All the Money in the World, Review: Ear today, gone tomorrow

Cinquanta to Gail: “Who is this so-called grandfather? How can he leave his own flesh and blood in the plight that your poor son is in? Here is the richest man in America, and you tell me he refuses to find just 10 miliardi for his grandson’s safety. Signora, you take me for a fool.”

Two Ridley Scott releases in the same year? Alien Covenant and All the Money in the World mark the repeat of a phenomenon that occurs once in 16 years. For his second release in 2017, prolific and iconic director Scott picks up Painfully Rich: The Outrageous Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Heirs of J. Paul Getty, a 1995 book by John Pearson, about a real-life billionaire and his heirs. (See excerpt, above). He focusses on the kidnapping of Getty’s grandson, and sends a strong signal to the world about the devilish acquisition that is the boon and bane of mankind: money. Money debases, and absolute money debases absolutely (apologies to John Dalberg-Acton).

Jean Paul Getty was the world’s richest man, of all time, and believed himself to be a re-incarnated Roman Emperor. The British-American oil magnate’s fortune was built on speculation and negotiation, not to mention fraud and deceit. (How else can one become the richest man in history)? Notoriously rich, he was a bigger miser than Duck McScrooge. Not many remember him in 2017 because after his death in 1976, his heirs sold of his interests in oil to what is today the restructured Texaco/Chevron.

Back in 1970s, the kidnapping was a paparazzi spectacle in Italy, definitely a resplendent story that needed re-telling, and Scott does an above average job of telling it. Sticking to its core, the man who would be moneybags, the film begins by giving us a fleeting glimpse of the tycoon’s foray into Saudi Arabian/Kuwaitian oil in 1953 (Ridley Scott was 16 years old), and jumps to a street in Italy, 1973, where his grandson J. Paul Getty III (Charlie Plummer) is out for a stroll and encounters some ladies of the night.

Witty, long-haired and somewhat girlish, bohemian Big Paul/Paolo asks for a discount from the women of ill-repute, who warn him to keep away from these lanes. As if on cue, a van appears and masked men kidnap him. His grandfather, Jean Paul Getty (Christopher Plummer), learns of his favourite grandson's abduction and a ransom demand for $17 million, but is unwilling to part with any of his fortune. Paolo’s father, J. Paul Getty II, separated from his wife, is an alcoholic. The boy’s strong-willed mother, (Abi)Gail Harris, (Michelle Williams) had refused alimony from her husband (her father-in-law, since her husband was broke) in exchange for the custody of her children. Her son's life is now in the balance, with time running out, so she attempts to get the money from her father-in-law.

Getty reasons that paying ransom could open the floodgates future abductions, with any of his 14 other grand-children targeted. After much persuasion, he agrees to pay $1million, because US laws will not allow tax deduction beyond that amount. That is a no go with the captors. At last, Getty sends his enigmatic advisor-negotiator Fletcher Chase (Mark Wahlberg), an ex CIA operative, to look into the matter. Chase and Gail become unlikely allies in this race against time, and he speaks up for her with Getty. After negotiation, a lower ransom—around $3 million--is agreed upon, with the abductors. However, the transfer of money takes longer than the captors like, and they chop off one of the boy’s ears. It is then sent to an Italian newspaper, by post. Gail is shocked to be asked by the publisher that they be allowed to print a photo of the severed ear in exchange for a small fortune. Frantic efforts are then made to get the boy back, while the Italian police also get hot on the trail of the terrorists/kidnappers, led by Cinquanta (Romain Duris) and Mammoliti (Marco Leonardi).

David Scarpa, a writer best known for the script of the 2008 sci-fi remake, The Day the Earth Stood Still, had been in the news with his TriStar script, All the Money in the World, which made the Black List in 2015. He seems to have hit big time with All the Money in the Money World, and another one coming up, called Cleopatra. Scarpa digs into Getty’s psyche and finds an insecure man addicted to money. There is plenty of material on the others in the script, except Gail, because it was just not there, and Scott credits actress Michelle Williams with developing it from just one TV interview. Looking at the characters, we find that Scarpa, Pearson and Scott have painted Getty and Gail as effective counterpoints to each other, but have failed to integrate Chase, Getty II and Getty III as effectively.

Unbelievable levels of greed, unscrupulousness and manipulation are juicily peppered with gangster stuff, like prostitution, kidnapping, torture, extortion, police action and shootouts. Well, it’s all fact, almost literally, so unavoidable and germane. Maybe the elements work better in the biographical novel. Here, they get too scattered and stereo-typical for comfort. “If you can actually count your money, you are not really a rich man,” said Getty, famously. It is one of the most quotable quotes of all time, and you bet it features in the film.

