaine distribution deal.
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.
[woman 3] In our films,
we look for people who are passionate
and taking risks to pursue a life goal.
So, it looked like, you know,
this is where we were meant to be.
We were definitely along for the ride.
[music slowing]
[music fading]
[theme music playing]
[funky music playing]
[man] People in America love heroes,
they like people who take on the system.
And I think that was the fascinating
Plus the total fascination
with Americans for cars.
So, that story about DeLorean,
everybody kinda had skin in the game
and what they were pulling for him,
to see him make this car,
there's gonna be other models
and this is gonna be great,
it hasn't been done before.
[reporter] Has a portion of the company
been offered to the public?
[John] No, no.
Do you want some? You can have it.
[laughing]
DeLorean Motor Company.
Good morning. One moment, please.
- Good morning, Mr. DeLorean.
- Morning. How are you?
Some of these reflect
some of the personality
that you have brought to bear
on the company and the car
that are statements
that reflect your thinking, such as,
"I have a habit of doing
what people tell me is impossible."
Yeah. I think you always have
to reinforce the difference.
That's gotta be the key.
Otherwise, we can't swim in the river
with all of the people.
We really have to be someone else.
"I dreamed of this car for 20 years.
The time came to build it or wake up."
I think that you decided
the time came to build it.
Another thought we had
is a rather simple expression.
"One man's car."
I think people see this as the moment
as being your creation and
[John] It works both ways.
The customer thinks that
- [man] Exactly.
- That's pretty positive. It's a nice line.
In all of the ideas here,
in none of them
did we use the expression "sports car."
We would like it to be
Uh, to come across
as something other than a sports car,
and, in fact, other than anything
that previously existed.
It's a category unto itself.
[John] You don't make it,
they're assuming
- Right.
- It's a good idea.
[funky music playing]
[woman] Pennebaker and I
were on an airplane
and in the airplane magazine
it had an article about John DeLorean,
who was this maverick who,
you know, left GM dissatisfied.
Pennebaker saw John
as this Kennedy-esque figure
who was going to,
you know, make this dream car
that would be safe for the environment,
fuel-efficient and, you know,
it was gonna be out of stainless steel
so it wouldn't rust.
So, he was enthusiastic
for us to do some type of documentary
on John DeLorean.
[woman] DeLorean was so masculine,
you know, every woman's dream of,
"What I would love to have when I'm 40,
a husband like that."
And his cars were "John DeLorean."
You were a DeLorean
if you bought a DeLorean later on.
And that was the dream that he could sell.
And he called it a dream.
That was his big, big ad.
"Living the dream."
You know, "You can do it, too."
"Just buy my car,
and you'll be John DeLorean."
[voiceover] Live the dream today.
DeLorean was the biggest name
in the American motor industry.
A very glamorous name.
I want you to stay like
The important thing about this,
lean very close. I want this camera
I can't see if you're moving.
[Ivan Fallon] His lifestyle was
very different to other motor executives.
He had great friends like Johnny Carson,
who was one of the huge stars at the time.
Sammy Davis Jr.
And he had an incredibly beautiful wife,
who was very glamorous.
[woman] You know,
our life was really lovely together.
He was extremely charismatic.
He had these beautiful green eyes
and this deep voice
and he commanded any room he walked into.
He was bigger than life.
I fell madly in love with him.
We became,
I guess, for lack of a better word,
"The Darlings of New York."
He's been living life in an airplane,
either on his way to Northern Ireland,
where it will be built,
or Detroit, California, or somewhere.
Has your marriage, which is in a way,
a public celebrity marriage anyway,
suffered as a result of all this?
No, not at all.
The first three years we were married,
he did quite a bit of traveling
and I stayed home most of the time.
[Zach DeLorean] My parents had
a really nice apartment in New York.
And seven, eight, nine, ten years old,
you don't understand the magnitude
of living in a two-story apartment
on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan,
but that was home to me.
That felt all normal.
We did a lot of things together
as a family.
You know, vacations,
dinners, watching movies.
It just was a really good household.
It was a home.
[woman] Their apartment?
It was absolutely gorgeous.
I think the Roosevelts lived
in the same building. Didn't they?
There was a lot of people over.
Yeah. I mean, it was a building of many,
you know, people of note.
They had four doormen.
- Yeah.
