Bittersweet Infamy - #46 - The DeLorean

Episode Date: June 12, 2022

Taylor tells Josie about controversial automaker John DeLorean and the most famous time machine in cinematic history. Plus: the true story of Ellen Wilmott, the misunderstood "bad girl of gardening."

Welcome to Bittersweet Infamy. I'm Josie Mitchell. I'm Taylor Basso. On this podcast, we tell the stories that live on in infamy, the shocking, the unbelievable, and the unforgettable. The truth may be bitter, but the stories are always sweet. Happy summer, Taylor. Happy summer, Josie. The flowers are out. Yeah. They've been out all spring and now they're like luxuriating in the sun. They're like deep, deep into their tanning beds. Everyone's over already. The sun is out. It's gorgeous. It's like 100 degrees where I am. It's raining where you are.

Also, if it's 100 degrees where I am, I'm boiling a lot. So maybe this is good. Today, Taylor, we're going to dive in to a little plant history, and I'm going to tell you the story of the bad girl of gardening. Oh, she sounds a little saucy. She's a little saucy, a little bad, and of course, a little misunderstood. Okay. Is she a person or a plant? Oh, a person. She's a person.

Because I thought you were going to be like the Venus flytrap, and I was going to be like sick. Fuck it. I knew I shouldn't. Olyander is the bad girl of gardening. That's true. We have our bad girls of the botany world, but you're about to tell me about a living breathing. I should say she's a person, but also she's a plant. Well, yes, yes. Miss Wilmont's ghost, or the ghost of Miss Wilmont, is a really thick kind of purple silvery thistle, and it has these spiky kind of, you know that like sagey dusty green

color? Yeah. It has these really sharp leaves, all of that color, and then when it blossoms, this thistle with extra, even smaller, sharpie, you know, little pinpricks, and it comes stabby, stabby, and it's a purple, silvery blue color. It's actually really quite pretty, but it is named after Ellen Wilmont. Miss Wilmont, she is an English hornoculturist from the turn of the century, so like late 1800s, early 1900s was when she was doing her thing. She was known to carry a revolver in her purse wherever she went. She was also known to carry seeds of this thistle flower that becomes her namesake, and she would seed bomb competing gardens with this really like

thorny, nasty looking thistle, and apparently would ruin other people's gardens. Did she like lace a bullet with the seeds and shoot it out of the revolver? Because I think that's a pretty, a pretty iconic, sick way to seed bomb places, just shoot the ground. Let's say she did, yeah. Let's say she did. Also, where are we? We are in England. We are turn of the century, home of competitive botany, home of the royal hornoculture society. Like this is like, this is when all of this scientific shabu is happening, right? Like lioness, and Darwin, and all these things kind of coming online for what we know as the categorization of sciences, certain sciences, right? Hornoculture, geology, you know,

all these things, evolution, right? All this naming, everything that's coming in. We finally decided things need names, yes. Yes, yes. So she is known as this gorilla gardener, pistol carrying bad girl of the horticultural scene, and it is totally badass, but Taylor, is it earned? Is it true? Yeah, that's always the question, isn't it? Did this actually happen? Well, especially with women at the turn of the century too, it's like, was she, was she just being a person and that angered people? Yeah, that's true. Did someone see her with a gun one time and be like, that's the bitch you see born my garden? Yeah, who knows? She was particularly disliked after 1897, when she was awarded the

Royal Horticultural Society's most prestigious award, the Victoria Medal of Honor, which was, you know, supposed to highlight the top scientists and horticulturalists of the queen's domain. Yes, large as it is. She was one of two women who were awarded this medal, this tribute, this honor, and she did not show up to the award show to receive it. She totally like Bob Dylan'd out and pieced. It was easier than to know show things, because you just didn't, right? There was no one texting you, there was no one calling you. That was this Sunday? Oh fuck, I didn't know. Oh shoot. No, apparently she wasn't even in town. The award ceremony took place in London and she was at her house and garden in France.

Why did she ice it? Well, everybody thought it was because she was just total B and wasn't going to show up because she was going to like seed bomb and shoot people and, you know, whatever. She was too good. She was snubbing everybody else. But I'll tell you a little bit more about the real reason why she didn't go. So, first we'll say she comes from a pretty well-to-do English family. They have a lovely home in Essex where she starts to do a lot more of her gardening, her whole family are very avid gardeners, including her grandmother. It's very, very avid. Of course, nobody has kind of entered the horticultural world. One, because it was just getting started at this time, but two, it was more kind of a hobby for the family. Okay. As a young girl, she created

a striking alpine rock garden with cascading streams and a fern grotto in her family's garden. Oh, wow. Yeah. And so she's not just like, oh, trimming, weeding. Yeah, yeah, yeah. She's like, no, she's doing heavy duty landscaping as a child. Yes, yes. And bringing like, like very rare plants and flowers to, you know, wet and very cold England and letting them thrive there, which we know now has implications and issues of its own. But at that time, it was very exciting to see, you know, like an alpine rose and. Oh, yeah. At that time, you just took whatever from wherever and you brought it to wherever. And if it massively overpopulated, you would just massively overpopulate something else that ate it. And it was not a problem. Bring some more snakes. Oh, too many snakes.

She's in this from this higher class of a British family. So she knows some of the royals and she's, you know, well connected this way. There's family money. And so she's able to buy property in France and start a garden there. She's able to fund these expeditions to Asia and the Middle East to collect specimens and bring them back. She was educated as much as a woman of her class and stature would be have been at that time. But that did not mean that she had the education that the other men in the horticultural society had. So she, you know, had a governess and learned on her own, but she didn't formally attend university. She didn't formally understand and converse and Latin, that kind of thing. Thank God, we don't do this podcast in Latin. Imagine.

Maybe that should be our next project, though. What do you think? So even despite this uneven education compared to her compatriots and colleagues, she was still really, really good at what she did, which as you said, it was like heavy landscaping, cultivation, studying documentation, hybridizing plants, just super green thumb, but also she was a very skilled photographer and a very skilled, I mean, we always had landscaper, but she had all these other kind of talents that were encompassed within her horticultural practice, but she was really quite skilled in in and of themselves, like the photography. She had a good creative mind. She had an excellent creative mind. And she had a very stern sense of

order. Like when she hired gardeners, they would be fired if a single weed were left in her flower beds. Like she was very strict. My God. Yeah. And I think that probably also propagated this idea of hers being this kind of bad girl of the horticultural world at the time. But of course, that culminated when she snubbed her ward, when she didn't show up in 1897 for her royal, the Victorian medal. And of course, everyone was super pissed and the society just thought she was snubbing all of them. But through a lot of research into her archives and into her papers, this woman named Sandra Lawrence was able to recreate pretty much all of her diaries and all of her scheduling, that kind of thing, and found through her correspondences that the most

likely the reason that she didn't show up in London was because her girlfriend was going to be married off to this elderly royal. Oh, yeah. Someone was puffering her flower from her garden. Miss Georgiana Tufnel, or Gien, is what she was called, was one of Ellen's, well, was Ellen's closest friend and most likely lover. And she worked as a lady in waiting to a member of the royal family, to the royal family, a princess. Upstairs, downstairs, shit. Exactly. And the letters back and forth between them that Sandra Lawrence was able to discover revealed this very passionate and very loving and like beautiful romance between them. Oh, wow. Yeah. And there's in one of the letters, Gien writes to Ellen, she says, you couldn't love me as much as you do and not know

