Dynasty: The Murdochs

0:00Rebecca Lavoie:I'm Rebecca Lavoie and this is You Can't Make This Up.

0:14Rebecca Lavoie:You Can't Make This Up is the podcast where we uncover the true stories behind your favorite Netflix documentaries and films. On today's episode, we take a closer look at the Netflix documentary series Dynasty, The Murdochs. It was always about more than money. It was about power and daddy's love. Rupert! Rupert got everything he wanted, and it ripped his family apart. Today we're talking to executive producers and co-directors Liz Garbus and Sarah Enright. Rupert Murdoch built an international media empire with splashy tabloids, trailblazing television, and the most influential news network in politics.

0:52Rebecca Lavoie:But for years, the question has been which of his children would take the reins at News Corp when Murdoch steps down. Elizabeth, Lachlan, and James Murdoch have spent their lives learning the business, preparing for the role. But when the father and his children go to court over a family trust, billions of dollars and control of the company are at stake. The Netflix documentary series, Dynasty, the Murdochs, goes deep inside the succession battle among Rupert Murdoch and his adult children. It shows how Murdoch used a mix of controversy and conservatism to build an empire. But his unwillingness to settle the question of a successor imperiled everything.

1:26Rupert pitted them against each other, played them off each other like they were cogs in this dynastic power game he was playing. But he allowed his quest for some kind of immortality to destroy his actual relationship with his actual kids.

1:56Rebecca Lavoie:And I'm joined by Liz Garbus and Sarah Enright. Welcome to You Can't Make This Up. Hi, it's Rebecca. Thanks for having us. So most of us who watched Succession knew the characters were inspired by the Murdochs. And I didn't realize, honestly, just how closely they lined up, both the characters and the plot lines, and even some really minute details from their real lives appeared on the show. Liz, I'm wondering if Succession gave you a new way to view this family and what was going on with them, or vice versa. that? The project came about after I made Harry and Meghan for Netflix. That series looked at two people who, yes, had their own lives and stories, but whose stories were emblematic of something so much larger and something that affected an institution, in this case, the firm, the royal family, that affected so many others.

2:48And so with the Murdochs, you sort of have the and opportunity. You have characters who are dramatic and interesting and living their personal lives, but their personal lives actually have stakes that affect all of us. Their inner family squabbles play out in the lives of all of us in that they control so much of our media diet. So it's a way of looking at personal story, but also casting this much wider lens into our society and culture.

3:20Rebecca Lavoie:So, Sarah, things come full circle, kind of a snake eating its tail moment, as we hear in the documentary, when Elizabeth Murdoch sees the episode of Succession when Logan Roy dies. And the show that was inspired by them ends up helping them confront the thing that they've been avoiding will happen in their lives. So can you tell us what happened next, like right after that? I mean, I think it was a long gestating problem, you know, that wasn't new for them to be dealing with. I think what that yielded was just more frank conversations happening and the clock that had been ticking just ticking that much louder.

3:58So I think it was more a future prediction of what could go wrong if they didn't figure things out. And, you know, piggybacking on that, I think, you know, there's also something really relatable about that. of, you know, I have parents who are growing older. It's not, you don't want to talk about the afterwards. You know, you don't want to, these things are really hard, like are deeply personal and painful. But in a case like this, where your family is your business, you cannot avoid those conversations. And again, those conversations have stakes for the rest of the world. So yes, there was that funny interweaving of succession having an impact on the real life Murdochs.

4:39Rebecca Lavoie:Well, also, Rupert Murdoch, in many ways, was the brand. And I'm wondering if we can just take a step back for a minute and remind everybody how Rupert Murdoch went from being an Australian newspaper man to being the most influential media executive in the world. I think I think what, you know, we learned on this journey is, you know, he started with a guy. He started as a guy in Australia who very much relished in taking on the establishment. And he did that very successfully in Australia for a number of years. And then, you know, as we see, outgrew it and then went to London and did the same and then came to America and kept going.

5:16So it was really from a approach standpoint, it's always been take on the establishment. And it just grew over the course of decades in a way that we're dealing with now. One of the things that, you know, you see in the series was very early on, he developed a very particular brand, which was kind of going for news that may not be news for the entire country, but would be salacious, right? that would grab the attention, a murder of a young girl. And that brand was, you know, that seed, as Sarah said, was started really early on. And you see that throughout, you know, throughout the tabloids and in his media empire later on.

6:00You also see in the origin story his own kind of succession drama with his father, with his own father. and wanting to, after his father's death, taking on an empire in Australia that his father had built and then redefining it in his own vision.

