Inside a Fortune 500 CEO’s manic plan to escape the U.S. ‘death tax’: ‘It’s not that I’m selfish for myself’

Darting between New York and Tokyo in the 1970s, he ran the American arm of Sony, a brand that revolutionized consumer technology and helped kick off what became a new digital era. 

Schein doubled Sony’s sales in the U.S., making him one the industry’s most prominent leaders, until 1978, when Sony cofounder Akio Morita pushed him out for being too combative. 

That part of Schein’s career has been documented in magazine profiles and business books. But a new film by his director son, Justin Schein, illuminates his late father’s other battle, this one with the U.S. tax code.

In Death & Taxes, viewers meet a retired Harvey Schein at home, obsessing over saving money and protecting the spoils of his investments from the IRS. The child of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, Schein grew up in a poor section of Brooklyn and inherited little when his parents passed. He wanted his legacy to be one of largesse. “It’s not that I’m selfish for myself,” he says at one point in the documentary. “It’s for you, your progeny, their progeny.”

Schein sought to ensure that his kin would live comfortably after he died, but his fixation with living frugally and avoiding taxes caused heartache while he lived. “My mother bore the brunt of his anger and toughness,” Justin Schein tells Fortune.  His father even insisted on moving with his wife to Florida for tax purposes, dismissing her deep objections. 

Schein’s story is animated by footage of family meetings and interviews his son captured in the two decades before Schein’s death, in 2008. The family tale becomes the vehicle for investigating the moral questions that shape the current debate about the so-called “death tax,” and the mindset of the mega-rich who believe high estate taxes are unAmerican. 

For the past several decades, successive Republican presidents have raised the minimum threshold at which the wealthy need to pay estate taxes, reduced the tax rate, or both. Democratic leaders have generally done the opposite, seeing estate taxes as a means to chip away at wealth concentration at the top of the socioeconomic ladder.

Today, the estate tax in the U.S. is 40% and only applies to estates worth at least $13.6 million per individual. That’s more than double the individual exemption, $5.6 million, that was allowed before former president Donald Trump took office in 2017. (The figure is adjusted for inflation annually.) 

Trump effectively cut the estate tax for thousands of extremely wealthy U.S. families when his administration enacted the Tax Code and Jobs Act, a set of policies set to expire early next year. With Trump returning to office, and with a Republican-controlled Congress, economists expect his tax code to be extended, though it’s also possible that Republicans will repeal the estate tax entirely. By comparison, in her failed run for the presidency, Vice President Kamala Harris said she supported a tax plan overhaul that would have seen the exemption lowered to $3.5 million, thereby implicating thousands of additional people.  

Justin Schein, best known for Crip Camp, a Netflix documentary executive produced by Barack and Michelle Obama, sides with the left on tax issues. Over the years, he argued about the social impact of avoiding taxes with his father, even as his father’s wealth allowed him to be a filmmaker, a point raised by his father in old footage and by others interviewed on camera. 

Schein the documentarian is careful to explore all perspectives of the estate tax issue. He talks to Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, a libertarian taxpayer advocacy group, Derrick Washington, professor of economics and urban policy at The New School, Amy Hanauer, executive director of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, and others. Through these conversations, which are deftly woven into his family’s personal narrative, the filmmaker unpacks persistent myths about estate taxes (it’s not a form of double taxation, for instance) and illustrates the role that tax benefits and loopholes have played in creating a racial wealth gap, while still humanizing people who shared his father’s take. 

“These issues are bigger than the politics of the moment,” Schein tells Fortune. His father’s rags-to-riches story begins with an education paid for by the GI bill, which predominantly benefitted white Americans. “He is such a great representative of his point of view, and he lived it, and he deserves everything he earned,” Schein says. But the question now, he continues, is whether having the ability to dodge taxes prevents others from experiencing the same kind of economic progress. 

The movie is timely not only as lawmakers look ahead to revisiting Trump’s tax code, but also because of shifting American demographics. The U.S. is entering a period that’s expected to see the largest wealth transfer between generations in the country’s history. 

That’s cause for concern for Robert Reich, ​​professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley who Schein interviews early in the film. 

“If more and more wealth can be accumulated and provided to heirs without ever paying any taxes, then we are on the way to a permanent aristocracy in America,” he says.

Death & Taxes is available online at NYC Docs until Dec. 1, and is set to screen at film festivals. See the movie’s site for more.