something of what I feel. Really close friendship. Yeah, yeah, just really, just gorgeous. Platonic, really intense platonic friendship. I get it. That's crazy. Ellen's award was going to be given on the 13th of October. And the wedding was scheduled to be the next day. If Ellen will not were in London at the time to receive the award, she because of the circles that she ran in, she would have had to attend the wedding because of, you know, social formalities and that kind of thing, or that would have been seen as like this horrible snubbing of the wedding. So Ellen decided not to be in London at all, which meant that she was not there to receive her award. So while the entire society and everybody in the Royal Horticultural Society felt that she was

just being rude and snubbing them and what a horrible woman blah, blah, blah, really was because she had a broken heart. She didn't want to be there. These affairs of the heart, they're very complicated, aren't they? The claim to that she would seed bomb people's gardens and sabotage them with this thistle is not really founded in any historical sense. For one, Sandra Lawrence, this author can trace back to maybe like the 1960s where somebody kind of claimed this. Ellen had multiple plants named after her because she had discovered so many. And so this was kind of tacked on to it. But the other probably most incriminating or the most like debunking fact of it all is that this thistle is very hard to take root. Like it's not something that is a weed

in any sense, like you need to cultivate it and nurture it to get it to grow. So it's not really a very successful seed bomb seed to use. Oh, so this woman is just completely misunderstood. She was none of these things. She was just an outsider. Yeah, just an outsider. But very, very obviously a genius at what she could do. She spent the rest of her life gardening and being the genius that she was until she ran out of money. She had to sell her French, her French house and gardens, the family house that was left to her after her father's death had to be sold to pay her bills. Though now silver lining, perhaps the garden and the lands that the family once owned in Essex is now part of the Essex Wildlife Trust and it's a 25 acre natural preserve

in Essex. Yeah, it's called Warly Place. What an interesting story. I know. I found this information from Sandra Lawrence's research, particularly an article in BBC News, Sabotage and Pistols, was Ellen Wilmot Gardening's Bad Girl by Lucy Walius. I would have gone with pistols and thistles, but still very good. Hogtown, The Six or Toronto. Whatever you call it, you can fly nonstop to Toronto on porter airlines. When you fly porter, you'll enjoy free fast Wi-Fi and beer, wine and premium snacks included with every fare. You'll also love that our planes have no middle seats. Discover why Porter has been Eastern Canada's favorite airline for the last 16 years.

Visit flyporter.com. Porter, actually enjoy economy. Meeting your clients face to face can elevate your business. Now you can elevate your business travel too. With the TD Aeroplane Visa and Business Card, you can enjoy Aeroplane Elite travel benefits sooner with every card purchase. Plus, enjoy a whole suite of travel perks and rewards. The TD Aeroplane Visa Business Card. Learn more at TD.com slash Aeroplane Business. Conditions apply. As you said earlier, it's summer, it's June, it's Pride Month in Canada, it's Indigenous History Month. Juneteenth is this month as well. And it's also Father's Day this month, so I wanted to do a thing that I do sometimes on this show,

which is if I want someone that I love to listen to one episode of the podcast, I'll just build it entirely at them. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. And then I can be like, listen to this one, and then you never have to listen again. Don't feel like you need to listen every week, you're off the hook. Listen to this one that I tailored specifically to your interests. Taylor tailored it. You know, it's gonna be good. Noun and a verb, baby, noun and a verb. So with that in mind, this episode is for my dad, Dan Basso, and much in the way that when I did the Mother's Day episode, it was a story that my mother had first told me. This is a story that I think my dad first alluded to. And it has to do with time travel. What if you had

a blank chat to fix all your past fuck ups? What if you could stop a major historical disaster? What if you could eat a cupcake twice? All perfectly reasonable yearnings. And so the great minds of our time and other times have sought a conveyance to carry us somewhere else. Unfortunately, as far as we know, we are currently only able to travel forward in time very slowly. But this is a storytelling podcast, and in a great story, you can go anywhere. H.G. Wells had his time machine, Dr. Who has his TARDIS, Bill and Ted had a phone booth of their own, Sandra and Keanu had the lake house, and in the Back to the Future trilogy of movies, released 1985 to 1990, Dr. Emmett Brown and his young non-sexual companion Marty McFly had

the DeLorean. Oh, you really wore the uniform today, son. I am wearing a t-shirt that has a diagram, a schematic of the DeLorean time machine from three different angles with a little drawing of a flux capacitor on it, baby. So Josie, what are you, you've seen the Back to the Future movies, yes? And I'm still waiting for my flying skateboard, yes. The hoverboard, yes. So I think that's one of the things that I really love about these movies. They have really, really good art direction, and you can see in how many like little pieces of

iconography there are, whether it's the DeLorean time machine, you've got the hoverboard, you've got Gray Sports Almanac, you've got Marty McFly's like distinctive outfit. There's a lot of, it's a very well art directed movie, I would say. Yeah, yeah. Or a series of movies. Yeah, it's a franchise, if you will. For those of us who haven't seen the Back to the Future movies, Marty McFly is a young teenager living in anonymous fictional city, California Hill Valley, it's called. Played by our favorite Canadian. Michael J. Fox. Young Mr. McFly is buddies with an eccentric, nutty professor, mad scientist type,

well-meaning, but kooky. Dr. Emmett Brown, played by Christopher Lloyd. Mad scientist vibes, great hair. And Doc Brown invents a time machine that is in a car called the DeLorean, which is this, yeah, Josie's doing gullowings with her hand. The things that are most iconic and recognizable about this car are that it's got a brushed stainless steel exterior with no paint on it. Gorgeous. Gorgeous. Oh my god, stunning. It's a beautiful car. And then it's got these two doors that open like gull wings.

It's a two passenger car, it's got these kind of gently sloping sides, it's got a rear taillight with like a waffle pattern over it and like a gentle gradient of colors. It's a really distinctive looking car. Yeah. And then this narrative, Dr. Brown has turned into a time machine. The very short version is Marty McFly goes back in time and has to ensure that his parents get together so he doesn't phase out of existence. In number two, they go into the future and it's genuinely I think the most endearing depiction of the future I've ever seen committed to film. Everyone's wearing like two neckties and they're going to the cafe 80s and they've

got these hoverboards. It's a really fun depiction of the future and it also takes place in 2015, which is really fun because it was a very optimistic. Yeah. And then the third movie, they go back in time and it's basically a Western. Okay. This movie is maybe marginally less beloved than the others in the franchise, just because it's such a departure, but I find it very sweet and endearing for what it is. I really like the third one as well. Yeah. These movies were on play constantly in my house. We had all three on VHS and why not? They're great movies, right? Yeah, yeah. And at some point, one of the kids says exactly what you said, like, yo, that's a fucking sick car. Whoever it is in

my head, it's me. Turns to whoever it is in my head, it's my dad because he's a car guy and goes, that car is fucking sick, right? And my dad goes, that car is a piece of shit and John DeLorean got arrested. Oh, and even in my head, whatever I am, 78, whatever I am, I think I got to do that for the podcast. Because time is a circle, the lengthens and times however it pleases. Exactly. So Josie, Bakalak, this is the story of the DeLorean. So do you know anything about the background of this car of the DeLorean? No, besides the fact that it came out in the 80s and it was like this very hot, chic car, but also kind of funny because of the goal. I like that. Is that like how they describe it themselves? The Gullwing doors. Yeah, I'm gonna play a bit later on, I'll play a commercial

for you that they use to market this car, obviously. And seagulls play very prominently into the choices they make. Seagulls are very 80s though, think about it. Yeah, it's true. It's true. I was a flock of them. Yes. I was gonna say seagulls aren't like sexy birds in the way that this car is sexy, because this car is quite sexy. It's very ahead of its time and its design, like the way that it looks, let's say, because you can kind of see the 80s in it in some of the forms and lines of the car, but it doesn't really look like anything else from the 80s or even now. Yeah. It's very its own thing. Yeah. A Taylor Basso car story. I'm in. Taylor, you don't even have your license. I was really hoping you wouldn't point that out.

