TELEVISION
A 10-episode small screen take on the Getty case that recently hit cinemas
Yet another take — this time on the small screen — on the infamous Getty kidnapping saga.
‘Money. Sex. Violence. Kidnapping.” Donald Sutherland, looking meditative over breakfast at an upscale diner, was contemplating a question: Why were people suddenly fascinated by the Getty family and what happened to it in 1973? How, he added, “did this family who had so much success also have so much failure?”
Sutherland plays billionaire J Paul Getty in the FX series Trust. Like Ridley Scott’s recent movie, All the Money in the World, the first season of the TV show — three different seasonlong stories about the Gettys are planned — deals with the 1973 kidnapping of the patriarch’s teenage grandson, John Paul Getty III, and the concatenation of family tensions around money and power that frames the event.
“There is an ecosystem around it which is as extraordinary as the kidnapping itself,” said Danny Boyle ( Slumdog Millionaire, 127 Hours), who directed the first three episodes and is an executive producer on the show alongside producer Christian Colson and writer Simon Beaufoy. “An amazingly compelling world emerged out of the research.”
Clearly others had found the kidnapping compelling, too; FX had already greenlighted the project when it discovered that Scott was working on a movie on the same subject, with Kevin Spacey as the Getty patriarch. That project acquired a great deal of notoriety when Spacey, accused of sexual harassment and assault, was removed from the finished movie and his scenes reshot with Christopher Plummer. But the movie disappointed at the box office, perhaps a sign that audiences may not find this particular family’s Shakespearean dysfunction as fascinating as the creators do.
Forty-five years ago, the kidnapping of the 16-year-old Paul (as he was known) in Rome, and the subsequent US$17-million ransom demand, made headlines. But his grandfather — possibly the world’s richest man at the time, thanks largely to his oil empire — first treated the kidnapping as a hoax. “If I pay one penny now,” he famously pronounced, “I’ll have 14 kidnapped grandchildren.” It was only when, several months later, an Italian newspaper received a package containing a severed ear and a lock of hair that Getty Sr agreed to provide the money. (He told Paul’s father that it was a loan, to be repaid at 4% interest.)
Beaufoy, who collaborated with Boyle and Colson on the Academy Award-winning film Slumdog Millionaire, said in a telephone interview that he had become fascinated with the kidnapping after reading an article a few years ago. “I started delving into the mystery about how no one would pay a ransom,” he said. “The more I delved, the more interesting it became: The complexity of these ridiculously wealthy people who were so locked in their own pain that they couldn’t just write a cheque.”
Although Beaufoy was about to embark on another project for FX, he proposed the Getty kidnapping as a potential series. “I thought about it for television from the beginning because it was so complex,” he said. “The generational issues needed those 10 episodes. And the story was so apposite to now, to the crazy wealthy element of our society, that I felt I should do it right away.”
FX agreed. “It was really their larger ambitions that drew us in,” Gina Balian, executive vice-president of series development at FX Networks and FX Productions, said in an email. “It felt like their approach to exploring how money influences family bonds would be original and not another story that idealises the wealthy and powerful of this world.” After seeing early scripts, Balian said that it was “an easy decision” to greenlight the show.
Boyle had begun casting — signing up Hilary Swank as Gail Getty, Paul’s mother, and Brendan Fraser as former CIA operative James Fletcher Chace, who was Getty Sr’s security specialist — when it emerged that Scott was making a movie on the same subject. Although FX ultimately pushed back the series release date from January, to put some distance between Trust and the December opening of All the Money in the World, there was no erosion of confidence from network executives, Boyle said, adding that they felt that a 10-part series was quite a different beast from a two-hour film.
It’s definitely a lot more experimental. Episode 8 is spoken entirely in the Calabrian dialect of Paul’s kidnappers. In several episodes, Chace speaks directly to the audience (shades of House of Cards), offering an epoch-spanning perspective on the events depicted during the rest of the show.
“I mentioned that it’s like Chace has a prescience, like he is a time traveller,” Fraser recounted in a telephone interview. “That developed into a touch of magical realism.”
In the first three episodes, the plethora of characters, split screens and montages of often-puzzling, non-linear events eventually begin to resolve into a coherent storyline: Paul, badly in debt to drug dealers, has planned his own kidnapping to raise money from his famously tightfisted family, then becomes a helpless victim as events spiral out of control. (This offers a different perspective to All the Money, which paints Paul as a victim from the outset.)
“The more research I did, the more I realised he arranged his own kidnapping,” Beaufoy said. “It was a huge attentionseeking device; they’ll pay because they love me. It became an extraordinary metaphor for the third generation saying, ‘Pay some attention to me, show me some love’.”
Ultimately, Boyle said, the story is about willpower. “It’s the willpower of each of the individual characters, the willpower exercised between old Paul and his grandson, first as one tries to get money from the other, then extending into different arenas, some tragic,” he said. “The joy of working in this format is that you can show how complicated any narrative can be.”
Or as Sutherland put it: “To try to capture the truth of a human being — la condition humaine — it’s the most extraordinary business in the world.”