6:18Rebecca Lavoie:I'm wondering if you can talk to me about the choices that were made making this documentary because I've watched a lot of documentaries about powerful people or well-known people and they very often feature folks who were brought in to try to provide some personal color or give like a softer perspective. And here you have primarily the top journalists who've covered Rupert Murdoch for decades. Like that's structured around journalism and features journalists. Can you talk about that choice going in that direction of having journalists talk about this journalist? You know, the show features the top journalists who have been on this story for decades.

6:54It also features people who have worked with the Murdochs in the various stages in Australia, in the U.K., in America, at their various networks. publications. So we tell the story from many sides. I mean, what the show does is looks at the TikTok of a unfolding court case that until the New York Times received in a dark alley, a briefcase of documents was unknown to the public. Every page was unbelievable. You're being lobbied by James and you're going to bend to his will. To this, Liz responds, do you think I'm a fucking moron? The family was airing decades of dirty laundry in a Nevada court.

7:48That's when it first dawned on us that, oh my God, the Murdoch family is in a massive lawsuit against each other. So collaborating with these journalists and getting access to their documents was key to telling the story. Yeah, I mean, I think our vantage point does come from a lot of journalists. I think by nature of Rupert and who he is, is part of it. But by getting those documents, we have that inside personal interaction and dynamics within the family in an intimate way that hasn't been seen before. So that was something that was really exciting for us.

8:21Rebecca Lavoie:Well, speaking of that, Murdoch's children, Prudence, Elizabeth, Lachlan and James, is it fair to say that they each fulfill like a certain archetype that fed into Rupert's vision for their place in the company? I don't know if it's fair. I think they're their own people and those archetypes get maybe put on them. But I think and maybe some of that molding is because of Rupert and maybe some of it is because of who they are. But I would say that these are complicated people with more dynamics than the archetypes. Yeah, I totally agree with Sarah. And I think also like as, you know, people who watch Succession, right, you think you know these people because you've seen these characters who are their avatars on television.

9:07or because you have a certain position on media, like you like Fox News or you don't like Fox News, you think, oh, James is this guy or Lachlan is that guy. And the truth is they're not that. They're much more complicated. The cookies didn't crumble the way a lot of people thought or hoped they would. They're complex characters. They're human beings who don't fit the stereotypes.

9:31Rebecca Lavoie:You know, one of the things I think people might take away from this, watching the clips you have, the archival clips of interviews with the kids, is that growing up with Rupert Murdoch as your dad, a lot of it could be, I think, perceived as them trying to get the attention of an emotionally distant father. Is that fair or is that just something that we have put on them again? I mean, I think they say, many of them say, again, they're each their own person, but they say that to be involved with their father and to be close with their father, you had to be obsessed with the media business. Like, you know, that's what he slept and breathed.

10:07That was the air he breathed. So I think there was a feeling that if you wanted to be in his company, you had to sort of follow in those footsteps. Perhaps he was less distant when you were in those rooms with him and in those conversations with him. All of the kids wanted Rupert's attention and there was a finite amount of it to go around. so invariably the kids ended up competing for it. We knew that you had to be part of that world in some ways if you were going to be engaged with him. You know, you see with Lachlan and James and Elizabeth that they did follow in his footsteps. Prudence, of course, takes another route.

10:48But I think they felt that to be close to him, you did have to be in that world.

10:53Rebecca Lavoie:One of your contributors said that when Murdoch arrived in London in 1969, he made the papers, quote, fun. What does that mean? What did that mean at the time? Well, in London at the time, you wouldn't talk about certain aristocratic people. You wouldn't, you know, in the government official that was caught in the sex scandal, that was done. He'd paid his penance. You wouldn't revisit that. You wouldn't dig into the woman's side of the story. And that was something that he did. And I think for people, it was fun and it was fresh. And in that particular moment, that was what he brought to that scene.

11:28Rebecca Lavoie:We hear that when Murdoch bought the New York Post, he wanted to shape it into something like the British tabloids. But the Post took this new direction, as we see, after the New York City blackout. Can you talk about the darker lesson that people learned about what New Yorkers wanted to read about at that point? The UK tabloids, you know, They are known for their dogged pursuit of salacious details, and people love it. They eat it up. And clearly in the show, we explore some of the times where that has crossed the lines into actually harmful behavior that the Murdochs were held accountable for.