- [Walter chuckling]
And they were all marble steps going up,
you get off the elevator and
The elevator went right to the door
to the floor.
There was no anteroom. It would open
right into the lobby of the apartment.
It was beautiful.
- [Cristina] Shoot.
- [John] What?
I left my pass upstairs.
- [man] You can have mine.
- He can get in with that, with his camera.
[man] Here. We'll work it out.
I mean, we didn't get
to spend a lot of time with Cristina.
She wasn't around.
Um, but when we did, um
I mean, she was incredibly glamorous.
She was smart and she was funny.
And she'd be always joking around
with John,
trying to get him to smile
and not be so serious all the time.
She was very fun to be around.
- I should've kept it in my pocket.
- I hadn't any intentions of coming
- How do you say "meathead" in Italian?
- [laughing]
"Capo carne?"
- No.
- [man] "Capo carne!"
[laughing]
Cross that out.
Why are you taking your key out?
- I don't know why!
- What is it with you today?
- I didn't get any sleep last night.
- [man] Are we there?
[reporter] For a man who
looks like Tyrone Power,
is married to the stunning young model
in the Virginia Slims and Clairol ads,
and earns six figures a year,
there will be no rest for DeLorean
until he finishes doing what no one else
in the history of modern business
has dared attempt.
To design, build, and sell
his very own automobile from scratch.
The DMC-12. It's more than a dream, now.
It's months away
from being a reality, isn't it?
Yeah. We've actually built
about 14 cars in our operations there.
We're starting to train our supervision
and we'll be in actual production in July.
We'll have cars on dealer showrooms
by new car announcement time this fall.
DeLorean was really one of the great,
almost genius-like, engineer and motormen.
The whole myth of John DeLorean
was really based
on a period of about seven or eight years
of his time
at the end of Pontiac and then Chevrolet.
And that's where he got
the huge reputation that he did.
[groovy music playing]
[bell ringing]
[man] This building was General Motors.
This was, you know,
the center of Detroit's universe
was right here.
They owned automobile companies
around the world,
and they were big, they were profitable.
They made a lot of money,
people wanted to work for them.
Their culture sometimes left a lot
to be desired, you know,
even when culture was changing
and people were wearing their hair longer,
and not many General Motors executives
did that, and they all wore dark suits.
It was that culture.
It was serious. It was business.
It was not about making cars.
It was about making money.
And this is where John DeLorean worked.
There are no shortcuts to quality.
Owner loyalty and customer satisfaction
are the only solid bases
for growth in our industry.
When he was still 32 at GM,
he still had one suit.
He had a very plebeian life.
And he said himself
that he was the squarest guy
at General Motors.
John DeLorean, he was a, um
[clears throat]
corporate child of the '50s
and as things changed in the '60s,
he rebelled against that.
[upbeat funky music playing]
[Ed Lapham] The 1960s.
It was a great time in Detroit.
It was great to be part of everything
that was going on. It really was.
And it was home for the young and the hip.
Motown Records is down here.
John DeLorean, he used to tell people
that if you wanted to find out
what was going on with the young people
in America, listen to top 40 radio.
And he believed that, he preached it.
And I guess he did.
[tires screeching]
[John] The guys that drove exciting cars
were the chubby guys on Wall Street
who didn't know how to drive,
and the young people
who really knew how to do it
and got a high, couldn't afford them.
So I think I said,
"Well, I think there's a market there."
DeLorean,
and he can't have been the only person,
but he was most notable for this.
The bright idea.
"Let's take our cheapest compact car
and let's put the biggest engine we've got
in the thing."
[suave brass music playing]
[voiceover] Some sporty cars
are only pussycats.
Pontiac's GTO is all tiger.
Agile, nimble.
One of the wide-track tigers from Pontiac.
[tiger growling]
GTO.
[P.J. O'Rourke] The result
was not a wonderful car,
but it was brilliantly fast.
It just blew everything away.
And it's kind of a simplistic idea,
but then it was being sold to young men,
who are famously simplistic.
[surf rock music playing]
[man] With the GTO, DeLorean was the one
who fully understood youth culture.
And that's where he was a pathbreaker,
was associating these cars with racing,
and a lot of the lifestyle
coming out of the west coast.
So all of this came together,
and he was really the first executive
in the auto industry
who saw the power of that
and took advantage of it.
[John] We set new sales records
and profit records,
which I don't think
have ever been equaled.