I know a lot about people and at its core, this is a story about people that happens to be about a car. I love it. A little bit of a disclaimer. This story more than I think literally any story I've ever covered, there was a lot of information out there. Like there was a lot of documentaries from every different angle, from the back to the future angle, from the car angle, from the DeLorean himself as a guy angle. At some point, I actually had to stop myself and be like, okay, you've watched enough documentaries, you've read enough blank, just go with what you have, but often it would contradict each other. Some went into more specifics than others, etc. And I've also had to cut a lot of stuff out. All right, Taylor, I'm buckled in. Take me for a ride.

John DeLorean is born January 26, 1925 in Detroit, Michigan. Oh, Detroit, baby. Detroit, although we don't actually spend that much of this story in Detroit, but you feel Detroit's influence in this story because it's like a city. It's a car story that happens when Detroit is the center of the car universe. He's the oldest of four born to a Romanian immigrant father and a Hungarian immigrant mother. His father Zachary, who like many immigrants at the time works in the booming Detroit auto industry, is an abusive alcoholic. He and John's mother, Catherine, don't get along. So they split and the kids spend a lot of time moving back and

forth with their mom to California. Oh, wow. Okay. In general, the relationship between John and Zachary is fraught at best and abusive at worst. And John spends a lot of time thinking about how he doesn't want to end up like his father. Poor, angry for ending up exactly like your father. He dreams of being somebody special. He doesn't seem to have been flawed in the exact ways that his father was, but he's like a very, he's a man with a lot of flaws. Overcorrections, yes. Okay. Yeah, perhaps. He goes to a technical high school for gifted students where he excels, specifically in like engineering he's really good at. He's a bit of a nerd, but he's able to consciously rebrand himself as a beloved party boy, which teaches him about the

importance of branding. He goes to Lawrence Institute of Technology, where he eventually graduates with a degree in industrial engineering. In 1952, he graduated from the Chrysler Institute with a master's degree in automotive engineering, then joined Chrysler's engineering team, got his MBA by going to night school, which he received in 1957. So he's, he's building his bona fides here, right? Yeah, very much so. And in and amongst this, I'm leaving out many academic and professional activities, many of them car centric. Okay. The story really picks up when he joins General Motors in 1957. At this point, he's 32, and he's just left a failing Packard where he managed to climb to the head of research and development.

So still very, very on the up, right? Very on the come up at GM, which is at this point, the largest company in the world. He joins a sea of interchangeable white dudes in dark suits and sharp haircuts. By his own admission, he fits right in, he's square. But then, you know, classic story as classic in bittersweet infamy is the 80s, even the 60s come along with their accompanying whirlwind and everything changes. Oh my gosh, sex, drugs, rock and roll. Vietnam, marijuana, it's all happening. And all of a sudden, John sticks right out with his big ideas, wide lapels and an uncommon swagger that earns both admiration and annoyance from the more button down members of the GM family. Oh, so he kind of loosens, gets a little polyestered.

Is that what we're seeing? Yes. Okay. It's noted that he had a poster of Snoopy in his office. And this was sort of like, you know, quirky, very daring in this context where everyone was like an interchangeable dronant, right? Yeah. But that guy. And then later he gets this two story office in Manhattan and instead of having a Snoopy poster in, oh yeah, it's like a with like a view of Central Park. And in his office, instead of a Snoopy poster, he has a shirtless photo of himself holding his young son and just like kind of looking out at the ocean, just like pondering the waves. Father's Day, baby. Wow. Oh, Happy Father's Day, everybody. So DeLorean is a gifted marketer and spotter of trends. Detroit, where this is all going down at this point, is the home of

Motown Records thriving youth culture. Yeah. And specifically, John watches the young guys rip down Woodward Avenue in their cars and he makes a key realization. All the cars with serious horsepower are only affordable to older folks. Whereas young people who want to go fast can only afford these shitty compact cars with no horsepower. Okay. What we need is something small and cheap that goes really fast. All right. This isn't easy because GM has all of these regulations in place to keep the horsepower of the cars down relative to the size. But DeLorean and co are able to sneak it past the higher ups and get enough purchase orders to justify production. Okay, okay. So design. They designed this car. They designed this car and went out and basically promised it to a bunch of people

and then came back and was like, look, we already promised the car to a bunch of people. We have to do it. Right. And we have so many people signed up that it's going to be worth our park of book anyway. So let's just do it. This car ends up being the Pontiac GTO, which releases in 1963 with an infamous ad campaign that promises the car is all tiger. Oh, it's not exactly. It's not an amazing car, but it goes fucking fast. And it gets associated with street racing and the West Coast Surfer lifestyle that we've kind of chatted a bit about on the podcast before. It's a massive hit setting records that still haven't been topped. It basically invents the muscle car category. Okay, okay. And for this success DeLorean is made a group

executive in charge of all of GM's car and truck operations. And from there he keeps rising through the ranks until he's the youngest VP in GM history. And he builds this reputation for himself as this suave debonair Maverick who has the pulse of the youth and thinks outside the box. Wide lapels. Just the widest. So time rolls on and DeLorean successes roll on and he finds himself spending a lot of time in Los Angeles making connections and hanging out with Michael Douglas and Ursula Andrus and all the beautiful people. Okay. What time period are we in? We're in 70s now maybe? Yeah, 70s. Okay. So Disco, he maybe he's, I imagine that he's kind of a shorter man. So he's wearing platforms now or lifts. I couldn't get a read on his height. He strikes me as someone

who might lie about his height though. There we go. I think maybe that's what I'm picking up on. Yeah, yeah. Okay. So he spends the 70s going Hollywood making celebrity friends and going to fabulous pool parties. There's stories about him coming back to Michigan with a tube of pink lipstick and being like Nancy Snatcher needs a car this color, you know. Okay. Make it happen. Yeah. As another example he gets divorced from his second wife Kelly Harmon in 1973 and she's like 20 years younger than him. And he has four wives in total and like two of them don't even make the cut in this story. It's one of those stories. Yeah. He gets this divorce from this woman Kelly Harmon who's 20 years as junior and then his friends in Hollywood get a bunch of escorts who look like Kelly for him.

Oh. Like as a like you just got divorced here's three girls who look exactly like the chick you just divorced. According to an associate speaking to the outline he said it was the classiest thing anyone had ever done for him. That was his phrase classy and he said it only could have happened out there in California that no one in Detroit would have enough class to pull off something like that. Wow class got banged around a lot too. Like wow. It was a very classy move. I'll do that for you Taylor. Don't. Please. I won't. He hits the gym. He gets a fake chin. Is this just are you just telling me the story of like Elon Musk or like Jeff Bezos. Like what this is wild. I think I'm just kind of telling you the story of a midlife. Yes. Okay. That's fair. Yeah. That's fair. Okay.

