
The Business of Fake Hollywood Money - ryan_j_naughton
http://priceonomics.com/the-business-of-fake-hollywood-money/
======
anigbrowl
_“Police stuff, for instance, is something you’ve got to be careful with,”
says Bilson. “If it’s too real, you’ll have issues.” For this reason, prop
houses make themselves accessible only to “bona fide motion picture entities,”
which must have $1 million insurance policies on file to merely rent out
something as simple as a ten-dollar police badge._

Alarmingly true. I was cast as a prison guard once for a film which was being
shot in a recently decommissioned jail. I used to smoke then, and every time I
went outside someone would come up and ask me about visiting hours or some
other prison-related question. I thought the outfit was obviously fake but
most people don't look at the writing on the shoulder patches or the exact
kind of badge someone is wearing as long as you're in a uniform and have the
relevant props.

It doesn't surprise me at all that people would attempt to spend fake money.
I've seen people try to spend bills that were obviously made on an inkjet
printer.

~~~
harold
_I 've seen people try to spend bills that were obviously made on an inkjet
printer._

Sadly, I've seen people that worked for the family owned bar accept bills that
were obviously made on an inkjet printer. High rag content paper feels like
real money and in dim light with an element of urgency (lots of people waiting
for a drink) it's sometimes easy to miss.

~~~
saalweachter
Then there are those "magic pens" which are supposed to detect fake bills but
actually just detect low quality (high starch) paper. James Randi, in his
wild, younger days, would spray real bills with spray starch to cause a little
chaos at the bank.

~~~
ejr
> James Randi, in his wild, younger days, would spray real bills with spray
> starch to cause a little chaos at the bank.

Terrifyingly devious while causing no physical harm. I wonder if pranksters
these days are just as imaginative. Or perhaps the environment is less
conducive toward appropriate penalties.

------
VLM
Can't wait to see fake hollywood bitcoins in the movies. I'm sure they'll just
'cat /dev/urandom' for awhile and call it good.

My assumption based on the title was the article would be a discussion about
hollywood accounting where numbers are manipulated until only the studio wins.
I was pleasantly surprised to read about fake currency.

~~~
sjtgraham
> Can't wait to see fake hollywood bitcoins in the movies. I'm sure they'll
> just 'cat /dev/urandom' for awhile and call it good.

You overestimate Hollywood tremendously. They'll create a GUI interface using
Visual Basic and see if they can track an IP address. [1]

[1] -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkDD03yeLnU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkDD03yeLnU)

~~~
jonnathanson
Hollywood has gotten better about faking technology. At least some people in
Hollywood have. "Silicon Valley" on HBO went as far as having a Stanford CS
professor develop a viable compression-rating system to be used on the show
(the "Weissman Score," named for Professor Tsachy Weissman).

~~~
grrowl
I've been really impressed by the TV show Halt And Catch Fire in this regard,
the sales guy is slightly incorrect as a sales guy would be, but the engineers
are bang-on.

~~~
centizen
Halt and Catch Fire is doing a bang up job of reflecting the technology and
even the market of the time. Really refreshing to see.

------
Lerc
There seem to be a lot of possibilities that would do in various positions.

If you could make the money feel distinctively different, while appearing the
same, it would probably be enough to cause a receiver to pay sufficient
attention to notice the minor differences.

Printing different denominations on each side of the bill would be sufficient
for most stationary money.

For scenes with large amounts of free flowing money, you could print the notes
backwards and flip the film.

I don't think there would be any single solution for all instances, but I
think you could pick a form that would suit whichever scene you were currently
shooting.

~~~
Natsu
I wonder if they could just print FAKE under the band that's bound around the
stack?

~~~
saalweachter
I think we're losing something here.

We're all inherently working within the movie/prop company's framework while
brainstorming fake money ideas. The prop company has two goals:

    
    
      1.  Make something convincing on camera.
      2.  Make something readily distinguishable from real money.
    

They've already succeeded! New solutions may be fun, but it's still
reinventing the wheel in the end. (Which may explain why programmers are
falling over themselves to do it...) But there are two extra constraints that
Hollywood isn't meeting with some of their current solutions:

    
    
      3.  Make something which meets Federal laws for fake money.
      4.  Make something which could not be passed ever.
    

3&4 are potentially the same, in that 3 is written to try to achieve 4, but I
think it's important to note that Hollywood is (or was, until the recent
innovations mentioned at the end of the article) failing at.

I don't think most of the solutions suggested in this thread actually solve 4.
I think mirrored, cut in half, and even bills with 'FAKE' printed across the
middle could still be passed with a fair success rate, and moreover a criminal
could laugh it off as a mistake if they were caught.

So what couldn't be passed, aside from the absurdly large/small bills the Feds
want, or the glued together blocks used now?

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JetSpiegel
"a movie set in the 1920s, to provide bills from that era. Elyea adds that
it’s “hard for production companies to liquidate assets after the film or
television series,” so they choose to rent cash out instead of purchasing it
at face value."

This phrase is glorious. Rent cash.

