Don’t Miss George Clooney in The Descendants, Made to Order for Trust Buffs

Don’t Miss George Clooney in The Descendants, Made to Order for Trust Buffs


Posted by Scott Martin, Contributor - on November 27th, 2011

A family trust and its trustee-advisor — played by George Clooney, no less – found their way to the silver screen this week in Alexander Payne’s new film, “The Descendants.” This is our favorite film of the year, a depiction of what the trust industry is all about.

Every multi-generational trust is a balancing act between the living and the dead, with the trustee in the precarious position of having to weigh the wishes of vanished grantors against the priorities of their heirs.

The new film “The Descendants,” by the director of “About Schmidt” and “Sideways,” frames that balancing act against the lush landscape of Kauai, where the fictional King family have lived for decades on acreage held in trust.

The land is not only their home but their birthright, so when the heirs decide to sell the property to generate income, the trustee (played brilliantly by George Clooney) has to do plenty of soul searching.

As a beneficiary and heir of the grantors himself, his position is almost impossibly complicated. He is torn between succumbing to the pressure of the cash strapped beneficiaries and the original intent of the family to preserve the land for generations to come.

He gets a lot of things wrong along the way — nobody said playing referee for a fractious family is easy, especially when there are billions of dollars at stake and the heirs are your cousins.

But at the end, he does the best he can, and Payne (who co-wrote the screenplay from a book by Kaui Hart Hemmings) even gives him a little peace after the hard decisions have played out.

Ripped from the headlines

In fact, the situation he has to face reflects the real-life decisions the trustees made a few years ago on behalf of the beneficiaries of Hawaii’s billion-dollar Campbell Estate.

The 107-year-old Campbell Estate had to dissolve in January of 2007, 20 years after the last of the heirs who was alive when the trust was created passed away.

A few of the remaining beneficiaries — grandchildren of the original grantor — took a large cash disbursement and paid the tax accruing.

But most simply rolled their interests into a new national real estate corporation, the San Francisco-based James Campbell Co. LLC.

In its new corporate identity, the former estate had to distribute its estate tax liabilities as well as its assets to the beneficiaries.

But where the acreage in “The Descendants” ends up sold off to outside developers, the Campbell family still controls several thousand acres of their family legacy in Hawaii, as well as an empire of projects on the mainland

Other details are drawn from the story of other family trusts in Hawaii that have faced this same situation in the last few years.

For example, when the film refers to how “Matt King,” played by Clooney, is a descendant of a Hawaiian princess, who was a member of the powerful Kamehameha dynasty, and a mainland banker, the lineage is fictional.

But the story is reminiscent of the foundation of what was formerly known as the Bishop Estate, created by Charles Reed Bishop, a banker who married the Hawaiian princess Bernice Pauahi.

As other reviews have pointed out, these people often started out as missionaries trying to do good for the people of the islands. The Bishop Estate began that way, as a non-profit trust that could theoretically have lasted forever if it had not been restructured after a scandal.

Remember, the rule against perpetuities only applies to trusts where the beneficiaries are individuals, rather than charities. This is true even in states like Hawaii where perpetual trust is illegal.

Essential viewing for estate planners and trustees alike

For grappling with the hard questions, “The Descendants” would have been noteworthy enough for all trust advisors. But for acknowledging that the questions are never answered in a vacuum, it is five-star viewing for beneficiaries and potential grantors as a glimpse of what can go wrong when circumstances take a family trust off course.

Trust may be an impersonal entity, but its heart is human. “The Descendants” manages to break that heart and, through a surprising undercurrent of humor, put the pieces back together.

Scott Martin, senior editor, The Trust Advisor, Jerry Cooper contributed to the research.


Please read complete article at link below:

http://thetrustadvisor.com/news/descendants

Editor's note: The judges and parasites at the Probate Court of Cook County would view this movie as a comedy.  Lucius Verenus, Schoolmaster,  ProbateSharks.com

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