IT’S ON THE HEIR T
Trust’ tracks saga of 1973 Getty kidnapping
HE notorious 1973 kidnapping of J. Paul Getty III has been filmed once before.
Ridley Scott’s movie, “All the Money in the World,” came out last year, and with its own notoriety, when Christopher Plummer replaced Kevin Spacey as miserly oil baron J. Paul Getty after Spacey’s sexual harassment charges made him an early casualty of the #MeToo movement.
No such misconduct so far haunts “Trust,” a 10-episode FX series, premiering Sunday at 10 p.m., that covers the same territory as the Scott film — with one crucial difference. Screenwriter Simon Beaufoy, an Oscar winner for “Slumdog Millionaire,” has fashioned a whopper of a story in which the teenage Getty III (Harris Dickinson), nicknamed the “golden hippie” by Roman denizens, arranged his own kidnapping — to wheedle several thousand dollars out of his billionaire grandfather (Donald Sutherland) to pay back a cocaine and jet-set lifestyle debt to smalltime Roman criminals.
Beaufoy read through Italian newspapers of the era and relied heavily on the book “Kidnapped” by journalist Charles Fox for research.
“[Fox] was a friend of J. Paul Getty III. Getty asked him to write a book [about the kidnapping] and wanted it to become a movie,” Beaufoy tells The Post. “He interviewed everybody involved.”
The series has a sick sense of humor. For every sunny Italian vista captured by director Danny Boyle’s camera, dark ironies dog the naively arrogant Getty grandchild, as when he attends a screening of the 1972 Maggie Smith film “Travels With My Aunt.” He’s inspired by the movie’s fake kidnapping subplot and makes notes in a journal to create his own film.
“The [kidnapping victim] sends bits of himself in the post [in the movie]. Getty couldn’t have known it was going to happen to him,” says Beaufoy, referring to the ear he eventually lost.
Getty’s fake abduction didn’t last long; the Peter Frampton wannabe broke out of the safe house where he was being kept and was spotted at Rome’s Treetops nightclub. That’s when the baby billionaire’s fortunes literally went south, to Calabria.
“People who arranged his kidnapping saw him and went mad and grabbed and sold him to the Mafia,” Beaufoy says. “It became a real kidnapping. He thought he had some control over it.”
Getty’s story became harder to track once the Mafia took him and “terrible misadventures” became commonplace. Even when his kidnappers cut off Getty’s ear and mailed it to a newspaper — in an effort to force the intractable Getty Sr. to pay ransom — there was a postal strike in Naples that delayed the ear’s delivery.
Getty eventually paid the $5 million and his grandson was released after six months in captivity. “He never really recovered,” Beaufoy says. “He tried to live a normal life. He had a drug overdose [in 1981] and had [liver failure] and a massive stroke. He spent many, many years in a wheelchair and couldn’t speak for years. His mother Gail Getty (Hilary Swank) looked after him the rest of his life.” He died in 2011 at thee age of 54.