As a result of that,
I was made a group executive
in charge of all of GM's North American
car and truck operations,
which is about 92% of General Motors'
total profitability.
[man] He was a free-thinker.
He didn't like stifling conformity
of General Motors,
which was all the more astounding
because he kept rising in the ranks
from sheer skill
and merchandising ability.
[announcer] From Big D Driving Detroit,
General Manager, Mr. John Z. DeLorean.
[applauding and whistling]
[lounge jazz music playing]
[Ed] John DeLorean went to Hollywood.
He got connected to that world out there,
and he used to find excuses
to go out there and travel,
and he made friends out there,
and it was it became a hip existence.
[Ivan] DeLorean was very popular
around Hollywood
because he had cars and money
to throw around.
And he used to be seen,
you know, taking out Ursula Andress
and all sorts of very beautiful actresses.
The phrase was, "He went Hollywood."
[John] I never have felt it necessary
to explain my lifestyle.
I do things my own way.
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.
[Gail Sheehy] He was
very elegant when I met him,
and he just looked so glamorous
and virile.
[clears throat] On top of the world.
And he played off of that,
but underneath,
the exact opposite was happening.
I was writing a book called Passages
and looking for people that
who had midlife crises.
That was one of the bases of the book.
And John DeLorean
had a massive midlife crisis.
[Gail] And I was able
to get an interview with him.
How long does it take to get one of these
put together? What are they?
[Gail] He was an engineer
and he loved building things.
But then he went on up
to the 14th floor, or the executive suite,
where he was in the corporate offices,
where he had a higher position,
more money,
but he wasn't a starboy anymore.
And that was very tough for him.
And then it became more than that.
It became also,
"Hey," you know, "I could die."
He recognized his own mortality,
and it's what I call midlife crisis,
and I was just beginning
to develop that thesis,
uh, that this is a common thing in, from
at that time between 35 and 45 for men.
And it happened
for John DeLorean like a landslide.
[John] I think it sort of
came to me one time
when I was making
the new car announcement.
And we're telling the dealers
and the public
what a dramatic and miraculous new car
this was, and it really wasn't.
It was the same old car
with the fenders bent
a little bit differently.
And so I thought,
"I just can't keep doing this."
[Gail] He fell into
a second adolescence, really.
So the first thing was you had
to discard the old version,
like the old car,
and then you had to go
to the gym all the time and bulk up.
[Hillel Levin] So he almost
embraced the youth movement,
you know, quite literally.
And it's at this point he starts
to reinvent himself physically.
Getting plastic surgery.
The plastic surgery, in particular,
is the jaw, you know,
building out his jaws.
[Gail] If you look at him
before and after,
he was transformed.
And then he had to, you know,
get the right kind of wife,
who had to be half his age and a model.
[Cristina] He was 25 years older
than I was.
I was 24 when I married him.
He was a fitness buff.
I never thought of him as an older person.
Plus, I was fascinated
with his mind and his knowledge of things.
He was always ambitious.
I know that he loved the limelight.
He liked being the superstar.
You know,
you could tell by the way he dressed,
by the way he conducted himself
in business.
In the back of his mind,
he always wanted
to end up having his own car company.
Being part or being one seventh
or one tenth of some committee
is a very unappealing thing to me.
The other thing is I'm action-oriented.
I like to be tied-in with the specifics.
When I was interviewing him,
I got that he was a, you know,
an enormously powerful personality,
and did have fabulous ideas,
and was sure he could amaze the world,
but he couldn't do it at General Motors.
And he wanted
to figure out how to get out of that.
[synth music playing]
- [man] Now, the news at nine o'clock.
- [reporter 1] Good evening.
The Middle East war produced developments
all over the world today.
[reporter 2] 11 Arab countries cut off
all oil shipments to the United States.
We are heading toward
the most acute shortages of energy
since World War Two.
[synth music playing]
[Ralph Nader] The oil crisis
increased the price of gasoline,
and after John DeLorean
left General Motors in 1973,
everybody knew
that he saw a marketing opportunity
for an American-built car
that was fuel-efficient.
[Hillel] In the '70s, people were suddenly
very concerned about fuel efficiency
and the impact of cars on the environment.
And, you know, that was very much
part of the zeitgeist of the time.
So, DeLorean, just like he did
with the youth movement in the '60s,
now he's saying his car was going
to appeal to people who are concerned
about the environment.