12:08When Rupert came to New York City and started the New York Post, he wanted to shape that paper very much after that UK tabloid model. The blackout that hit New York City was a sort of cultural event that shaped everybody's lives. And reporters at The Post, under Rupert's guidance, he was very, very present in the newsroom, decided to cover it as a story of crime and a story of the city is getting out of control. And often that is black on white crime. So Rupert says, that's what my newspaper is going to be. Get your post here. Do your post here. I'll get more. He's building a new constituency, white and working class readers.

12:52But with a populist right-leaning slant. There was an exploitation of fear and racial division. You know, that kind of fear-based journalism that can often be very divisive is something that his papers and other papers have returned to with frequency since. It sells. Hmm. Sarah, one of the things that occurred to me, you know, watching that section of the documentary was that I think people think of Murdoch as this person with like strong opinions and ideals.

13:25Rebecca Lavoie:But it really seems like he's very good identifying potential markets and then creating a product that fits that market. Is that what he was doing here by sort of identifying this division and then making it worse in a way, like increasing the marketplace for his own product? I mean, yeah, I think he has a unique knack for who has who isn't being represented and how do I target them? And I think, you know, it had been a against the establishment mantra for a really long time until, you know, recently when it becomes more the establishment than not. And I think back then that was, you know, the mainstream media was reporting one thing and he said, well, what's the other lane that isn't being serviced and just ran with it.

14:09Rebecca Lavoie:Can you talk about Anne Murdoch's novel, Family Business? I mean, it really seemed to have foreseen how destructive the succession plan would be if it wasn't handled properly. Just tell me about that book. How did it inspire what she did at the end of her marriage and how did it resonate? I mean, her book, yeah, it's prescient in a lot of ways. She's kind of a Cassandra-like figure in this story. It focuses on a female protagonist, and it is this decision of what's going to happen with the kids and what's going to happen with the inheritance and what's going to happen with this media company. I think it was, you know, I'm projecting, but I think it was her way of working through it and kind of figuring out what she was worried about and how she saw that going.

14:54I don't know if the book was the reason or her ultimate concerns was the reason for her to do what she did at the end of the marriage. But, yeah, the two the two feel very similar. You know, the book presents the dilemma of what happens and a family being destroyed while squabbling over a business inheritance. So it is quite a thing. And she clearly, as Sarah said, had had this concern. But then, of course, she ends up playing like quite as she ends up being quite a twisty figure in the story. And it, again, goes to the point that none of these guys are exactly who you think they are. And who you might have thought she was in episode two is very different than where she lands in episode four.

15:38Rebecca Lavoie:Murdoch took a very big chance and established a fourth television network in the U.S. And we all grew up with the big three, right? And suddenly there's this fourth one. Fox's programming was transgressive. I think of The Simpsons and Married with Children. But Fox News, you know, was the thing that I think we all now associate with Fox. It is the thing. So can you talk about how the creation of Fox News solidified Murdoch's position as the most influential figure in American politics, arguably? Well, I think what he did, what happened with Fox News is he took some of that tabloid spirit and infused it into a news network.

16:15He wasn't the only one doing this. I mean, I'm not, you know, many news networks also, you know, do personality driven pieces or, you know, crime driven pieces. They realized that what the American public wanted almost more than anything else was an attractive young woman with the opinions of an old man. And I think that kind of defines the brand. And again, he found a market of folks who didn't feel they were being represented by most of the mainstream media. And he blew it out. He, you know, created one of the most powerful news networks and he really was able to drive opinion. His partnership and relationship with Ronald Reagan in the 80s, I think, was formative for much of his views moving forward.

17:03And as we explore in the film or in the series, he was not a fan of Donald Trump's at the get. And, you know, that kind of push pull with Trump, I think, you know, one of my favorite shots in our pieces of archive that's in the show is, you know, Rupert sitting on the back of a golf cart, kind of not buckled in, bumping around with Donald Trump at the wheel. And that certainly is a metaphor for what ended up happening. But certainly Fox is a major powerful force in American culture. Yeah, he found that audience and that market and he grew it. And it's an incredibly powerful force in our in our contemporary politics.

17:46Rebecca Lavoie:Sarah, as we talked about earlier, the Murdoch kids are individual people with like rich and independent lives. So can you just remind me about what they sort of did, what Liz, Lachlan, James actually did in their careers to try and position themselves as potentially the successor to the Empire? Well, they all had a series of internships when they were young. You know, infamously, James, there's a picture of him where he falls asleep when he's at one of the news organizations. And then he decides he's going to go off and do his own thing. He starts a record label. Lachlan is in Australia and he's, you know, climbing the ranks there.