He gets a chin like a surgically like yeah it's put in. I didn't clock it at first which is not bad considering you know plastic surgery in the 70s but then once you find out you're kind of like oh yeah and it's not a it's not subtle the new chin. Yeah. Yeah. And his explanation for it is to the public because this is not you know plastic surgery amongst random Detroit motor executives men isn't really normalized at this point so his his explanation of the sudden new chin is that he underwent reconstructive surgery after going through the windshield of a race car prototype and recuperated in secret because you know the higher ups at GM would be mad if they knew I was playing with the toys and the person who owns the race track in question recalls neither

the accident nor any other instance of DeLorean driving a car there. All right. Yeah. DeLorean also gets a new wife Christina Ferrari who's 25 years younger than him and she was a model in like the Virginia Slim's ad she's the third wife of four. Yeah. And is she of the Ferrari car like no. No relation. Okay. Okay. Spelled differently. Spelled differently. Spelled with an E you know. Okay. Okay. Thank you. It's the mid 70s DeLorean's having his midlife crisis he has all these big ideas that meet with attrition at GM because he wants to build these flashy fast cars and they want to build their dependable little compacts and he's always out in LA and he's kind of a wild car. Yeah. Yeah. And here we get conflicting stories about how exactly John DeLorean leaves

General Motors. Okay. Some say he had all these big ideas and dreams and wanted to make it on his own so he boldly left the biggest company in the world to strike out for unknown shores. Others say that DeLorean was pushed out by the higher ups at GM for rubbing people the wrong way having competing interests leaking sensitive information. Yeah. Bad boy. Our theme of today's show is infamous and infamous is outsiders. Yeah. Yeah. Mavericks. What a noise. I didn't know. I didn't know before it came what it would be. Also of note read the automotive world in the mid 70s. Due to the war in the Middle East America is experiencing a massive oil shortage that threatens to collapse the car industry. Lines around the corner for gas. But in this crisis John DeLorean

sees an opportunity. What if one man could build and design from scratch an American built lightweight sports racing car with amazing fuel economy made of stainless steel so it'll never rust or degrade built on 20 years of experience and ideas formulated at every strata of the world's best car companies. This would be the greatest work of a master and the realization of a lifelong dream. This would be the DeLorean named it after himself. Interesting. Oh he's that kind of guy. He's that kind of guy who wants to see his name on everything and he's he's that guy. Yeah. And I really want to underscore that part about the dream because this was and remains a huge part of the appeal of this car. All of the marketing emphasizes that it was born of the dreams of

this one talented outsider by buying the car. Not only were you buying the DeLorean lifestyle being the suave jet setter. You know bad boy Maverick chinned Maverick. Yeah. A chin and a tan and a lot of ideas. But you were buying into the realization of a dream. This could be yours. This could be you. This is you. You're not a Ford. You're not a Chevy. You're a DeLorean. And then you go back in time at the end. So DeLorean starts up his own company called the DeLorean Motor Company or the DMC. So again he does like to put his name on things for the design he reaches out to a legendary Italian designer named Giorgetto Giugiaro who in addition to having the most Italian name I've ever

is like this master designer who like go to this guy's wiki page and just hover over some of the pitchers. He's designed a million beautiful cars. And if they're from the 60s they look like bond cars. And if they're from the 80s they're boxy and they always kind of fit the style of the time but just interpreted in the most stunningly beautiful way possible. Yeah it was probably the like a front runner for those designs. Like what he created everybody behind him fed from that design. For sure. And he was the guy who like if you wanted to come up with something like beautiful and interesting you would come to this guy. He also did he did some guns for Beretta. He did some cameras from Nikon. He designed the basketball that the International Basketball

Federation uses and he invented a type of pasta. Wow. So jack of all trades. He's like a genius this guy. Read more about him. This beautiful exterior is largely ideated and conceived of and designed by Giugiaro but DeLorean did give him three parameters. It needs to have a stainless steel body. Right. Never rests. It's a really distinctive look. It's very sexy and also you know nascent 70s environmentalist movement. Right. Let's let's make it good for the environment. Doesn't rest. Doesn't degrade. Okay. It needs to have gullwing doors because they're sexy and distinctive. And if you're a brand new car company that doesn't have you know this pedigree what you need to do is make something really sexy. And he said the engine should be located somewhere between

the two wheel axles. So a mid engine although the DeLorean doesn't end up being a mid engine car. Okay. So that could be in the front or the back for mid engine or no literally anything but the front or the back the middle Josie the doctor. Okay. Well you know a mid engine. Okay. Okay. Listen. I never claimed to be a car person either. I know it wasn't stated as explicitly as you as an imposter car person. Let me tell you. He brings on his neighbor Bill Collins to build a prototype based on jujara sketches and they take their prototype out on a little dog and pony show trying to whip up interest and investments. DeLorean gets a few investors and he works out a structure where the car will be sold by licensed dealers all of whom by some amount of stock options

in the DeLorean motor company. So now they're stakeholders in this dream and extremely invested you know the more that they sell the more money they'll make. Yeah. Exactly. But despite this there's nowhere enough money to actually set up a factory in an assembly line while simultaneously refining the design of the car. Don't forget we only have prototypes. So they've got to build the car while they design the car but also they need to set up an assembly line where everything needs to be standardized. Right. So it's they're doing a lot and they're looking for investors. Yeah. So they're doing a lot at once. Yeah. Yeah. Because like GM or Ford they would have that assembly line all set up. So the prototyping and they have this infrastructure in place

would happen in one department and then they would just switch gears instead of building both departments up at the same time. Yeah. That makes sense. Okay. Yeah. That's a lot. DeLorean starts looking around for somebody who will subsidize the factory or otherwise incentivize the DMC. Okay. Yeah. At first he starts looking outside of Detroit and other states. He looks at Puerto Rico whatever. But then he has to go international. So it won't be an American made car after all by the way one of the many things that's about to change. Okay. He tries all these different approaches all these different cities and countries but in the end one place rises to the top. Belfast Northern Ireland. Okay. Where the Titanic

was made. My God. You're right. You're right. Okay. Cool. Wow. That's rare. The Titanic is the Titanic but if you don't know much about what was going on in Northern Ireland from the late 60s to 1998. The Troubles baby. The Troubles. A very charming Irish euphemism for an incredibly bloody and violent civil war. In very brief Northern Ireland is distinct from the Republic of Ireland. While Ireland is an autonomous country Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom. However there is much disagreement about whether Northern Ireland should be part of the UK. Circa 1978 which is where our time machine has currently stopped. Belfast is split ideologically as well as geographically between two sides. On the east you've got this is the west. They

can't see. No. It's a podcast. I was doing east. I was doing east and west hand folks. Also I would never know. It's fine. On the east you've got the Protestants who want let's just put these over here. You've got the Protestants who want to stay in the UK and in the west you've got the Catholics who want to leave the UK and form a united Ireland. The nomenclature here makes it seem like a religious war but it isn't really not entirely. It's like more of a nationalist battle that also happens to have entrenched cultural components like religion and where you live if that makes sense. Totally. In practice what is this war like? Josie when we talk about the troubles what do you think of? Oh car bombs. Urban guerrilla warfare. Obviously the irony of