[John] We're doing a sports racing car.
Very lightweight, excellent fuel economy.
It's going to be
very beautiful aesthetically,
and it's going to be designed
in materials that have an eternal life.
It's designed to last.
[Ivan] He was going to build
this very glamorous car that,
for a start, didn't use much petrol.
It was going to be
built out of stainless steel.
He was embracing
the zeitgeist at the time,
the environment.
That was the dream he had.
Using all-new materials,
new designs, new everything.
It was going to be
all the things he had learned
from his lifetime in the motor industry.
And it was a fairly easy dream to sell.
John was a guy that had exciting ideas,
and it's always fun
to work on new projects.
He said, "Well, I want
to do a two-passenger sports car,
and I need you
to be the chief engineer of it."
I talked to Nina a little bit about it.
I have a hunch her reaction was,
"That's not a great idea."
[Nina Collins] I do remember saying,
"I can't tell you what to do
because you're the one doing the work
and, you know, it sounds really exciting."
"I can understand it."
"But I know our life is probably going
to radically change
in one way or another."
And I was right.
Bill, to his credit, was the person
that built the first prototypes.
How he did that on a shoestring,
I just wouldn't know.
The first prototype was magnificent,
and John used that to sell the brand.
[ballroom music playing]
[Chris] We met John
at the Car Dealers Convention
in New Orleans.
I mean, I don't think John DeLorean
had any clue who we were.
I don't think he, you know,
watched Don't Look Back,
or had any idea about documentary films,
but he liked being on camera.
- How's everything with you?
- Everything's good.
My little daughter drives me crazy.
I've never had so much fun in my life.
I have a two-year-old girl,
and it's absolutely the greatest thing
that's ever happened to me.
[man] That's great.
I take her out to dinner once in a while,
just the two of us, and
- [man] Okay.
- Yeah. It's really fun.
John was there to charm dealers
and get them to invest $25,000
in stock in his company
because this was part
of the financing plan for the car.
How much does this cost in pounds?
- We haven't set a price on it yet.
- You haven't?
[Chris] A lot of the dealers
had already invested in the company,
and they were so excited to see John,
and John was like a rock star,
basically, there,
and he had Cristina, you know, his wife,
this beautiful model, on his arm.
- Mac Magruder, from Palm Springs.
- How are you?
- How you doing?
- [John] Good to see you.
You know, I, uh, I got 44 orders.
- [John] That's incredible.
- Yeah. [laughs]
You look younger every time I see you.
How do you do that?
- No. We're gonna do that.
- [woman] How'd you beat us here? Hi, John.
- [John] How are you?
- Fine.
45 orders. Doris wants one.
- That's my wife.
- [John] She gets the last one, right?
[Matt] The last one, yeah.
Not the first one, the last one.
[Chris] People wanted him to succeed
because they would be pulled along
on this, you know, amazing ride
that he was going on.
[Ivan] DeLorean was going to put
his own name on the motor company
and on the car,
and that's a huge marketing advantage
for a start.
And he then talked about,
"I want to build a company which,
one day, will be
as big as Ford and General Motors."
That's the way he talked, very ambitious,
uh, very but very innovative man.
[Cristina] He was always ambitious,
but he was driven to,
I think by demons from his childhood,
to want to be extremely successful.
He came from a very abusive background
because his father was a major alcoholic.
I think my dad loved his father,
but I think
it was a complicated relationship.
[horn sounding]
[Zach] My dad was born in 1925.
His parents, I mean, I think,
you know, went through Ellis Island.
I mean, they were immigrants.
[tram bell dinging]
Where his parents
and his family came from was Romania,
and there was a large Romanian community
in Detroit at that point,
you know, and where he lived.
[P.J.] Um, it's interesting.
They didn't go to New York,
as previous generations of immigrants had.
They went to the "Boomtown."
They went
to the Silicon Valley of its day,
which was Detroit.
And the automobile companies
provided lots of work for these people.
[John] You know, my father,
he was the youngest of 13 kids
from a farming family
in the middle of Europe.
He came to this country
all by himself at age 15 or 16,
and then he fought his way
through a variety of jobs
including, you know, being a cowboy,
you know, a foundry worker
at the Ford Motor company,
which is really
where he spent most of his life.
[J. Patrick Wright] His father
had a hard time with the language.
