The Business of Fake Hollywood Money

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Today, “movie money” is ubiquitous and plays a multitude of roles in TV shows and films. It can be seen clutched in the hands of heisters and gangsters, tucked covertly into steel suitcases, and splayed across poker tables in smoky rooms. But as far back as the inception of film (anywhere from 1878 to 1895, depending on one’s definition of the medium), money has been represented on the big screen.

Fred Reed, author of Show Me the Money, a book compiling the history of currency in the movies (both real and fake), chronicles how the use of real money gradually transitioned into the use of fake money. Legal tender made its big-screen debut in Thomas Edison’s 1895 kinetoscope film of a cock fight, in which two men wager ferociously; a few years later, in 1903’s The Great Train Robbery, real money was prominently featured during a stick-up scene.

But just as film began to flourish in the early 1900s, counterfeiting crimes rose; as a precaution, Federal laws were enacted that barred the use of real currency in full-scale photography. Studios found a replacement in 1920: when the Mexican Revolution ended, vast quantities of Mexican currency, rendered worthless by the war, were acquired by Hollywood producers and used in lieu of U.S. tender. When the supply of these notes diminished a decade later, studios began replicating other Mexican currencies. By the 1960s, this crude prop money was in widespread use.

Gradually, prop houses in Hollywood began sensing producers’ demands for more believable U.S. currency, and a new era of movie money was born. Between 1970 to 2000, nearly 270 types and 2,000 sub-varieties of movie money were produced for Hollywood’s use. To win market share, prop masters increasingly competed in creating the most realistic fake cash available -- but it came at a very real cost.

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