John DeLorean coming to set up camp for this explosive new car that's going to change the industry. Car bombs are going off outside the factory. Yes. That's not lost on us. No. In practice this war involves a lot of fucking explosions. Tanks in the streets because there's British quote unquote peacekeeping forces in there right? Paramilitary groups shooting at each other constantly an insanely high death toll. More than 3,500 people of whom 52% are civilians as in not even affiliated with a paramilitary group just random people trying to go about their fucking day. As you might imagine this whole car bomb shit is not good for the economy. Something like one in three men is unemployed. So when John DeLorean comes to the Labour government about

building the factory in Belfast they're like yep yep yep no need to do due diligence. Get in here and hire some people that's pretty much what they're saying right? Exactly. So the British government says here have a whole fucking whack of money and I don't know how much they give him initially but I can tell you that by the end of the whole saga the British government is in for about a hundred million pounds. Jesus. On June 22nd 1978 the Belfast Telegram breaks the story that John DeLorean is bringing his factory to Belfast. So for reference on February 17th 1978 a hotel called Le Mans and Cumber County Down which is where the guy who built the Titanic is from. It's about six miles outside Belfast and it was bombed in what is considered to be one of the

great atrocities of the trouble. So again like Josie alluded this kind of urban guerrilla warfare it's a napalm bomb in this case uh yeah basically the IRA which is the paramilitary organization of the Catholics in the west napalm this fucking hotel 12 fatalities 30 injuries a bunch of clubs there having dinner like absolutely horrific details that I won't share with you. Okay thank you. A Belfast native Richard Murphy received 12 life sentences for manslaughter one for each person killed although he was freed on license in 1995. Okay. And into this literal inferno walks John DeLorean with his fake tan and his fake chin and his fake teeth saying my northern Irish friends Protestant and Catholic alike let me sell you on a dream.

No wonder the world hates America like it's so well deserved. I don't want to I don't want to categorize all Americans by the actions of John Z DeLorean however this story is often pitched as like an like a quintessentially American story despite much of it taking place in Belfast northern Ireland. Right yeah. And there you know the people of Belfast are very willing to be sold on the stream by and large he's a charming guy they want jobs they want purpose they want stability yeah. So DeLorean picks a big flat field in the middle of agricultural land in an area outside of Belfast called Dunmary that happens to be neutral ground in the war between the Catholics and the Protestants.

Supposedly he destroys what the Irish call a fairy tree in the process so we're off to a good start. Oh fuck yeah you're cursed you're totally cursed indeed. And he takes applications from both sides Protestants and Catholics and all of a sudden we have this group of folks working toward a common goal in a part of the world where there's a 15 foot high wall called you know Orwellian League called the peace wall between communities and a lot of schools aren't integrated and so on but these are also people who have never built a car. Oh yeah. And John DeLorean has promised the British government that he'll get to market within two years so he brings in this guy Colin Chapman the head honcho of Lotus the number one grand pre-racing team in the world at this point

to take over the engineering and he actually kind of bumps out his friend Bill Collins who designed the whole thing he kind of gets nudged out by Chapman here. Oh wow okay. Mind you Lotus hand builds its cars it's a totally different process though than creating something for an assembly line you can bang out this bumper if it doesn't quite you know whatever yeah so even under this you know genius designer and this team that we're installing we have aches and pains we need time and we need more money so John goes back to the British government and he's like hey it's me John remember me car with the doors I need more money by now though it's a couple years later and Margaret Thatcher and the Tories have taken over and they're a lot less easily convinced to

dole out large sums of money DeLorean needs an angle to make his case and an unlikely one falls into his lap with the death of Bobby Sands on May 5th 1981 okay Bobby Sands was a 27 year old prisoner associated with the IRA Sands helped planned the 1976 bombing of the Balmoral Furniture Company in Dunmary during which he got into a gunfight with the police and was apprehended trying to escape so he bombed a furniture factory blah blah blah he was given 14 years for firearms possession imprisoned at HM prison maze which was one of the more infamous prisons where you know they stuck the IRA people who were making trouble he and other prisoners demanded special category status so basically the rights of a POW rather than a prisoner as had previously

been the case at one point in time including the right to wear their own clothing receive a visit in a parcel a week and so forth they started a hunger strike and so this is another very famous infamous component of the troubles was that there was a lot of like dirty protests which is when you smear your own shit all over the walls there was a lot of blanket protests which is where you refuse to wear anything but a blanket and there's this hunger strike so a lot of like prison activism let's say or prisoners wanting certain rights striking in some way to obtain them and that word getting out into the larger world both in Belfast and internationally and and becoming something of a news item okay okay yeah and in this case it's a group of young men all of them in

their 20s and they basically slowly starved themselves to death the protests received international attention so you can imagine how intense it was in Belfast Sands who was like the leader of this group and he was so picked because he was young he was hailed he was hardy he was willing to see it out whatever it was he was actually elected to parliament during the strike as part of a protest vote oh wow and he was the first of 10 striking prisoners to die the strike ended with no concessions to the prisoners although it's regarded as a real watershed moment in the radicalization of irish nationalists and the public perception of Margaret Thatcher as a heartless monster so probably a net loss for the government big yeah yeah so bobby sands dies

there's a massive outpouring of public grief including a funeral attended by a hundred thousand mourners and of course there are riots bobby sands comes from the area just north of dmc headquarters so some of these riots by happenstance end up finding their way to the delorean factory yeah and things get burned two years worth of records get destroyed the total cost of the damages is about 450 000 pounds so delorean is like great we will ask for 14 million and it works what and they get it and they're able to make a to market on schedule which is great not only for the dmc but for john himself who is paying himself 500 grand and spending every cent of it on jet travel jewelry fur coats big houses a 50-acre avocado farm in california

avocados are great a bougie two-story apartment in manhattan where he lives with his wife christina and son zack and a matching two-story office complex that i mentioned earlier for dmc headquarters but anyway it's a very different life than his employees at the factory in dunmari are enjoying yes no i would imagine very different he never loses his taste for the finer things does john even after leaving his 600 000 annual salary from gm and i suppose this is where i should add that john has a history of doing grifts to make a quick buck oh in college for example he got busted making his own fake version of the yellow pages in order to sell ads in it like just it was just like a yellow book with ads yeah he never had been arrested for anything

because in this particular instance a college professor got him out of it but his his criminal record is clean at this point but he does shady shit to turn over a quick profit um some grifty grifty shit yeah grifty energy you know there's some people who are just kind of inherently at their core just kind of crooked i think john delorean is just kind of crooked okay in phoenix there's a guy named walter pete avery trucker and inventor um he made the coolant recovery system which cools down your car cool he sets up a company called safeguard products but he's like i'm just an inventor let me hand the business off to someone more experienced so one of these classic like old blue collar guy tinkering around in his garage who is also like a mechanical genius

stories right right yeah and so he writes delorean because he knows of john delorean by his reputation as this maverick outsider and says basically will you partner with me they strike up an agreement avery assigns his patents to delorean oh no bad idea never assign the patents folks and allegedly delorean brings in this other guy named roi nesif who is kind of his heavy and they just skim off safeguard till it's insolvent when avery tries to pull out the family alleges that delorean tried to extort avery for 500 grand for the return of his patents and that roi nesif would threaten them saying i know where your grandkids go to school kind of thing whoa in the end avery pays up to make delorean disappear pete's daughter and wife are in one of the documentaries i watched and they

talk about john delorean like he's fucking satan oh and sure enough in belfast in 1981 john's secretary maryan gibson walks out one night with two bags full of files and makes a bunch of allegations that john delorean has only invested a fraction of the money in the company that he's legally obligated to by the terms of his agreement with the british guard oh in response delorean claims that gibson was bad at her job and gave a sob story to avoid being fired they had to keep moving her around and no good deed goes unpunished scotland yard investigates they don't find evidence of what maryan is alleging or if they do they don't say anything about it right yeah and the dmc chugs along which is critical because they have just released the first wave of the dmc 12 the car