He worked at Ford Motor Company,
he was a tradesman.
It was the life
of a working person's family.
His father and mother, apparently,
they had a hard time getting along.
Things got rough
and she'd pick up the kids
and move to California
for a while and then come back,
and that was kind of his life.
[Zach] We would sometimes
talk about his family or his
The way he grew up.
He had talked about how, like,
uh, his dad and his buddies,
you know, on payday on a Friday night,
would go get their paycheck,
go to a local bar, and,
you know, get into fights,
beat the crap out of the cops
when they came or be
And these big brawls would spill out
on the street,
and my dad had said
that his father kind of enjoyed that.
I think his
He said his dad was an alcoholic.
There was some physical abuse going on
in the household.
[John] The way the world cast its lot,
you know, my father,
he was destined to be a common laborer,
you know, all of his life.
He also led a frustrated life
because he felt
he had a contribution to make.
Nobody would listen
when you're just the little guy
down on the foundry floor.
[Gail] And I got him talking about,
"Where did he come from?"
"What was his family life like?"
And he got very, you know, despondent
and told me
that his father was a factory worker.
He was a drunk.
He died and left the family with nothing,
and John with no emotional sense
of love, or belonging,
or self-worth.
You could tell
from the way he told it in a halting way
that there was a lot of pain there.
There was a lot of loss.
There was a lot of sense
of never being anything or anybody,
just a kind of throwaway ghetto kid.
And that certainly
never went with the image
that the public had once he began rolling.
So, you knew that underneath
he would probably always
have a sense of inner powerlessness
and fear of being nobody,
so he had to become really somebody
to, um keep that at bay.
What he could imagine himself being
like his heroes.
The originals who started
this greatest company in the world,
who were, you know, independent-minded
pioneers doing it from the ground up.
Those were his heroes.
That's what he wanted to be like.
[John] I think that the people
that built the automobile business,
they were a rough, tough,
driven bunch of bastards.
I mean, you hear stories
about those guys, you can't believe it.
They used to work unbelievable hours.
Absolutely they were an incredible
and unusual bunch of people.
Just, really, the pioneers,
the developers, the builders.
We still gotta work on that front end,
though, and get back to that brush
Hello, there.
- Isn't it just a gorgeous thing?
- She heard the first thing you said.
They know they have to do something
with that, I'm sure.
[Ivan] John DeLorean needed
the seed money to build this car.
So if you go around the dealers
around America, which he did,
and say, "Look, you know,
I'm gonna produce this car."
"Would you guarantee, in advance,
to take 20 cars, 30 cars, 50 cars?"
You know, they matched the fender line
with the window lines,
put louvers in the back,
changed the wheels,
and it's still as gorgeous as it ever was.
Or better.
And he got 350 dealers,
and he said guaranteed orders
for 30,000 cars.
But they weren't firm orders.
But he still, obviously,
hadn't got enough money
to build the factory,
to build everything that was needed
to produce this wonderful new car.
[Walter Strycker] John didn't have
anywhere near any money to build anything.
What we needed, really,
was a couple 100 million dollars
to, you know,
finally be able to build the plant,
build the car,
and to have working capital.
And that's what we were looking for
in these different sites.
He shopped around
to look for the best deal he could get.
The ideal situation for him
was if he could get money and build a car,
and not have to put any dough in.
He was close to a deal
to take his factory to Texas.
He also shopped the city of Detroit.
He shopped Allentown, Pennsylvania.
He even went up to Maine.
[Ivan] He originally
thought of building it in Detroit
or somewhere in America,
but then he found
that if you went overseas,
uh, Puerto Rico,
or somewhere of that kind,
they would offer you huge grants,
they'd build a factory for you,
and that became quite attractive to him.
And that's when he first went
to Puerto Rico,
got into negotiations there.
They all went sour.
[Bill Collins] We went round and round.
We spent lots of time in Italy.
We were going to take over Maserati.
And I got sent to some place in Spain
where the GM plant was closing.
We just kept running around,
looking for some way to get a free plant.
[Ivan] And then the Republic of Ireland
became involved.
The IDA, the Industrial Development
Authority of Ireland,
was very, very active in trying
to bring in investors into Ireland.
[man] The Industrial Development
Authority, the IDA,
came to me and they said
some of their people in America
were talking to a man called DeLorean
who had a project
for a revolutionary new type of car.
