Movie Money: The Truth, the Fiction and the Billion-Dollar Question

THE MONEY SHOT

The sun is rising over the industrial corridors of Downtown Los Angeles. The city is waking up, and the camera catches money changing hands across its darker corners.

Cut to the workshop of counterfeiter Rick Masters, played by Willem Dafoe in William Friedkin’s 1985 thriller To Live and Die in L.A.

The slow beat of Wang Chung’s “Black-Blue-White” rhythmically taunts us in the background as Masters expertly generates thousands in counterfeit cash inside a remote warehouse half-baked by the California sun.

You can almost smell the ink and feel the heat rising from the presses as he mixes the perfect cocktail for success.

Fake money is his game. And just looking at it in all its glory is intoxicating.

Sexy. Dangerous.

It made me think about money and how it can become its own character in the movies that captivate us.

Money has always had a starring role in Hollywood. Sometimes it even gets its name in the title: The Color of Money. Milk Money. Mad Money. All the Money in the World.

But I started thinking about all those famous movie scenes built around ridiculous amounts of cash.

Is any of it real?

Is it made specifically for the film?

Who makes it?

And when there are millions of fake dollars flying around a movie set, how the hell do they keep track of it all?

Turns out, movie money has a pretty fascinating script of its own.

WAIT...THEY CAN’T JUST USE REAL MONEY?

Well, actually...they can.

That was the first surprise.

There isn’t some universal Hollywood rule declaring that filmmakers can never put genuine cash in front of a camera. Real money can and does appear on screen.

But think about the logistics.

If a character pulls a few twenties out of a wallet, using real money isn’t particularly complicated. If the script calls for a briefcase containing $2 million, a casino floor covered in hundreds or a warehouse stacked to the ceiling with cash, using the real thing suddenly becomes expensive, impractical and a rather spectacular security problem.

Enter "prop money".

But that creates an entirely different problem.

The money needs to look convincing enough to fool us.

Yet it can't be so convincing that it starts fooling everybody else.

Federal law regulates reproductions of U.S. currency, which means filmmakers and prop manufacturers have to walk an interesting line: create something believable enough to work on camera without accidentally entering the considerably less entertaining business of counterfeiting.

And Hollywood has gotten very, very good at the illusion.

SO HOW DO YOU MAKE A MILLION FAKE DOLLARS?

The answer is: you don’t necessarily fake all of it.

At least not equally.

The bill an actor holds inches from the camera has a very different job from the stacks of cash sitting twenty feet behind him.

Prop suppliers can create different types of movie money depending on how it will be photographed. Detailed bills may be used when the camera is close enough for us to see them, while less elaborate versions and filler money can create the appearance of enormous quantities of cash farther from the lens.

Those giant bricks of hundred-dollar bills?

They don’t necessarily contain hundreds of individually convincing bills.

Some are essentially elaborate visual sandwiches: convincing money where the camera needs to see it, filler where it doesn’t.

And then there’s perhaps the simplest trick of all.

For an especially tight shot, a production can put a real bill on top of a prop stack.

Our eyes see Benjamin Franklin staring back at us and apparently decide there’s no need to conduct a forensic examination of the other 99 bills.

Hollywood wins again.

The amount of prop cash required also isn’t necessarily determined by the fictional dollar amount in the script. What matters is what the camera needs to see.

A briefcase full of cash requires one illusion.

A tabletop covered in it requires another.

A room containing mountains of money requires something else entirely.

And if you’re planning to blow a billion dollars through a Las Vegas casino...

Well.

We’ll get to that.

WHEN FAKE MONEY GETS A LITTLE TOO REAL

Remember Rick Masters?

There’s a reason that counterfeiting sequence in To Live and Die in L.A. feels so authentic.

William Friedkin wanted it that way.

The film’s co-writer, Gerald Petievich, had been a Secret Service agent. Friedkin ultimately worked with an actual convicted counterfeiter to help recreate the process. According to Turner Classic Movies, when Willem Dafoe’s face wasn’t required in the shot, the counterfeiter’s own hands were used during portions of the printing sequence.

Which means some of what we’re watching isn’t an actor pretending to know how a counterfeiter works.

We’re watching someone who actually knew.

But here’s where the story gets even better.

In August 1985, The Washington Post reported that the Secret Service was investigating after approximately $500 of the movie’s fake currency found its way onto the streets of Los Angeles.

According to the production’s account at the time, a crew member had taken some of the bills home as souvenirs. His child subsequently found them and began circulating them.

A Secret Service spokesman told the newspaper that the stage money looked quite real.

Think about that for a minute and let's break it down:

Friedkin made a movie about a counterfeiter.

He wanted the counterfeiting to look real.

He enlisted someone who actually knew how to counterfeit money to help make it look real.

And then some of the fake counterfeit money escaped the movie and entered the real world.

You’d think Hollywood might have learned something from this experience.

And Then Rush Hour 2 Said: "Hold My Briefcase"

Sixteen years later, Rush Hour 2 was filming a casino sequence in Las Vegas.

The movie's plot involved counterfeit money.

So naturally, the production needed counterfeit money.

A lot of it.

