99% Invisible - 285- Money Makers

Episode Date: November 22, 2017

For a long time, anti-counterfeiting laws made it illegal to show US currency in movies. Now you can show real money, but fake money is often preferred. Creating fake money that doesn’t break the law, but looks real enough for film, is a tough design challenge. Money Makers

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. There's a scene in the buddy-cut movie Rush Hour 2, starring Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker, that takes place in a Las Vegas casino. What's that letting you, Mouse? In the scene, Jackie Chan's character is in the unenviable predicament of having a small bomb stuffed inside his mouth by a villain. I hate it when that happens. Jackie Chan's mouth is taped shut, his hands are tied, he shoved onto the floor of the

casino about to explode. Fortunately, at the last minute, Jackie Chan's partner, played by Chris Tucker, removes the tape from Chan's mouth and Chan spits the bomb onto a new bi-relet table, where it goes on. So in that scene where the Roulette Table explodes, money flies everywhere. Best producer Elizabeth Nakano. And to create the scene and a bunch of others in the movie, filmmakers needed a lot of money. Fake money. We had produced a billion dollars of $100 bills, which is quite a bit of money.

It's 14 palette loads of $100 bills solid 4 foot by 4 foot cubes. That's Greg Vilsen Jr. He's the CEO of ISS Props, the company that provided all the fake money for the movie. And he says, while they were filming Rush Hour 2, something strange happened. A couple of men showed up to Vilsen's office. Well, when they showed up, they were saying that they were from secret service and provided documents indicating such, and I thought it was being punk. I didn't believe that it was a real situation.

Do you remember how many people there were? Just two officers, but it got very serious, a very real, very fast. The secret service was in Greg Billson's office because during the filming of that scene in the casino, some of the fake cash had gone missing. Some souvenir seekers and extras grabbed some of that money put it in their pocket and it subsequently started turning up his counterfeit over the next few days. People were trying to use the fake money as real money up and down the Las Vegas strip, which meant that Greg was being accused by the Secret Service of counterfeiting.

This is a serious charge. People who counterfeit money can face large fines and even jail time, which has made the use of prop money in movies really complicated over the years. We have pretty strict laws around the reproduction of US currency, which can be traced back to the mid-1800s. Around the time of the Civil War, there was a ton of counterfeit currency circulating in the United States. Some people say anywhere from the third to a half of all money was fake. The federal government wanted to give people faith in its currency. So, it got serious about cracking down on counterfeit money.

All reproductions of US currency became illegal, including photographs of money. Along with the law that criminalized reproductions of money, an enforcement agency was formed, the Secret Service. including photographs of money. Along with the law that criminalized reproductions of money, an enforcement agency was formed. The Secret Service. Yeah, those guys with the earpieces, black suits, protect the president, those guys. Today, the agency falls under the Department of Homeland Security.

But at its start in 1865, the Secret Service was part of the Treasury Department, and its only job was to fight counterfeiting. Secret service agents operating from field offices throughout the country have inconsistently fighting the criminals who make voting money as well as those who pass it to the public. That's from a film put out by the Treasury Department in 1945 called Doutful Dollars. 5 called doubtful dollars. Okay, so the ban on any photographic representation of money was in place for about a century. And this was a problem for advertisers and photographers.

By the letter of the law, they were specifically barred from taking pictures of money. The law was written before the invention of motion pictures, but when movies came along, it was generally assumed that filmmakers would follow the same rules as photographers. No money on camera. And so in the early days of cinema, when money was needed in a film, producers had to get creative. Thirty, thirty, five, forty, forty-thousand. Shall we stop with forty?

