hen David Scarpa heard that a producer wanted to make a movie about the 1973 kidnapping of John Paul Getty III, the teenage grandson and namesake of the oil tycoon, the screenwriter wasn’t sure there would be enough content for a feature-length film.
“I said, ‘Well, you’ve got the whole business with the ear, but you can’t base an entire movie on that,” Scarpa told Vanity Fair, recalling the kidnapping’s grisly, most-remembered detail—how Italian captors sliced off the ear of the teenager while he was held hostage.
It was only after Scarpa learned that J. Paul Getty was the richest man in the world at the time—worth approximately $2 billion—and still refused to pay his grandson’s ransom of $17 million that the screenwriter became interested and wrote the script that became Ridley Scott’s All the Money in the World, which opens on Christmas Day.
“It became a story about money and the power that money has over people in my mind,” said Scarpa. “And not just the power that money has over poor people, or ordinary people, but the power money has over the people you think would be most free from it.”