~~~
eridius
I agree, although if you think about it, that's exactly what you're doing when
you take out a loan from the bank.

~~~
JetSpiegel
Or buying money with future money. Or the promise of future money.

------
chatmasta
So Hollywood can generate realistic looking footage of 50 foot high humanoid
robots fighting each other in downtown Hong Kong, but it can't digitally
correct some orange dollar bills to make them appear green?

~~~
anigbrowl
The movies with giant robots tend to have vastly higher budgets than the ones
involving suitcases of money, although these days 'invisible' FX are the norm
even on lower budget projects.

But I think it's more to do with departmental splits. ie if you're the prop
guy and you turn up with a pile of orange money saying 'just CG it' then
you're offloading part of your job onto a different department and messing up
their budget, which is a big no-no. Producers always prefer the person who
makes things simpler over the person who makes them more complicated.

Bear in mind that the majority of people work together on a per-project basis
so organizationally film production is more fragmented than you might expect.
Even on big productions you typically don't know many of the people you are
working with at the start of a project and you only meet each other a few days
or weeks before shooting starts. Like any other organization, different
departments guard their budget allocations jealously.

------
merrua
I thought this would be on Hollywood accounting. Its interesting to see the
fake bills used in films however.

------
lojack
My sister used to work for a Prop studio, and one Christmas she gave various
members of the family fake $100 bills. They said very clearly "For Motion
Picture use Only" on them, and it was quite obviously not a real $100 bill. My
brother jokingly decided to give it to a cashier who then proceeded to start
counting change. Embarrassed, he had to explain to them that it was all a
joke, and the money was fake.

~~~
thaumasiotes
The bar for being a cashier isn't all that high. I bought a gift card at an
IKEA in Shanghai for 100元 (about $16). IKEA's web site seemed to indicate that
their gift cards couldn't be used across countries, but I took it to a cashier
at a store in California to see if that was true. The cashier happily informed
me that my card was loaded with 100 dollars. When I expressed surprise, she
gave me a receipt that correctly showed 100 CNY.

------
scoofy
Easy solution. All non-closeup bills are literally cut in half at production.
Wrapped in bill wraps, you'd never know the difference.

~~~
Htsthbjig
A cut bill is perfectly valid at least in Europe and I suspect in the US is
the same as there are movies in which the Big gangster cuts a money bill and
tells someone else if he wants the other part do something.

~~~
acheron
Yes. If you have both halves of the bill a bank will exchange it for another
one. Even if you're missing a part of it. US bills have two serial numbers;
generally you need one whole serial number and part of the second. (Obviously
so you can't cut it in half and try to exchange each half separately.)

(I was a part-time bank teller while in college.)

------
crussmann
One solution nobody has mentioned is filming in another country. While there
probably are laws restricting the "foreign" currency reproductions, I'd think
it's unlikely the authorities in, say, Canada would spend nearly as much
effort going after prop US currency as the Secret Service would in The States.

~~~
embolalia
Canada might. They're pretty tight with the US, and fake US currency is still
a diplomatic problem for them. Film in Iran, however, and they probably
wouldn't care at all.

~~~
scott_karana
Yeah, agreed. Plenty of places will accept US currency at par with Canadian,
and many cashiers have no idea how to check if the money is genuine, if they
check at all.

A flood of fake US $20s in Vancouver could really screw people over.

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bluedevil2k
Have bright (green/blue/orange) bills and simply CGI it to look like real
money. Would even work for overseas markets, to make them euros for example.

------
known
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_Accounting](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_Accounting)

------
ps4fanboy
I was hoping this would be an article on how movies always lose money even
with record box office.

~~~
underwater
Why would you hope to see it reposted here? Especially since it sounds like
you've already read it.

~~~
ps4fanboy
I have never seen it clearly explained.

------
surge
I heard the same story from Adam Savage, but it was Con-Air, not Rush Hour 2.

~~~
msantos
When Adam Savage shows the contents of his replica of the Jason Bourne's "go
bag"

from the Bourne Identity's Swiss bank scene he briefly touches the subject of
bank

notes not being too close to the real stuff

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQbbtnTz1KE&t=346](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQbbtnTz1KE&t=346)

------
aptwebapps
Maybe they could use disappearing ink? Or ink that substantially changed color
in a few hours?

~~~
anigbrowl
Odds are that it will be blank by the time you're ready to shoot it :-) Film
production can be sloooow, it's easy to spend hours adjusting the lighting for
every scene and then you have multiples camera setups within each scene and
multiple takes for every setup....

~~~
aptwebapps
I was imagining something that would oxidize quickly. If you could make it
cheaply and vacuum/nitrogen pack it, you could have as much as you wanted on
hand. But, yeah, could easily be an added source of stress.

"That was perfect!" "What about the money? It looks faded. Is that faded?"

~~~
anigbrowl
Exactly! There is nothing worse than having everything go right only to
discover that one thing...wasn't.