Who would you have liked to see as Getty--Jack Nicholson, Gary Oldman, Kevin Spacey or Christopher Plummer? Nicholson was not interested and Oldman was not favoured. Plummer was considered, until Spacey was cast. The film started shooting on 05 June, and was already complete when...you know what happened. Spacey was accused if inappropriate sexual conduct, and the entertainment world was agog with revelation after revelation. With just over a month to go for the release, the producers of All the Money in the World, Sony, decided on November 8th, to replace the 48 year-old Spacey with 88 year-old Christopher Plummer, and reshot all the scenes featuring Spacey.

The reshoots took eight days, and cost of $10 million. Christopher Plummer had less than two weeks to memorise his lines, but did have the advantage of having met Getty in London at one of his parties, during the 60s. Director Ridley Scott decided not to show Plummer any footage of Spacey in character, or even tell him how Spacey played the scenes. Scott found the performances of the two actors to be quite different and yet equally effective, in their own particular styles. Scott said Spacey played J. Paul Getty as a more explicitly cold and unfeeling character, while Plummer's take on the role showed both a warmer side to the billionaire and the same unflinching refusal to simply pay off his son's kidnappers. Mark Wahlberg had lost 14kg for his next film when he was asked to come back for reshoots. His costumes had to be refitted, for the sake of continuity. Altogether, 22 scenes had to be reshot.

Ridley Scott (Blade Runner, Hannibal, Exodus: Gods and Kings) is 80 and kicking. He started making films quite late, aged 40, but more than made-up for it by his steady output. Four Oscar nominations bear testimony to his talent, which, a tad disappointingly, is not at his best in his most recent flight. All the Money in the World is both helped and handicapped by performances, some consummate, some specious. However, it is the canvas that really gets the better of the director. Where he could have gone fleshing out characters, he chooses to get into the action, in a film that needed the barest of action to tell its tale. Getty’s is the central part, yet, by contrast, you gradually develop antipathy for him, and sympathy for the militant brigade that wants a slice of his pie.

Plummer is the pick of the lot, and Getty is a plum role. He makes us want to see him play a JPG is a full biographical film. Mark Wahlberg (actor, producer, businessman, former model, rapper, and songwriter; Planet of the Apes, The Departed, Transformers) is mostly at sea, unwilling to reveal what his job really is and apparently unaware of it himself. He seems to be waiting for some ‘punches and bullets’ action, which never arrives. Michelle Williams is cast in a multi-layered role, and responds with a flexible face that gets into expressions and then resets into the poker-based mould as smoothly as an ice-cream smoothie.

Romain Duris (The Beat that my Heart Skipped, Heartbreaker, The New Girlfriend) gets a fair amount of footage, as does Marco Leonardi (Italian actor; Cinema Paradiso, From Dusk Till Dawn 3: The Hangman's Daughter, The Knights of the Quest, Once Upon a Time in Mexico). Both parts needed more writing depth. Charlie Plummer (King Jack, The Dinner, Lean on Pete) is no relation of Christopher and possesses talent that must not be compared to the veteran. He’s a young boy; maybe he’ll learn. Andrew Buchan who has done a lot of TV, gets the smallish John Paul Getty Jr. role, with little to do except look zonked out. Kit Cranston as Young Mark Getty, Maya Kelly as Young Aileen Getty, Charlie Shotwell, Timothy Hutton, Giuseppe Bonifati and Nicola Di Chio constitute the supporting cast.

The world is not a fair place, and maybe never as unfair as depicted in the film. It took $50 million to make the film, and it has yet to recover the major part of this investment. Imagine the irony if a film about the world’s richest person ever fails to make profits. A host of philosophers and sages, not to mention religious doctrine books, have dubbed money as the root of all evil. Kings and philanthropists who gave it all to charity have been lauded as kind souls. Given this scenario, where does Jean Paul Getty fit in? He and his ill-gotten billions were here yesterday and are gone today. The one-eared J. Paul III, a heavy drug abuser, suffered a stroke in New York, which left him paralysed and nearly blind for the rest of his life. J. Paul III died in 2011, after spending three decades on a wheelchair.

Writer Scarpa had felt that the business about the slicing off of Paul’s ear was a great centre-piece but there was not much more in the Getty story that could be turned into an effective movie. Later, when he learnt that the fortune Getty had amassed was $1-2 billion in tax-free family trust funds, and the ransom demand was just $17 million, he sensed the germ of a drama. It might sound far-fetched, but Getty suspected, and the Italian police and Chase believed, the kidnapping was concocted by the boy and his parents, to pinch money from the billionaire grand-dad.