18:25And Liz is at, you know, a different news organization as a low ranking intern and then works their way up. I mean, I think they all had different routes. And I think Rupert gave certain things to certain individuals, whether it was from their own motivation or not. I think, you know, Liz early on is doing her own thing with buying new stations and selling them back at a profit and kind of showing some of that business acumen that her dad has and really makes it in for herself. She is, you know, she starts two production companies in the span of her career. One gets bought by her dad, one she's still working at now.

19:04Lachlan just spends a lot of time in Australia, comes to New York. decides he's going to leave, goes back to Australia, takes a lot of big swings. Some of them great, some of them not so great. And we, you know, we couldn't get in all of them. But I know Australia, you know, there's sports things. There's all kinds of stuff that he tries to do. And then he gets brought back. And James, as we know, once he gets brought in, kind of stays the course, stays with the company, moves around over two decades until or decade until he parts ways.

19:33Rebecca Lavoie:What about the mingling of the professional and personal? Because each of the kids at times seemed to be on an independent fast track and then Rupert would make a move, push one aside, bring another one in. Did the people that you spoke to for this documentary categorize those as business decisions or business slash personal decisions or personal decisions? Like what was that formula like? I think it's always business and it's always personal. And I think when you're in a family like this, the two are not separable. I think that's what it comes down to. And that's why it's so interesting. To illustrate the different paths the kids took, used a very clever visual.

20:10Rebecca Lavoie:I mean, any Gen Xer like me will remember the Game of Life board game, piling all those pegs into those little cars. Whose idea was that to use that visual? I believe that was Sarah Enrights. I think it was me and Pax were both trying to find a way to, how do we personify this situation? Yeah, in an accessible way. But it is very much like a gilded game of life we tried to put together. Sometimes it felt like chutes and ladders, though. Yeah, totally. Or like some mousetrap in there at some point. You're just going to get hit with something. Or sorry, the game where you get all the way around and then you lose everything.

20:47Rebecca Lavoie:Go back to home. Yeah. So we hear about James and Lachlan being placed in these positions where they are like co-CEOs of a thing or co-working together on stuff. What was their professional relationship like, according to your sources? I mean, we can't know exactly all of the details of their personal relationship, but some of their relationship did play out very publicly. What did you hear about that when you were making this doc? I mean, there were some instances that we heard about where they were kind of two sides of a coin and they complemented each other. We heard, you know, there were definitely power struggles and their communication was something that was complicated from what we heard.

21:28James would look for opportunities to one-up his older brother. Lachlan was dyslexic and struggled with some speech issues. James would challenge him in these board meetings and pick apart his logic and witheringly argue against his various ideas. Lachlan would sort of become flustered and not know what to say. And when Rupert was in the room, he never stepped in to stop it. I mean, from what we heard, it didn't feel like it was a healthy, dynamic set. I mean, the infrastructure of how they were put together at the end didn't seem like it was sustainable from anyone we talked to's perspective.

22:08Rebecca Lavoie:I want to pivot and talk about the hacking scandal. In a British media landscape that kind of openly plays dirty, how did this scandal become an existential threat? Yeah, I mean, as we talked about before, there was there was what they call the dark arts and reporting in the tabloids where many of us would consider unscrupulous techniques were used to get stories, hacking people's voicemails, paying people to give a tip when somebody might be attending a house or a place they shouldn't be in. And these were the dark arts. And it was kind of one thing for the public when celebrities were the targets, right?

22:55Hugh Grant or Prince Harry or some of these other folks who famously have had run-ins, tough times with the tabloids. But when a little girl became the subject in her family, a little girl named Millie Dowler who went missing, and the tactics that were being used to try to get information about her case to get a scoop went public, the public really couldn't stand it. The Murdoch organization at the News of the World was an organized crime group by any definition. Scores of people were involved, journalists and private detectives trading unlawful information. They were spending millions of pounds a year on gathering it.

23:39It went on all over the world. And that's when the kind of the push for accountability got some steam and heads rolled and newspapers were shut down. And, you know, you really have to you really see Rupert and his son James having to eat crow in a way that they really had never had to do before. And you also see Rupert throwing his son James a little bit into the fire to take some of the heat for that. But yeah, it's when the public realized, oh, this could happen to anybody, that the that the wind started to change a bit.

24:15Rebecca Lavoie:In the opinion of people you talk to, is it plausible that Rupert nor James had any knowledge or no knowledge of how far their reporters were going? I mean, I think we explore that in the series. I think we explore how James is on emails where some of these things were discussed and he says he didn't read all of them. You could do anything as long as you didn't get caught. But it's important that the war is maintained. so the Murdochs can't see how the sausage is made even though they know how it's done. So there's plausible deniability on every level. That's really important in a Murdoch organization.