John DeLorean Car Mogul, Netflix Series 'Myth & Mogul'- The Dark Side 'A Malignant Narcissist'

The Guardian, Aug. 2, 2021. - Ed.

In Northern Ireland, many still revere the automotive magnate John DeLorean as a local hero for situating his car factory in Belfast at the height of the Troubles, a time of extreme economic deprivation during which the influx of jobs came as a godsend. Others – his family, his personal confidantes, his colleagues, the FBI officials responsible for his eventual arrest – remember the business tycoon as a greedy, flagrantly unethical megalomaniac. The new miniseries Myth & Mogul: John DeLorean triangulates the truth in hiding somewhere between these two characterizations.



- DeLorean and the prototype of the DMC DeLorean, 1980.

Conceived as a feature for the BBC, now expanded and split into three parts for streaming on Netflix, the biographical documentary takes stock of a man ensconced in ambiguity. (Those giddy about Back to the Future nostalgia, look elsewhere – a brief, obligatory name-check at the top of the first episode gets that out of the way, but the program has bigger fish to fry.) When he left a cushy position at General Motors to invent the car of the future, was he a free thinker chasing a noble dream, or a deluded narcissist obsessed with putting his name on a company?

When he brought the nascent DeLorean Motor Company (DMC) to the neighborhood of Dunmurry, was he expressing solidarity with a controversial cause, or simply capitalizing on a period of turbulent political instability? When he agreed to transport millions of dollars in cocaine for what turned out to be undercover agents, was he revealing himself to be a crook, or falling victim to an unjust setup verging on entrapment? Those were the major questions tackled by the pioneering non-fiction film-maker Chris Hegedus and her late partner, DA Pennebaker, when they set out to make a film about DeLorean at the height of the controversy surrounding DeLorean, through the 70s and 80s.

Myth & Mogul repurposes some never-before-seen footage from that project, as well as candid interview segments with Hegedus about her front-row seat to the bizarre spectacle that was DeLorean’s life. “As we started to unpack DeLorean, particularly his childhood and early years on through to his deviousness in college, we started to see that traits coming out in his character later on had been part of his personality for a long time,” Jon-Barrie Waddell, executive producer, told the Guardian. “Dissecting those in more detail, we saw there was another side to the corporate executive type he’d been portrayed as. He was a sort of master of illusion … Having access to this unseen material with Pennebaker and Hegedus showed something fresh about DeLorean the man.”...
More,
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2021/aug/02/john-delorean-netflix-docuseries-myth-and-mogul
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Wiki, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_DeLorean