A boy taken at gunpoint in Rome, an ear in the post, a grandfather who would not pay, and now Al Pacino as the film’s kidnapper, falling for the boy’s mother.
The Getty kidnapping is the most famous haggle in old money, and film-makers keep returning to it because an audience will forgive a crime long before it forgives a discount. Men in Calabria held a sixteen-year-old for five months in 1973. Half a century on, what people remember is the price, and how far his family brought it down.
On 13 November Deadline reported that Isla Fisher and Blake Ritson had joined Al Pacino in Captivated. Jackson Kelly of The Pitt is also cast, and Dito Montiel is directing, with filming under way in Calabria and Rome. Deadline did not say whom the newcomers play. By our count this is the third screen version of those same five months, after Ridley Scott’s All the Money in the World and the FX series Trust, and the producers bill it as an angle both of them left unexplored.
That is a bold claim about a story so thoroughly told. It also happens to be fair.
A grandson priced, then marked down
John Paul Getty III grew up in Italy, where his father, John Paul Getty Jr, had been sent to look after the family’s business interests. On 10 July 1973, at about three in the morning, he was taken at gunpoint from a street in Rome. His mother, the American actress Gail Harris, called journalists to her house in Parioli to announce the ransom, which Fox News put at $17 million. His grandfather, J Paul Getty, who had built Getty Oil, declined to pay.
The family has spent fifty years being judged for that refusal, and the judgement is usually delivered by people who have never been asked for the money.
In the autumn an ear arrived at Il Messaggero, the Rome newspaper, with a lock of hair and a note giving the family ten days. The conversation then moved, as such conversations do, from whether to how much. The family agreed to about $2.9 million, under a fifth of the opening demand, and the boy was found alive at a filling station in Lauria that December. The NZ Herald reports that nine men linked to the ‘Ndrangheta were arrested, that two were convicted and the rest acquitted for lack of evidence, and that $85,000 of the ransom was ever recovered.
A young man who has just lost an ear is entitled to a sense of humour, and Getty III kept his. Speaking to Rolling Stone in 1974, in what the magazine called a sardonic mood, he said it had been “a high-priced ear”. Nobody in the family has improved on the line since.
What came after was less amusing, and the films tend to leave it out. In 1974, at seventeen, he married Gisela Zacher; their son is the actor Balthazar Getty. In 1981, while being treated for alcohol abuse, he had a stroke that left him paralysed, unable to speak and in need of care around the clock. He died on 5 February 2011 at the family’s house in Buckinghamshire, aged 54. His brothers and sisters made their own names in the meantime: Mark Getty co-founded Getty Images, and Aileen Getty became an AIDS activist.
Captivated moves the camera to Calabria
Every retelling needs someone to sit across the table from the money. Ridley Scott gave the grandfather to Christopher Plummer and the mother to Michelle Williams, and his drama was an old man’s arithmetic set against a mother’s nerve. Trust stretched the same negotiation across a television series. Both films looked at the ransom from the side that was being asked to pay it.
Captivated sits in the other chair. IMDb Pro’s synopsis describes a Calabrian mafia boss who kidnaps the grandson of the world’s richest man and then endangers his own organisation by falling in love with the boy’s mother during the ransom talks. IMDb Pro lists Pacino in the role, under the name Saro Mammoliti. The romance is the film’s premise, and it rests on the word of the people making it.
One of those people is Michael Mammoliti, a producer and co-writer, who told Deadline the project is “deeply personal” and spoke of his family’s connection to the events. The rest is for the audience to weigh. Cassian Elwes is among the producers, and the full list in Deadline’s report runs to nine names. That is a large committee for a love story, though it is a modest one by the standards of a ransom.
Ritson arrives from The Gilded Age, so he will at least know where to stand when very rich people are in the room.
DDW’s reading is that the Calabrian angle is the only fresh one left, and the producers were right to take it. Two films have already shown the payer. This one shows the people asking for the money, and it turns their side of the negotiation into a romance. Whether the history bears the weight is a question for the release, which has no date yet.
The family’s real deal came eleven years later
The kidnapping is what the screen keeps returning to, which is a pity, because the Getty fortune’s own plot turned in 1984. More money was involved, and the lawyers stayed much longer.
J Paul Getty died in 1976. A great deal of the family’s wealth sat in the Sarah Getty Trust, and his fourth son, Gordon, was its sole trustee. On 6 January 1984 Getty Oil agreed to merge with Texaco. The J Paul Getty Museum, a large shareholder, agreed to sell its stock, and two days later the trustee agreed in writing to sell the trust’s shares as well. According to the California Court of Appeal’s judgment in Getty v Getty, he sold the trust’s stock to Texaco on 17 February for over $4 billion.
That might have been the end of it. But Pennzoil sued Texaco, alleging that it had induced the trustee to break an earlier contract with Pennzoil. The deal that settled the family’s fortune became one of the great corporate fights of the decade, and the trust’s own affairs went before the courts in their own right.
Gordon did well out of the sale. Bloomberg’s index says he received $750 million after taxes and still ranks him among the world’s richest few hundred people. He owns ReFlow and is the biggest shareholder in the PlumpJack Group. A grandson’s ransom was bargained down to a fraction. A trust’s shares went to the highest serious bidder, and then to court. The same family was capable of both, and the second is better business than the first was cinema.
Hollywood will keep returning to 1973, because a kidnapping has a villain and a deadline, while a trustee’s signature has only a counterparty. The record of 1984 tells you more about how the Gettys kept their money. The record of 1973 tells you how they were seen, and the family has never quite outlived it.
Gordon Getty, who signed for the trust, is 92. The boy whose ear went to Il Messaggero would have turned seventy this month.
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