owners the delorean gullwing doors rise effortlessly beckoning you inside the sleek stainless steel delorean beautifully crafted for long life the delorean is one of the most awaited automobiles in automotive history drive the delorean live the dream today beautiful gullwing doors beckoning you inside yeah did you feel beckoned with you saw that commercial would you want to buy that car um seagulls are dirty no they don't make you buy the seagulls with it it's not like james and the giant that's an add-on the seagulls are not so i can definitely see some dad drinking to be a watch in that commercial being like those seagulls are just gonna poop on that car i don't know why they did that i can see that

happen i'm sure it scrubs right off with the brillo pad because of the chic stainless steel exterior there we go there we go it might be my uh non 80s aesthetic but i'm not i'm not totally convinced but i do see how it's like luxurious maybe the doors certainly are like intriguing because they're just so different they're fucking cool they're very cool until you try and fucking park it at the grocery store but whatever apparently it's um gas pumps is the bad one oh because it gets stuck on the pump shit sorry i didn't mean to yell it gets stuck on the phone think about that because you could be like well i'm not taking my delorean to the grocery store that's done but it's like well you gotta take it to the gas pump so i don't know dude

the radial of the car doors going up is apparently not is apparently smaller than like a conventional door opening out but it's also that like it's a different angle the world isn't built for cars with gullwing doors it's built for cars with conventional open closed doors right yeah but you can see the mystique that they're trying to create and this this idea of living the dream the delorean dream in steve jobsy and fashion deloreans going around sprinkling all these quotes like i have a habit of doing what people tell me is impossible yeah yeah and i i'm getting the goal sense in a different way too is like the the you don't drive the delorean you fly the delorean you know it's like seagulls can go anywhere they want they can just float on the air

mm they eat garbage too yeah they're a little french fried beak bills you may notice that there wasn't a lot about how the car actually performs or specific technical details true yes and that may be because the delorean is not very good oh shit so for one thing by the time the car reaches the market it's completely different from the prototype right no longer american made for one no longer a mid-engine car oh okay okay i know what that means the original plans included airbags anti-lock brakes all of these features that would have been absolutely revolutionary at the time but don't show up on the finished car like airbags really that was yeah like a luxury item it when are we like late 70s is when the car was like sketched right yeah okay i

guess so i'm just thinking the airbags were were never luxury they were like oh shit we found out that this is a good way to prevent death and now they're mandatory on all cars done and done federal legislation made airbags mandatory in 1998 fuck me wow so there you go i was driving around 10 years my life cars without airbags i had no idea every piece of this car that isn't custom made is pilfered from some other mediocre car oh shit it retains the signature gullowing doors although they have a bad habit of getting trapped and locking people in they have to be padded to prevent head injury it retains the brush stainless steel exterior although they end up having to do steel panels on top of fiberglass there was some drama about the composite and blah blah blah blah

all of this steel also makes it really heavy which makes it slow and then the mid-engine is moved to the rear of the vehicle which makes it slower and then they have to nerf it and switch the engine to this like pujo reno volvo engine for it to be street legal in the us so it's slow it's slow it's fucking slow yeah it's a fucking tank yeah it's a fucking slow shitty car the handling is trash yeah the cars have a bad habit of breaking down spontaneously so much so that it's a plot point and back to the future fair enough yes and apparently and most damningly in my opinion delorean speedometers just don't go past 85 so don't always trust what you see in the movies the car received a lot of its pre-orders on the pretense that it would cost about 12 grand

when it reaches the market it costs between 26 and 28 thousand dollars that's more than double that is ridiculous yes that's significantly more dog i don't know if you've noticed but there is a lot of overhead in building a factory and a design process from scratch in war-torn northern ireland while also paying yourself half a million and skimming off the top like i guess we need more money the math the math does work out there you go the 1981 launch also coincides with a recession and a brutal winter in most of america so fewer buying outside of the los angeles market which is where delorean counts on his celebrity buddies and delorean owner investors like johnny karsten and sammy davis jr to help drum up publicity cruising the one

along malibu and your delorean yeah take it to the shops in beverly hills etc although apparently johnny karsten's alternator just broke down in the middle of the highway one time so oh that's embarrassing that is that's rough somewhere out there nancy sinatra's in her pink delorean being like what the fuck i can hate this well none of the deloreans ever had any color they were all except for they were all they were all brushed stainless steel except they made like three uh 24 karat gold plated ones as a promo set oh yeah eighties you know gold plated car that's what you toilet some cars you're a very wealthy and important man live the dream sales outside of la drop off a cliff warehouses and transports are backing up with unsold deloreans at this point

they created about nine to ten thousand cars and they've sold about three thousand and they're running out of money again so delorean goes to secretary of northern ireland tom prior and he's like hey can we have 40 million pounds more kisses and priors like fuck you no yes that absolutely not answer yes we're already in hawk 100 million pounds you're not even profitable we had to investigate you for fraud we're pulling the plug totally half the employees at the factory in dunmarie get fired oh and the remaining ones are cut down to three days a week it's like a core a core group of about 30 of them i think yeah our part time yeah uh-huh he's shopping the company around to investors but nobody wants in except for this one woman who wants equity that he's

nervous about giving away but do note that he has a potential lifeline on the table here that he ultimately turns away oh okay this this woman who wants to invest yes and around this time delorean will tell pretty much anyone who will listen how desperately he needs money and this includes his neighbor a long time snitch for the fbi and dea named james timothy hoffman who spots a big stupid fish on the end of his poll he calls up john and he says well john i know some columbian guys why don't we just traffic a fuck ton of cocaine together oh and john delorean is confronted with a choice that seems to come up frequently in his life between doing something quick and dirty to get a buck or to do the same thing the legitimate way but take

longer and make compromise and live frugally and he's like twist my rubber arm bitch let's make it snap oh this story is very eighties very eighties it's very eighties we we took a brief detour to belfast for the troubles and now we're back so let's address a point of jurist prudent that you joey or you the listener might be wondering about okay is it really legal for people acting on behalf of law enforcement to just approach someone they know to be susceptible and initiate criminal activity in order to what's the word entrap them into implicating themselves great question nobody knows the answer but it's probably worth noting that when hoffman called in the tip to his fbi superiors he told a little feb and said that delorean was the one who had proposed the deal

which would not be entrapment therefore no scoffery therefore legitimate people generally suspect that he did this out of self-interest to reduce his own punishments or to claim around 32 000 in salary from the government although some conspiracy theorists allege that it was a co-production between reagan and thatcher to deal with a perpetual thorn in the british side while also fluffing the new american war on drugs oh oh that one's juicy it's juicy you know this is a story full of patsies and fall guys and stuff like that so seagulls you know maybe this guy just stays upon but it's the way that the story unfolds and the general accepted thing is that he was kind of just going into business for himself because he's that kind of guy yeah yeah either

way delorean puts up half his stock and dmc is collateral for 1.8 million dollars which is used to finance the delivery of about 200 pounds of cocaine right on october 19 1982 delorean goes to room 501 at the los angeles airport chariton and meets four people who have with them 25 kilos or about 55 pounds of cocaine why is he going himself isn't he rich enough to send somebody else delorean is like a very arrogant dude he's he's quite audacious although i will say that apparently the entire time he was in belfast he was really hassling his assistants about acquiring a bullet proof trench coat for him oh like he was really like you know when kissinger came here he had a bullet proof trench coat and and and and and like wouldn't light up about this so he is a cautious guy

