Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/11/13/how-hollywood-makes-prop-money.html
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Film industry employees stealing props (and wardrobe): It’s Hollywood tradition.
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I read that in the early days of Hollywood studios didn’t want to take chances with anti-counterfeiting laws so they usually just used inexpensive Mexican banknotes when they needed something that looked like printed American currency since it was superficially similar enough to use in black & white film as long as you didn’t do any close-up shots.
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Adam Savage has a video about weathering prop money 
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Well I’m sure from his time on MythBusters (mixing blur with blur) he’s on all the government “look out for this guy” lists, so why not add this to his Secret Service file?
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That is a LOT of cash. I just checked and apparently there are only an estimated 11.5 billion in hundred dollar bills in circulation in the entire world, so they made almost 90 times as many fake bills as there are real ones.
I never saw Rush Hour 2 but unless the criminal plan was to destroy the US economy through inflation (as the Nazis attempted with fake British banknotes in WWII) then they may have over-done it a bit.
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I used to work in the Film Biz doing Props and have handled a LOT of Fake Money over the years. Real Money looked better but the Production Companies would just keep balking at using it for some reason. I could not understand why.
Turns out it was the overly cautious Ad Agency’s Lawyers. This was particularly true on Lottery Commercials where there was lots of money all over the place.
Their interpretation of the anti-counterfeiting laws was that we were NOT allowed to “make a film copy” of ANY REAL MONEY! No matter how small it appeared in the frame.
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He does have a story that he’s recounted about two times now on the channel where he was contacted by an explosives expert from the FBI about him fabricating a “Thermal Detonator”. Let me see if i can find the particular video and timecode.
Edit: here you go
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That’s… honestly surprising. Though your math is a bit off (that’d be $1.15T, so they actually reproduced the world’s supply). Still, an amazing feat.
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You’re right, I was thinking $11.5b in hundreds when it was qty 11.5b in hundreds, even though I typed that part correctly.
So assuming the prop money was denominated in 100’s, the prop people had to print ten billion fake bills. And the total cost was $100k? Maybe I made another math error but that would mean they were able to print each bill on both sides for a per-bill cost of only $0.00001, which seems completely implausible. Either the denominations were higher than $100 or maybe it wasn’t really a trillion in fake money.
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That is more than a year’s production of real bills at the Treasury. Printing that much of anything would take . . . a while, on presses of the size shown in those videos. So I make a guess that there was not really that much fake cash on set.
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All real money. As security for the cash they borrowed (presumably from this very bank) they gave a rubber check. Fortunately, they only lost a few bucks during the shooting of the scene and were never forced to try to clear it.
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In the movie To Live And Die In L.A. (1985), not only did the same thing happen but, in the opening sequence, Willem Dafoe shows you how to do it yourself step by step. Counterfeiters allegedly used the film as a guide for years afterwards.
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Someone I know only vaguely and who definitely wasn’t me, was asked to reproduce a 50 euro note by the accountant of a company he (definitely not me) used to work for. Apparently the accountant wanted to use a fake note to pay off a bet he’d lost.
He (not me) was surprised to find that photocopying the fifty just produced a black rectangle. Apparently euros aren’t photocopyable!
However he was able to use the scanning facility of that same copier to reproduce both sides of the note in photoshop, and then use the same machine to print out a double sided counterfeit.
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Wow, that was a long rabbit hole, but Adam Savage is just delightful to watch. Fun video warts and all. And it shows how content is more important than fancy production values - he’s apparently shooting it using his laptop webcam.
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During the lockdown he’s been recording on his iPhone and occasionally on his laptop. I like the lower production on the vids because more of his personality shines through compared to the more polished vids. Not that i dislike them, they have their place for sure… but his build vids are something that have brought me a lot of joy throughout this tough year.
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I also love the simpler production values of his self-filmed one day builds. Not too long ago he had one of his regular cameramen come in and shoot a recent video, and the deliberate, wandering shaky cam video, with snap zooms, focus pulls and unnecessary attempts at coolness were really annoying. Just show me the content with simple shots. Savage doesn’t need window dressing.
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I always thought this Simpsons clip was funny, but especially so after I had a short stint working in Hollywood:
The effects house I worked for used fake milk for commercials because the real stuff apparently isn’t white enough on film. And they once did a dumb Carl’s Jr. commercial in which they put an elaborate prosthetic udder on a cow because the director thought that real udders look weird.
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I recently and unknowingly passed off a counterfeit $20 bill at a fast food drive in. The clerk who took the bill went and got the manager who told me he was required to confiscate it and put it in the safe.
I was genuinely embarrassed as I had no idea it was fake. Pretty sure I got it as change in New Orleans at a coin shop in the French Quarter after I broke a (real) $100 bill buying an antique silver dollar.
Irony is ironic
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