From behind-the-scenes sexual scandal to the high price of protecting a dynasty from violent threats, “All the Money in the World” hits the topics advisors need to cover in 2018.
The 1973 Getty kidnapping is one of the great case studies in how an extremely wealthy family — a literal dynasty — can collapse according to its response to sudden external pressure.
Most advisors know the broad strokes, as a cautionary tale. But Ridley Scott’s new film “All the Money in the World” dissects the details like a forensic surgeon, with results that should be as compelling for your clients as they are for the general art-cinema audience.
And in this case, some of the best arguments played out behind the scenes. The conclusions may be cold, but that’s what serves the subject matter best in all its real-life intricacy.
This movie is too deeply rooted in historical reality to play out as a straightforward thriller. Instead, Scott’s given us something a little less entertaining and a little more valuable: a meditation on what powerful people do when external events expose their deepest priorities.
Dynastic calculations
The Getty saga revolves around the cost of failing to manage the risk associated with being the wealthiest family in history.
When the patriarch refused to pay kidnappers more than a $2 million ransom to return one of 14 grandchildren, all he really did was commoditize what are ordinarily invaluable bonds of family.
His heirs got hard evidence that he wouldn’t pay more for them than they were worth as a tax break. That’s a tough lesson.
If a family only adds up to its net worth on paper, then it might be cleaner to dispense with all the pleasantries and run it as a corporate enterprise. Relatives become cogs in an org chart, to be embraced or abandoned as the math dictates.
That seems close to Getty’s personal ethos. There’s little indication in this film that there’s any principle beyond wealth and the accident of birth to bind this family together — looking out for the heirs at all becomes more of a concession to mortality than any joint sense of the world and their place in it.
Most dynasty creators think in more sentimental terms. But for Getty, the life and death of grandchildren played out on a balance sheet, as though they were employees brought in to fill a hole in his personal succession plan.
Each had only so much intrinsic value and not one penny more. He could afford to pay the most lavish ransom in history. He chose not to.
From talking to people over the years who knew kidnap victim John Paul III, it’s clear that the experience warped him for the rest of his life. He never really recovered.
The dynasty was wrecked.
Cost of doing business
And while hindsight is cruel, the sad thing is that a family living on the Getty scale could have averted the entire episode.
The kidnappers were amateurs, exploiting a rich kid’s unguarded vulnerability. A decent security program would have prevented the crime in the first place.
Even on the coldest scale, figure Getty thought each of the grandkids was worth about $2 million for a collective liability of $28 million. That’s real money — the equivalent of $140 million today — but budgeted across a lifetime it would have bought a lot of bodyguards with a lot left over.
People like the ex-CIA fixer Mark Wahlberg plays in this film should have been on the payroll looking out for the heirs from Day One. By the time a crisis emerged, all they could do is damage control.
The richest family I’ve dealt with personally put up with a surprising amount of internal constraint in order to satisfy their own security protocols. They weren’t about to let some stalker grab one of the kids, and they paid top dollar to reduce the odds of it happening.
A lot of ultra-wealthy families have been making similar decisions since before the 2008 crash unleashed Occupy Wall Street and the threat of a populist backlash against the elite.
Class warfare is routinely one of the biggest nightmares their advisors have to soothe, followed by a more generalized slide into destabilized and higher-risk social conditions.
Getty was legendarily stingy and aloof, so he skimped on the risk management, only to pay the full bill with interest when John Paul III’s number came up in chaotic Rome in the 1970s.
Today’s billionaires are making the hard choices of where to invest in order to buy a little insurance for the dynasty. But at a minimum, even the most strung out and recalcitrant kids need the best supervision money can buy. They can do what they like, behind locked doors.
Meanwhile, people like Ridley Scott are drawn to these calculations as the map of power and its priorities. Getty had a lot more than $28 million to spend protecting his dynasty. As the film makes time to point out, he spent a lot more than that on his art collection and still left plenty behind when he died.
The takeaway here isn’t that rich people are cold — an obvious moral for a mass audience — but something much more interesting. No matter how rich you are, Scott implies, the world is always bigger. And true wealth means being able to sleep at night.
Invest in outcomes
Of course the behind-the-scenes machinations behind this movie speak to this too. Christopher Plummer is magnificent as Getty, radiating a lifetime of imperial privilege in a way Kevin Spacey — who originally played the part in Scott’s first cut — could never have achieved.
Recasting the role amounts to a miraculous response to a world that’s always going to be bigger than you can anticipate.
Scott says he knew Spacey was going to implode when Harvey Weinstein’s sexual harassment hit the headlines in mid-November. He decided to reshoot the movie within hours.
That was barely six weeks ago. Publicity for the original Spacey version was already underway. Trailers were playing.
Bringing in Plummer and getting enough footage to eliminate Spacey entirely added about $10 million — the equivalent of John Paul III’s ransom in 2017 dollars — to the $40 million the project had already cost.
It’s a daring move, but I don’t really see an alternative. Spacey is poison. Leaving him in the film would’ve killed it. Scuttling it entirely would’ve admitted failure.
Instead, Scott rolled the dice to rescue the film and its backers. While he may not earn back the expanded budget either way, at least now he’s got a shot.
Curiosity on his side doesn’t hurt. Back in May, when Spacey was the star and the cameras were rolling the first time around, there wasn’t a lot of buzz here at all, good or bad.
Six months later, the world changed. That’s exactly what happened to the Getty dynasty when their bubble of luxury broke back in 1973. It’s what other wealthy families plan as well as they can to mitigate, but sooner or later the unexpected always rolls around.
We may never see the Spacey version. Even though Getty doesn’t appear onscreen in every minute, I suspect swapping in Plummer provided a stronger performance and a better film.
And it gets me thinking about the Getty legacy in a scenario where John Paul III never got snatched. Would the family have weathered the decades in a stronger and more vibrant position?
At least they would’ve had the chance if someone had decided to roll the dice. Scott’s movies are like his children. His career is his legacy.
Win or lose, it’s just $10 million he had to spend. If he hadn’t spent it, it’d already be dead. Now it’s got a chance.
Otherwise, if the dollars were the only thing that mattered, he would've made another Alien sequel instead.
