Dressed To Kill
A major fashion house, a fake Colombian hit-man, a personal magician - it's little wonder Ridley Scott was willing to wait 15 years to enter the House Of Gucci.
For a lot of people, it'll have begun with that sweater. The sight of Adam Driver clad in said item of clothing while also wrapped around Lady Gaga had many a person counting the days until Ridley Scott's House Of Gucci premiered. Look closer at the killing that levelled the Italian fashion behemoth and you could be forgiven for wondering why it's taken so long for anyone to make a film about it. Scott's making-of struggle is quite a story in itself. But before one examines House Of Gucci the film, one must first get a handle on the events proper, what with them being so complex as to contain almost as many threads as Driver's enviable jumper.
On March 27th 1995, Maurizio Gucci was gunned down on the steps outside his Milan office. Once the head of the fashion empire that still bears his family name, Gucci was still a man of considerable means at the time of his untimely death. To ask who had good reason to kill Maurizio Gucci was to prompt the raising of a hundred hands. In the end it took two years to bring his killers to justice.
In the wake of Gucci's murder, police attention first turned to his long list of creditors. Though once among the richest men in the country, Maurizio Gucci had been dogged by debt for decades. It was in trying to get back in the black that he sold his company stock to Investcorp, the Japanese investment firm that also owns Tiffany's. Though while the sale of his shares yielded over $300,000m, Maurizio Gucci was in the red long before the blood began to pool around his body.
Italy being Italy, it'll come as no surprise that the Mafia were at one point considered Maurizio's most likely assassins. The longer he looked at the crime scene evidence, leading Milanese detective Paolo La Forgia became convinced that Gucci's slaying had been a crime of passion. Still it wasn't until early 1997 that the detective received the tip-off that split the case wide open.
As La Forgia explained to the BBC, "This man called me and said he had information about a murder. He told me to meet him in this rather dangerous part of Milan if I was interested to find out more. I asked him to give a reason why I should meet him in such a dingy area. He said, 'I know about the Gucci murder.'"
So it was that in a particularly seedy hotel, La Forgia sat down with a man with one helluva story to tell. For while staying in that very hotel, the informant had heard one of the porters boast that he had been involved in Maurizio's murder. The porter's name was Ivano Savioni and under police questioning he revealed that he had liaised with both the person who paid for the killing and the people who'd carried it out.
Nailing Savioni led Milan's finest to his fellow gang members; getaway driver Orazio Cicala and gunman Benedetto Ceraulo. As for whom had hired the killers, all three men brought up the same name, Patrizia Reggiani, the former wife of Maurizio Gucci.
Reggiani and Gucci had married in 1973 and were divorced in 1991. As careless in love as he was in his business affairs, Maurizio Gucci had frequently been unfaithful to Patrizia. In May 1985, he walked out of the family home never to return. Traded in for a younger model - interior designer Paola Franchi - Patrizia dedicated herself to raising the couple's daughters. As if things weren't already bad enough, she was then diagnosed with a brain tumour. Though it was treated successfully, Patrizia Reggiani must have wondered what her next misfortune would be. What she mightn't have guessed was that it'd be entirely of her own making.
To establish a link between the mechanics responsible for the murder and the person they claimed had financed it, top cop Paolo La Forgia and his fellow officers hit upon a highly unusual plan. An undercover officer was sent to the hotel where Ivano Savioni worked and told to befriend the porter. Then, once he'd been taken into Savioni's trust, the cop was to claim that he was a Colombian hit-man who was intrigued to know how anyone could have got to a man like Maurizio Gucci. Delighted to have a fresh audience for his extraordinary story, Savioni not only named all the major players but complained at great length about how little Patrizia Reggiani had paid him and his partners for killing her ex-husband. With his new tough friend in tow, the porter sought to extort a larger fee from his paymistress.
If this all sounds rather improbable, what happened next elevates the House Of Gucci story to the realms of fantasy. For in taping Savioni's phone conversations, the special agent found that the person the criminals were talking to wasn't Patrizia Reggiani but her personal magician!
Skilled in the art of clairvoyance, Giuseppina Auriemma had long been part of Reggiani's entourage. Once the case came to trial, Reggiani - by then often referred to as 'The Black Widow' - would claim that Auriemma, together with Savioni and his cronies, had blackmailed her; aware that she longed to see Maurizio Gucci dead, they wanted payment for having made her dreams come true. The prosecution, however, wasn't having a bar of it. For one thing Reggiani and Auriemma had remained close throughout the years following the assassination. And then there was the small matter of Patrizia's diaries in which she dropped herself in it with all the guile and cunning of a trashy paperback villainess.
"There is no crime that cannot be bought." So wrote Patrizio Reggiani just 10 days before the Gucci slaying. As for her diary entry for the day of the murder, it comprised just one word - 'Paradise'. Little wonder it took the jury just two hours to find Ms Reggiani guilty of arranging her ex-husband's murder. Along with getaway driver Orazio Cicala, she received a 29 year sentence. Ivo Savioni got 26 years while gunman Benedetto Ceraulo was handed a life term. Meanwhile, self-styled seer Giuseppina Auriemma was sent down for 25 years. One imagines she must have seen that coming.
As for what's occurred since the court case, it only fuels one's curiosity as to why it's taken so very long to turn so improbable a story into a feature film. Whether it's Patrizia Reggiani refusing to be moved to an open prison a decade into her sentence on the grounds that "I've never worked in my life and I'm certainly not going to start now" or the 'Black Widow' - since her release in 2016 - receiving annual alimony payments of $1 million thanks to an arrangement she'd reached with the man whose murder she plotted, it's material even Jackie Collins might've thought far-fetched.
Not that a certain amount of waiting time wasn't always on the card. Between the court case and the appeals, it wouldn't been impossible to do true justice to the House Of Gucci saga until the early-to-mid noughties. Indeed, Sir Ridley Scott first expressed an interest in making a film on the subject in 2006. With Angelina Jolie and Leonardo DiCaprio lined up for the parts of Patrizia and Maurizio, Andrea Berloff's script went unproduced due to protests from the Gucci estate and Scott scoring the financing for one of his dream projects, the crime epic American Gangster (2006).
Fast forward six years and Jordan Scott, Ridley's daughter, was gearing up to make a Gucci movie, now with Penelope Cruz in the role of the 'Black Widow'. When this too came to nothing, Wong Kar-Wai (Chungking Express, In The Mood For Love) entered the picture, touting a script written by Charles Randolph, then red-hot on the back of winning the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for The Big Short. What's more, the Hong Kong filmmaker was said to have interested no less than Margot Robbie in playing the role of Patrizia.
And now here we are with Ridley Scott back at the Gucci helm, shooting a script adapted by Roberto Bentivegna from Sara Gay Forden's The House Of Gucci: A Sensational Story Of Murder, Madness, Glamour, And Greed. Scott's body of work and reputation attracted not only Lady Gaga and Adam Driver but a trio of Oscar winners in Al Pacino, Jared Leto and Jeremy Irons.
In the 15 years between expressing an interest in making a Gucci film to finally getting around to shooting one, Sir Ridley Scott has directed nine feature films, almost all with budgets in excess of $100 million. If House Of Gucci is a slightly smaller Scott production, at least in terms of expense and effects, the material he has at his disposal is truly epic in scale. Indeed, it's rather fitting that our man should find himself filming in Rome since it provided the setting for arguably his most successful movie, Gladiator. Sure, the stories are superficially very different, but the murder and glamour of the Guccis has more than a little of the madness and greed of Ancient Rome about it.
Not that Maximus Decimus Meridius could've carried off that jumper, mind you.