Rating: ***

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXHrCBkIxQQ

FORBES website

Jul 11, 2014

The Tragedy of the Gettys: Billions, Affairs, Severed Ears, Drug Overdoses, and Oil

The story of the famed Getty family is one of the most obvious examples that money, cold hard cash, doesn’t buy happiness. In our most recent list of America’s richest families, we valued the Getty clan at approximately $5 billion, making them the 54th wealthiest in the country. Essentially all of that comes from the sale of Getty Oil, an energy empire built by the miserly J. Paul Getty throughout the course of the twentieth century that was ultimately absorbed by Texaco in 1984 and today is probably part of Chevron.

The Gettys got their start in the oil business in 1903, when Jean Paul’s father George Franklin, formerly a lawyer, moved to Oklahoma. Becoming a wealthy businessman himself, he financed his son through his Minnehoma Oil Company, which J. Paul joined at 21. Within two years, J. Paul made his own fortune buying and selling oil leases, and decided to retire in Los Angeles to enjoy the fruits of his labours. Getty lived the Playboy life for a couple of years, before returning to the family business, to continue growing the oil company.

Getty’s shrewdness as a businessman, picking up companies and adding reserves through the Great Depression, merging and building an integrated giant by 1967, was complemented by a blockbuster deal with Saudi Arabia’s King Saud. Paying $9.5 million in 1949, Getty secured a 60-year concession of a field between Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, and sunk $30 million in exploration and production, hitting oil in 1953, which took production north of 16 million barrels a day. Getty, the billionaire, had arrived.

As Getty rose to become the world’s richest man on the back of precise business decisions, his personal life was always a mess. By the time of his death, in 1976, he had had five wives and countless lovers.  He left behind three living sons (two others had already died) whom he didn’t seem to particularly love, and a reputation of extreme avariciousness that would make Scrooge McDuck look like the world’s greatest philanthropist. He also left the vast majority of his estate to the Getty Museum, which houses his vast collection of Western art and the Villa, said to be a reconstruction of a famous Italian villa buried by the ash of Mt. Vesuvius.

Fortunately for sons Gordon and Jean Paul Jr., and the daughters of the deceased, George Franklin Jr., Getty’s mother Sara established a trust in 1934, with substantial interests in Getty Oil. By 1985, when the heirs managed to break open the trust, the value of its 40% interest in Getty Oil had ballooned to $4 billion. In a controversial move that resulted in litigation from other family members, Gordon Getty, sole trustee and the only family member to feature in the Forbes 400 over the past several years, orchestrated the sale of Getty Oil to Texaco, for $10.1 billion in 1984. The following year, and after paying over $1 billion in capital gains tax on the Texaco deal, the trust was split into four equal parts.  Gordon and his family, J. Paul Jr. (who had changed his name from Eugene Paul) and his remaining kids, and the three daughters of George F. each got $750 million, while the remaining $750 million were split in part among the descendents of Jean Ronald (who personally got only $3,000 a year after a bad divorce between Getty and his mother Adolphine) and other beneficiaries.

For years, the adventures of the Gettys were followed by the media, obsessed with their eccentricities. From J. Paul’s Sutton Place mansion, where he entertained the rich and the famous but had payphones in order to reduce the phone bill, to J. Paul III’s outings with Mick and Bianca Jagger, or Andy Warhol in New York. They owned the Pierre Hotel in the Big Apple, the luxurious 2,500-acre Wormsley Park outside of London, and properties scattered throughout Italy, Morocco, San Francisco, and elsewhere.

While they’ve tried to remain out of the limelight, even straight-shooter Gordon has had his mishaps. In 1999, the opera lover was forced to admit that he had been living a double life.  The San Franciscan came clean about having a second family in Los Angeles, with Cynthia Beck, after their three daughters filed to change their names to Getty.  Gordon’s wife Ann, and their four adult sons, stood by his side.

Scandal has dominated the public face of the Getty family for years, but there has been some recent success. In 1995, Mark Getty, another son of J. Paul Jr., teamed up with South African Jonathan Klein in order to consolidate the fragmented stock photography business. Through an aggressive acquisition strategy, they beat Microsoft’s Corbis to become one of the largest digital photography archives in the world.  After trading on the NASDAQ and the NYSE, Getty Images was eventually acquired by private equity firm Hellman & Friedman, which in 2008 paid $2.4 billion for the company. A few years later, with Klein and Getty still on board, Carlyle bought the company for $3.3 billion.  Getty is said to have united different branches of the company for the initial backing of his company.