[Ivan] Des O'Malley,
he was the minister in charge.
He was hugely
he'd keep pressing for it very hard.
But one of the IDA officials said,
"Hang on a second."
"I don't think we've looked at
all of this, have we?"
"Do we know that these firm orders
for 30,000 cars actually exist?"
"Have we tested this?"
So this guy went over and knocked
on the doors of these dealers.
He came back and said, "Look, I'm sorry.
These orders don't exist."
And the Irish were forced
to pull the offer at the very last moment.
[man] It was a question, really,
of the risk involved, as we saw it,
and we thought that
it really didn't fit the kind of criteria
which we apply in these things
and therefore we decided
to withdraw from the negotiation.
[Walter] Arthur Andersen
was our accounting firm,
and they said, well,
they had a special group
for Industrial Development
in North Ireland,
and that they had a different attitude.
And so I told John,
"John, I'm going up to Belfast
to meet with the people in North Ireland."
[man] The British government
were desperate for investments.
John DeLorean was desperate for money.
So, they didn't ask too many questions
about the sales that DeLorean promised.
Why, the British government
and North Ireland would fund you forever.
'Cause it was, you know, 2,500 employees.
We worked out a contract,
and the financing,
and how it would work, and all that.
And we got that all done,
and then I called John and I said,
"John, we got it funded."
And it was dead silence. [chuckling]
That was the thing
that I thought, "Oh, sh"
And then John was going,
"Oh, Christ. Are we gonna do this?"
[reporter] The British government
is committed to John DeLorean
and his company
to the tune of £84 million.
They accomplished so much so quickly.
All the little obstacles
that we've had other places
were just taken care of immediately.
[man] This is a car assembly plant.
It's a specialized product.
It's the United States market
it's going for.
The company have got 400 outlets already.
They've got private investment
behind them.
They've got 30,000 orders already
for the car.
On June 22nd,
the Belfast Telegraph broke the story
that there was to be a massive new factory
in West Belfast.
It's here, on this green field site
that the biggest industrial gamble
this province has ever seen
is to take place.
Within two years,
a factory costing £60 million worth
of taxpayers' money is to be built.
This is an area
of extremely high unemployment.
One man in three is without work.
There's complete euphoria
about this factory.
In nearly every household,
there's an application form.
[applauding]
[Jeremy Paxman] Today,
in the unlikely setting of West Belfast,
John Delorean's dream is becoming reality.
I want to tell you what a great pleasure
it is for all of us to be here.
It's actually the culmination
of a lot of years of very, very hard work.
[cameras clicking]
[Jeremy] The chariot of Delorean's dreams
is wide-bodied and low-slung.
So far,
only two working models have been built.
[motor revving]
[Jeremy] It is, in the view of many,
the sexiest thing on four wheels.
[Jeremy] I thought it was really bizarre
that someone who looked
and acted as DeLorean did,
and came from this other world.
I mean, he just came in
with this perma-tan and perfect teeth
into this grotty part of the country,
where he was going to build this factory
to build this dream car.
I thought it was extraordinary.
[bomb exploding]
[reporter] The center of Belfast again,
a massive bomb explodes.
[shouting]
[guns firing]
[bomb exploding]
Well, DeLorean was so, um,
dazzled by his own idea,
he just brushed it off and,
"Oh, this is There's nothing going on
in Northern Ireland
that could compete with Detroit."
"I mean, more people get killed in Detroit
than happens in Northern Ireland."
Which was totally
the opposite of the truth.
[John] I had an interesting conversation
when this young man who did the story
in the Detroit Free Press Parade section,
uh, called me up.
I said,
"I'll make you a interesting arrangement."
I said, "Tonight at midnight,
I'll go out and I'll take a one-hour walk
around downtown Belfast
and you go take a one-hour walk
around downtown Detroit."
He said, "What? Are you nuts?"
[bomb exploding]
It was a nasty war,
and every day you went out
on a bombing or a shooting.
Two Catholic postmen were gunned down
at this same road junction.
Last week, two workmen were gunned down
at the junction next down the road.
[siren wailing]
[Jeremy] And DeLorean
was walking into this,
this guy with this
"hail-fellow-well-met" attitude.
He could be quite charming.
But he was walking
into an absolute snake pit.
[bomb exploding]
[theme music playing]