so i don't know but i think actually the bullet proof trench coat makes the drug trade even make more sense to me because he's like he is interested in maybe being in on the action and like living out the adrenaline and like you know being in the hotel room being on the streets in his bullet proof trench coat like i i get it he does think of himself as as billy big dick a bit like he's very to put it into context he's the kind of guy who he once said to this this same secretary that he was hassling about the bullet proof code i think he was like get israel on the phone i have military advice for them oh my god like i have a plan yeah yeah so he's he's that kind of guy he thinks highly of himself and his own capabilities in a in a bind i think yeah yeah that which feels

particularly 80s to me as well 80s strong man yeah but he shouldn't have because he's videotaped by a hidden camera fondling a brick of cocaine and saying it's as good as gold and toasting here's to a lot of success for everybody immediately after the toast federal agents enter the room and arrest him for narcotics smuggling violations exactly yeah the resulting trial is of course a media circus as hinted earlier delorean's lawyers argue that as shon connery said to jones it's entrapment delorean thank you that was that was really nice that was good i was really happy about that i had it bolded in the script and i couldn't wait oh good for you delorean claims that hoffman was threatening him saying he was going to send him his daughter's

head in a shopping bag meanwhile a reporter digs up some evidence suggesting that in 1978 delorean and callan chatman the engineer from lotus who since died by this point okay okay they allegedly siphoned 18 million pounds of government money from the company through a secure swiss bank account oh shit basically a mysterious 18 million pound payment was made to a panama registered swiss-based company called gpd that fully does not exist but it has a registered po box in geneva set up under delorean and the late chatman's name wow wow half of it could be conclusively traced back to delorean the other half just disappeared although i've got a guess nobody has ever done anything legal with a swiss bank account folks it just doesn't happen just how

could you it's like you open it and they give you a little pamphlet on how to bypass the law so you want to move your money meanwhile the tape of delorean getting busted by the feds goes 1982 viral when larry flint of hustler magazine pays a law clerk five thousand dollars to copy it and then distributes it to the media fuck whoa whoa if it wasn't 80s enough here comes larry flint i know thank yeah wow thank you and so now you've got this massively public case with this salacious piece of evidence in the public realm complicating the jury selection process etc etc yeah totally the trial takes place in LA and the defense so delorean is commonly thought to have stomped an overly cocky prosecution they paint the government as bloodthirsty sharks victimizing an outstanding

citizen with no criminal record a genius a maverick that's why they don't like him he's an outsider a genius maverick outsider such as john delorean a man who once had a snoopy poster in his office folks he's one of you reckless they managed to find a dea agent who has moved to tears as he describes his regret for setting up an innocent man the jury deliberates and in 1984 two years after his initial arrest john delorean is found not guilty oh wow he he was able to successfully plead entrapment okay and in my head legitimately so if it went down the way it seems to have went down yeah it's not incumbent upon like i said it's not incumbent upon somebody acting on behalf of law enforcement to be like this guy needs money i wonder if i could seduce him into crime and then

bust him for it although like it's one of those things where john delorean doesn't seem to have needed much much seduction to do dicey shit to make money but he was much like the much like the stainless steel exterior of deloria nothing ever managed to stick to him like he hasn't gone down on anything yeah so either way though despite the verdict his personal and professional lives are in shambles the marriage doesn't survive the company is immediately liquidated the people of belfast are left jobless once more to endure the troubles for another 16 years in what remains of the purpose built state of the art delorean factory we find a door with a message signed by the seven employees who made it quote this is the last right hand door to be made at dmc the end of

a dream or is it from there john delorean sort of just exists in semi-anonymous infamy dealing with the many legal issues that spin out from his rise and fall lots of lawsuits lots of i've got to prove i didn't do this piece of embezzlement now and whatever yeah yeah he's he's under a microscope for whatever he does which as as you've been saying that close scrutiny might reveal some other issues yeah he declares personal bankruptcy in 1999 amid 40 such legal cases he has to sell his 434 acre estate donald trump buys it and turns it into a golf course checks out yeah yeah yeah that's a sad ending he becomes a born-again christian he gets married again he makes these little plays to reboot the delorean brand like another car or a line of wrist

watches but nothing sticks he dies of a stroke at a hospital in new jersey on march 19th 2005 at the age of 80 his tombstone depicts the manifestation of his dream the delorean with its iconic gullwing doors aloft flying high and that is the story of an infamous man and his infamous car the delorean it's a bummer ending but sadly we don't really get the chance to rewrite our endings the way we'd like not without a time machine bang let's go back in time a bit yes thank you i have questions so i will august 1984 a pair of filmmakers named bob gale and robert zemeckis is my question are working on the first big project for steven spielberg's new production company amblin entertainment okay a little film called back to the future the inspiration for this film by the way came when bob gale

was flipping through his dad's high school yearbook and spotted the picture the class president was like who's this twat only to realize it was his dad oh burn happy father's day i don't think he was in front of the dad he's just like in the childhood bedroom you know he mused on whether he and his dad would even be friends in high school which transmorphed into the idea of back to the future in which eighties teen marty mcfly travels back to the 1950s with the help of his extraordinary neighbor the mad genius doc brown and is forced to go to high school with his younger parents well he finds a way back to the future in the first two drafts of the script the time machine is built out of a fridge but it's not quite right and one of the writers suggests well

doc brown builds this thing in his garage why not build it into a car so it's mobile yeah and bob zemeckis replies and what if that car was a delorean again it's 1984 delorean is on trial for drug trafficking he's in the zeitgeist he has this mystique totally and the delorean is a very iconic telegenic car already so why not and i have to say back to the future in general is really good about it was what must have felt like a very modern approach at the time because the movie is released in 1985 and set in 1985 they're really good about marking the eighties as the eighties marking the fifties as the fifties marking 2015 as 2015 yeah like it makes sense that they would mark 2015 and they would mark the fifties but to mark your own time to find the things

that are iconic design wise and just the culturally iconic for your specific time that is a challenge like i don't quite know what i would choose for 2022 you know what i mean like that'd be a that'd be a hard thing to gauge and that's i think you're right they do that super super well they do and you can even see it in the in the second movie when they go to 2015 there's a amazing piece of set work called cafe eighties where they go in and it's just like a it's a throwback to the the mid eighties but of course this movie is filmed and released in the mid eighties and it's got like tv's coming coming down where you can order food from like a glitched out ronald reagan or a glitched out michael jackson and you look at it and you're like that is cafe

eight like they got it yeah they did get it yeah totally so in researching this story i watched a very good two-hour youtube documentary called 88 miles per hour the story of the delorean time machine hosted on the youtube channel haigarty drivers foundation it's specifically about this car as interrogated from the perspective of its role in the movie its status as a piece of american pop culture and eventually the community of people who collect delorians in real life and modify them to look like the time machine from back to the future oh shit if you're at all interested in cars car restoration art direction and practical effects in film you owe it to yourself to watch this documentary dad dan basso dan basso who by the way is like he doesn't fancy the delorean

as a car as his type i don't think uh he's more of a muscle car guy but i should say that he is an artistic genius in terms of making something out of nothing and he could make a delorean if he wanted the basso the vasonian i don't think he would though because it's such a shitty car like you can't get away from it not being very fun to drive and use so there you go we get a lot of really cool process stuff about how a series of minds including andrew probert wrong cob mike fink kevin pike and mike sheffa who worked on night writer by the way mike sheffa so he's got like he's got the car thing kind of he's got the experience the pedigree so this youtube video talks about them ideating the design of this time traveling delorean the techniques they used to make