Ultimately, the Getty family has come to symbolize extreme wealth and repeated tragedy.  Getty himself seems to have done everything possible to earn his reputation as a mean, arrogant, cheapskate. As Forbes contributing editor and Getty biographer Robert Lenzner put it, “Getty's cardinal rule was to give nothing to the government because they wasted it. He very nearly succeeded in this goal. Secondly, he wanted to prevent his children and grand-children from obtaining vast wealth. On this score he failed.” If one ever wants to teach someone that money isn't everything, the Getty family history would be a good place to start.

(Reproduced above, with due credit, as non-commercial, academic, background reading. No copyright infringement is intended).

Exit Kevin Spacey: A chronology, October-November 2107

• Actor Anthony Rapp, now 46, claims Spacey made a sexual advance towards him when Rapp was 14. Spacey offers an apology on Twitter, “...for what would have been deeply inappropriate drunken behaviour". In the same post, Spacey said he has had relationships with both men and women, and that he "choose(s) now to live as a gay man".
• Netflix announces it has suspended production on the sixth series of House of Cards "to give us time to review the current situation and to address any concerns of our cast and crew".
• In an interview, US film-maker Tony Montana claims he was "forcefully" groped by Spacey in a Los Angeles bar, in 2003.
• A man claims he woke up to find Spacey lying on him while staying at his New York home in the mid-1980s. The man was 17 at the time.
• Former bartender Daniel Beal tells Spacey exposed himself to him in 2010, when he was working at a hotel in West Sussex. Spacey then invited the 19-year-old up to his room. Beal claims the actor later gave him a watch worth £5,000.
• CAA (Creative Artists Agency) confirm Spacey is no longer a client
• Publicist Staci Wolfe also confirms he is no longer represented by her company, Polaris PR.
• There are reports that Spacey is being investigated by UK police over an alleged sexual assault on a man, in 2008. The Sun claims an unnamed actor, who was 23 at the time, woke up to find Spacey performing a sex act on him at the star's London home.
• Netflix announces it will "not be involved with any further production of House of Cards that includes Kevin Spacey". It also says it will no longer release Gore, a film about the writer Gore Vidal, in which Spacey stars in the titular role.
• Harry Dreyfuss, son of actor Richard Dreyfuss, claims Spacey groped him in 2008, in his father's presence, but his father did not see the act. Spacey’s lawyer denies the accusation.
• Barman Kris Nixon claims Spacey groped him at a party held in the actor's London apartment, in 2008. Nixon accuses Spacey of pestering him again one week later, at his place of work.
• New allegations emerge, including one from an American film-maker who says he was groped and sexually harassed by Spacey as a 22-year-old crew member.
• An investigation by the Old Vic Theatre concludes they have received 20 personal testimonies of alleged inappropriate behaviour by Spacey, during his 11-year tenure as artistic director.
• Out of the 20 individual allegations, 16 have been made by former staff, all of whom are men.
• An accountancy firm in Manchester says a large mural of Kevin Spacey will be removed from the side of its office building.
• Scotland Yard confirms it is investigating a new allegation of sexual assault made against Kevin Spacey. The claim alleges an assault took place on a man in Lambeth, in 2005.
• The King of Norway's former son-in-law accused Spacey of sexual harassment after a Nobel Peace Prize concert. Ari Behn told radio station P4 that it happened after the actor had hosted the event in 2007.

Kevin Spacey

• Born in New Jersey in 1959 (now 58 years old), Spacey studied at New York's prestigious Juilliard School and made his professional stage debut in 1981. He went on to appear with stage and film veteran Jack Lemmon on Broadway, in Long Day's Journey into Night, and won a Tony Award in 1991, for his work in Neil Simon's play, Lost in Yonkers. The following year he appeared with Lemmon in the film version of Glengarry Glen Ross. More high-profile roles followed, one of which--in 1995's The Usual Suspects--won him an Academy Award.
• His performance in American Beauty brought him another Oscar, in 2000. In 2004 Spacey became artistic director of the Old Vic in London. During his 11-year tenure, he directed and acted in numerous productions there. In 2015 he received an honorary knighthood and a special Olivier award for his contributions to British theatre. Spacey earned further acclaim for playing Francis Underwood in House of Cards, Netflix's adaptation of Michael Dobbs's political novel. Earlier this year, he hosted the Tony awards, in New York, during which he made jokes about the 'rumours' regarding his sexuality.