According to contemporary reporting, the production used approximately $1 billion in face-value prop currency for the scene. The scale of the illusion was almost as ridiculous as the story itself: the billion-dollar order amounted to 14 pallet loads of fake $100 bills—and the paper alone reportedly cost $77,000 before printing or labor.

Then they blew it into the air.

You can probably see where this is going.

People gathered up some of the bills.

And some of those bills subsequently began turning up as actual money and the Secret Service came knocking.

Contemporary Associated Press reporting said 19 of the bills had successfully been passed in Las Vegas and Los Angeles, while another attempted use was reported in Minneapolis.

Federal agents ultimately seized more than $180 million in prop currency in Las Vegas and another $22 million from the company that manufactured it. The prop company was ordered to stop producing that version of the bills.

So let's make sure we've got this straight.

Rush Hour 2 was a movie involving counterfeit money.

Hollywood made fake money to portray the counterfeit money.

People took some of the fake counterfeit money.

They then used the fake counterfeit money as real money.

And the actual Secret Service had to intervene.

You couldn't write it.

Well, technically somebody did.

They just thought they were writing a movie.

FOLLOW THE MONEY

By now we've established that movie money occasionally has trouble staying where Hollywood puts it.

But just how much of this stuff is floating around out there?

More than $2 million in prop money has reportedly made its way into circulation since the early 2000s. The Secret Service has estimated that fake movie currency totaling more than $2 million has been passed as real money, with some of it leaving sets in the pockets of extras and bystanders.

Apparently fake money can be just as hard to hold onto as the real thing.

Netflix once put $2 million in fake cash inside a single bus-stop display. For a Narcos advertising campaign, custom prop money was installed in bus shelters in New York, Toronto and Los Angeles. According to the company that supplied it, each display contained $2 million in fake bills.

And yes.

Someone robbed one.

I don't know whether stealing $2 million that isn't actually worth $2 million qualifies as a successful robbery, but I admire the commitment.

Sometimes Hollywood orders fake money by the pallet. For Netflix's Triple Frontier, Prop Movie Money says it supplied an entire pallet of cash for the movie's enormous jungle-heist haul.

And sometimes movie money gets another gig after the movie does. Thousands of full-print bills made for Den of Thieves didn't retire when filming ended. The supplier says those same stacks were later reused for promotional events.

So somewhere in Hollywood, there really may be boxes filled with fake fortunes waiting for their next role.

Sometimes one movie even creates money for movies that haven't been made yet. When American Made needed convincing 1980s-era cash for its story, its supplier created custom period prop money. That design proved useful enough that it subsequently became the company's 1980s Series of prop currency. 

Translation:  Movie money can apparently have a longer résumé than some actors.

And I kind of love that.

FIVE TIMES MONEY STOLE THE SCENE

Money doesn’t always need dialogue to tell us exactly what it means.

Sometimes it’s temptation.

Sometimes power.

Sometimes desperation.

Sometimes excess.

And occasionally someone just sets an enormous pile of it on fire.

To Live and Die in L.A. — Money as Craft

Obviously.

But I’d put this scene here even without exercising my completely unbiased editorial authority.

Rick Masters doesn’t merely possess money.

He creates it.

Friedkin turns counterfeiting into a process—the paper, ink, machinery, precision and patience. The sequence makes us watch money being born, knowing all the while that what we’re seeing is criminal and false.

And somehow that makes it even more intoxicating.

The Dark Knight — Money as Power

The Joker stands before a mountain of mob money.

And burns it.

It’s a startling image precisely because cinema has spent decades teaching us what that pile represents.

Everybody wants the money.

Everybody fights for the money.

Everybody kills for the money.

And here’s a man casually setting it ablaze.

The money tells us something about the Joker before any psychological explanation ever could.

Jerry Maguire — Money as Validation

No mountain of cash required.

Just four words:

“Show me the money.”

The scene is frantic, funny and desperate, but underneath all the yelling, money has become something much larger than currency.

It’s proof.

Proof of professional worth. Proof somebody believes in you. Proof you’re still in the game.

That’s an awful lot of work for four words.

A Simple Plan — Money as Temptation

Sometimes the most powerful money scene doesn't involve spending it.

It’s about finding it.

A bag containing millions of dollars suddenly offers ordinary people an extraordinary possibility.

Keep it.

Nobody needs to know.

And just like that, the cash starts doing what great movie money does best.

It changes people.

Scarface — Money as Excess

Tony Montana’s money isn’t subtle.

That’s the point.

The piles of cash become part of the visual language of his ascent—more money, more power, more extravagance, more everything.

Until abundance itself starts looking grotesque.

The money that once represented arrival eventually becomes part of the excess consuming him, right up to his departure.

Maybe that’s what fascinates us about movie money.

We know what we’re seeing isn’t ours.

Most of the time, it isn’t even real.

Yet filmmakers can put a suitcase of fake bills on a table and instantly make us understand greed, possibility, danger, freedom, desperation or power without explaining any of it.

Money doesn’t have to be real to mean something.

Maybe that’s why Rick Masters and his printing press stayed with me all these years.

The money wasn’t real. But somehow, it never felt fake.