it look homemade the practical effects they used to make it light up and glow were pre-led so they have to use 9 000 volt neon tubes with a generator and every time it rains it's like beautiful love it and you know we need if this thing uses plutonium it needs a nuclear reactor and how do we make that look like a nuclear reactor if we're using the hubbed cap from a dodge and yeah how do we make the ground catch fire when it travels back in time right it's very cool stuff yeah apparently though true to the car's reputation it was a massive pain in the ass to film with people were always getting locked in bashing their heads visibility was bad cars would break down and then they have to remove a bunch of the rear prop work to access the engine oh no there are three of these cars in

the first movie the a b and c car and then there are four more used throughout the sequels and all of these vehicles end up on display at various universal studios locations the a car from the first movie ends up getting lovingly restored by this group of delorean time machine builders which this documentary explores and we hear about how they did it together you know the clash of egos when we're deciding like which version of this time traveling delorean are we doing are we doing it in the second one where he has the mr fusion from the future are we doing it when it comes right off the back of the truck taylor these are important things these will keep you up at night they are it's all about the details man i love people who have like an intense interest in one specific

thing like this a passion a hobby as i said 88 miles per hour tells the story of a lot of these folks who 201 seem to match this profile of dreamers people who see themselves in this car or this story whether it's delorean story or back to the future or they want to make a fantasy real they unanimously say that every time they are out in the car traffic stops and people lose their minds with just childlike joy and i can confirm this because i mentioned this to my friend fellow and he's like that's true because i just saw a delorean time travel machine in vancouver this week i took pictures and in the pictures you can see just everyone gathering around and listening to this guy explain this delorean that's so cool the most affecting story is about a couple

called oliver and terry huller oliver is 32 when he gets diagnosed with terminal cancer he's got six months she's like like what do you want to do we can do whatever you want and he's like i want to build a time machine and so they sink themselves into building this delorean and six months turns into six more months and six more and six more and eventually he just lives oh you wait it gets sapphire they're still together and they take the delorean out for events to raise money for the michael j fox foundation which is the world's largest non-profit funder of parkinson's disease research at one point an interview asks him what's the secret to time travel and he says a good partner a good adventure partner and she's so touched she's

like me and she starts tearing up just like you are that's so sweet so via back to the future the delorean dream in whatever form was immortalized for future generations to strive toward on july 25th 1985 robert zemeckis bob gale and steven spielberg received a letter via fax which i will read now oh oh shit a fax an important fax has arrived july 25th 1985 dear gentlemen last week i had the opportunity to see a screening of back to the future in new york and want you to know i think it was brilliant oh i was particularly pleased that the delorean motor car was all but immortalized in the film and want to thank all of those responsible ron cob andy probert mike sheffa and kevin pike for the outstanding job they did in presenting the dmc as the vehicle

of the future they can join my soon-to-be-revived design team at any time no thanks again for continuing my dream in such a positive fashion sincerely john zed delorean so he liked it that's good i mean obby yeah that movie did more for the delorean than fucking delorean himself that's true that's true but i would also think that the delorean was chosen because it was emblematic of a certain time not because it was this fantastic car but it was emblematic of this very 80s view of cars and like this like drop in the bucket of a certain style so the fact that he founded a positive rendition like awesome good silver lining but my reading of it would be kind of different i think i don't know maybe it's just negative

nancy but one i think you have like more capacity for both self reflection and analysis of theme than john delorean i also have the benefit of hindsight so that might be in there too but two other than the fact that like we say the delorean in the movie breaks down and stuff like that it's a very endearing depiction of a car like it has a charisma this car it really draws people in yeah yeah the people are always like yo what's that yeah yeah yeah the kitchen is just kind of charming in the end yeah in may 2021 the delorean time machine entered into the national historic vehicle register its history will be permanently archived at the library of congress an estimated 6500 original delorians are still on the road the delorean motor company name lives on in the form

of a new company with the same name based in humble texas just outside houston that restores and sells parts for original delorians they also happen to be the major investors in delorean motors reimagined which one week ago announced production on a new reimagined electric delorean taylor mixture faster one week ago one week ago as of recording holy shit so all in i'm not sure i buy entirely into the idea of the car itself the delorean as this unambiguous symbol of dreamers yeah it's a good way to market a car fantastic or tease out a narrative for a podcast yes or or sign off on a fax or visualize a time machine yes and sure it worked out great for the hullers or for doc brown in the end after many attempts but for the people of belfast or the

man himself it ended up being a pipe dream a beautifully designed trap that ensnared and deceived them for a while then spat them out the other side but as a symbol of the man himself controversial but iconic beautiful on the outside but underneath it all kind of a piece of shit the car works magnificently and that is the story of the delorean live the dream i like the hit on your vape as you say that too thank you it's i'm living the dream what do you want fuck dude it's a real it's a real shit show i feel like it features in my mind like a very class and capitalism conscious 80s thing you know

80s were strong we're 80s babies that's why it's true we're strong the charisma of the car is so like enticing and kind of quirky and even though it begins to represent this vapidness the car itself is not that big in the end the way that it's been repurposed for the movie and i don't know it's like a piece of like italian design modern art right and by being this thing that is so unique that people kind of seem to have this habit of projecting themselves onto it like anything it acquires the emotional meaning that we give to it and it means something totally different divorce of its context it's just a beautiful but shitty car which again i think is very 80s this thing that looks that is beautifully designed

but underneath it all pretty mediocre but it takes on a completely different meaning if you're somebody dying of cancer who wants to travel through time just once yeah you know it means something completely different so i think it's really interesting like i hesitate to call it a trap because you know people have found this really positive meaning to it but also this enticing mystique has proven to be quite toxic to some other people so it's interesting right yeah yeah what kind of car is your dad's favorite he had a 60s camaro that he restored he has like a i think he has a Porsche now he likes fast shit yeah he likes he likes going fast he's like sonic and mystery delorean he likes to go fast i think my dad was a card guy too he owned a Porsche

nice do you know what kind blue sick thanks for tuning in if you want more infamy go to bittersweetinfamy.com or search for us wherever you find your podcasts we usually release new episode every other sunday and you can also find us on instagram at bittersweetinfamy and if you liked the show consider subscribing leaving a review or just tell a friend stay sweet for this week's episode i watched four documentaries the first is called myth and mogul john delorean you can find that on netflix it's about three episodes long good stylishly produced netflix style documentary i watched a documentary that was just called delorean from 1980 by d.a.

pennabaker and chris hedges and they basically follow john delorean around at the time that he's you know trying to scrape up investments for this new venture and it really is from the era of john delorean as visionary genius rather than washed up car dude as i mentioned in the show i watched 88 miles per hour the story of the delorean time machine on hagrity drivers foundation on youtube i watched delorean the man the car of the people on car faction which has a lot of interviews with people who worked at the factory in belfast which is really cool i watched a clip from bbc's those were the days on the delorean hosted on youtube by steven bram and i watched a clip posted by top gear on youtube dmc delorean the back to the future superstar car at 40 i also read cocaine

lies and videotape by matt mcwilliams for Wagner and lynch law firms and a really great long-form creative non-fiction article called saint john delorean and the invention of the future by alex papa demas for the outline and partnership with epic magazine december 11th 2018 had a lot of really good character details and really cool passages of writing for additional background i read the wikipedia pages on the 1981 irish hunger strike bobby sands the laman restaurant bombing and george eddo jujaro we used audio from the original delorean commercial hosted on youtube by delorean mid atlantic and our interstitial music this episode was the little chime noise from back to the future hosted on youtube by osw review hd this song you're currently listening to is tea street by brian

steele happy father's day