“The real Getty was almost a caricature of wealth and greed, in the sense that you think of Mr. Burns from The Simpsons,” said Scarpa. “So the real challenge dramatically was how do you render this guy as a more complex individual than that? How do you make the audience sympathize with this guy? Or at least have a sense of pathos about him?”

In Scarpa’s research, he gathered that “Getty was a deeply fearful man. For instance, during this kidnapping, the crisis itself, he was very careful to never let it touch him personally. He never involved himself directly in any of these negotiations, because he’s terrified.” (Pearson alleges that he did not pick up the phone during the kidnapping ordeal because he did not want any involvement with the Mafia.)

But Getty had been so single-focused for so long that he was numb to most things that were not finance-related. Explained Scarpa, “In order to be No. 1 at anything, whether it’s being the richest man in the world or being the greatest 100-yard dash track star, what you’re doing has to consume you. I think to a certain extent it did consume. That drive for wealth sort of took over.”

Paul’s mother, Gail, could not get through to Getty. Paul’s father, John, haunted by his own demons and unable to return to Italy for complicated reasons, would not call Getty on the grounds that he was not speaking to his father. Five weeks into the kidnapping, Getty’s only gesture of goodwill was sending former C.I.A. agent J. Fletcher Chase (played in the film by Mark Wahlberg) to Rome to help Gail. Chase, who believed, along with Italian police, that the kidnapping was a hoax, only affirmed his employer’s suspicions. Gail, without the money to pay her son’s ransom, and not in a position of power for anyone to take her seriously, was left helpless.

“Interestingly, the F.B.I. agent I spoke to while researching, who worked on the case, was actually sympathetic to Getty,” said Scarpa. “At the time this was very much a man’s world, so the men, be it Getty or Chase, felt that this was no place for a woman. Today we would assume, if a woman’s child got kidnapped, she would be in charge in a sense. Yet at the time the attitude was, ‘Well, you can’t possibly involve a woman in all this business, right?’ ”

All Gail could do was wait for phone calls from one of the kidnappers, “Cinquanta,” who found himself, ironically, sometimes pleading on Paul’s behalf.

“Who is this so-called grandfather?” Cinquanta told Gail, according to Pearsons’s book. “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.”

Though the idea of a kidnapper actually protecting his hostage—as Cinquanta does in the film—sounds like a fictional flourish, it was not.

“He can’t even conceive the world of these wealthy Americans . . . It’s like, how can you have all this money, and yet the money is more important to you than your kid, and he finds himself sympathizing with the kid,” said Scarpa. “Cinquanta eventually found himself negotiating kind of on Gail’s behalf with the kidnappers. That relationship with Cinquanta is true, and then he went to jail.”

Some of the original kidnappers grew so impatient with the sluggish crime that they sold their stakes in Paul—and more aggressive investors came in, who were willing to go to desperate measures to collect their money. Though the film offers Paul chloroform and a skilled doctor during the infamous ear-cutting, Pearson wrote that the operation was actually performed by a captor, with only brandy and a bite-cloth offered to the teenager as he was being held down. Even after Cinquanta alerted Gail of the amputation, action was not taken until weeks later when the envelope containing the ear finally made its way to an Italian newspaper office.