That's a scene from the 1943 Hitchcock film, Shadow of a Doubt. And if you watch the movie and look closely, you can see that the bills in the scene aren't American dollars. They're Mexican pesos. I'm glad to see that your man who understands the tales of the screen. They're most important to me. Most important. I remember seeing it in movies all the way from the 20s and the 30s and the 40s up into the 70s. This is Peter Huntoun. He's an author and expert on American currency, and he says you can see pesos in a lot of

old movies. The reason for this is that after the Mexican Revolution ended around 1920, some regional Mexican money that was created during the Revolution lost value and was sold for cheap. The notes from the Mexican state of Chihuahua were Pancho via held power, or some of the most widely used in film. They were absolutely gorgeous because they were multicolored. They had gold, backs, black, print.

But the idea was that these things looked like money. They were real nice looking. And so the studio was bought them up. But the studio is weren't trying to pass pesos off as American dollars. It was just all they had. Nobody's ever fooled by it.

If you see this money go by and a movie, you know whether it's American or not, because of course you'd see that a block away. In the second half of the 20th century, the government began relaxing restrictions on the rules around photographing currency, and it eventually became legal to film real money. And real money is great for scenes where you need close-up shots, like this scene from the 1995 movie Dead Presidents. In this scene, four of the characters have robbed an armored truck and are splitting up the cash.

The camera pans slowly over stacks of bills. But it can also be risky to have real money floating around on set, especially if you need a bunch of it. So a lot of producers prefer to use fake money. These days, the government does allow for some reproductions of US currency. It's just not very clear how real fake money can look. It depends. It's very subjective. If it's the same size as a current US currency note and it's front and back and it's made in the likeness of our US currency, then we viewed as counterfeit.

That's Trent Everett. I am an assistant to the Special Agent in Charge for our criminal investigative division of the Secret Service, and I currently oversee our counterfeit operations section. Over the years, prop money and movies has begun to look more like actual money, sometimes too much like actual money. Sometimes too much like actual money. Some companies did and still do turn out bills that run a foul of the law. Because to look good on screen, fake money has to be pretty close to the real thing. These movie companies like to have things look as real as possible

and that's where they start running into issues. Some people make bills that are the same size as real money, but with one or two small design changes, like maybe it says, in dog we trust instead of in god we trust, or has Benjamin Franklin make it a weird face, or there are bills that look exactly like the real thing, except they're stamped with a small disclaimer. All of these would probably be unacceptable to the Secret Service. Remember Greg Bilston from Reshauer 2?

He thought they had made their fake bills look different enough from the Secret Service. Remember Greg Bilston from Rush Hour 2? He thought they had made their fake bills look different enough from the real thing. There's probably 25 or 26 separate things that are not what a real $100 bill has on it, but it was still too close to the reality for them to accept. Bilston had to turn over all of his prop money to the Secret Service to be destroyed. And then they confiscated and destroyed all the electronic files that were used and

creating this money. Wilson lost a lot of money. Not just the fake money, but the real money it took to produce the fake money. Oh, it was well in excess of $100,000. Just the paper stock alone to buy enough paper to produce a billion dollars was $77,000. In the end, all Wilsonson really lost was money. He didn't have to go to jail. These days, he mostly tries to avoid using fake money at all.

It's just too hard to please both the Secret Service and the movie producers. It's not worth it. I'm not going to break the law for a TV show, a feature film, or a producer that I don't even know. But movies are definitely not the only way fake money is making it into the marketplace. Here's Trent Everett again from the Secret Service. That's not that it's just leaking out of production companies, but that's being sold on the internet or anybody can purchase it. You can actually buy prop money right now on Amazon. It's even on Prime, free, two-day shipping.

So of course, we ordered some. Yep, this is it. That's producer Katie Mingle opening up the package. Okay, so it's a little stack about half an inch thick. It does look a good bit like money from a distance. It doesn't feel that much like money though. It feels like just regular paper to me. Benjamin Franklin is making a really strange face. It's like they took his mouth and shrunk it. And it says, for motion picture use only, but yeah, let me see if I can fool any of my coworkers at this.

Katie has about $10 dollar bills in her hands, which she's going to say a fan sent us in the mail. Oh my god, you guys. A fan just sent us this note with all this money in it. Who did? A fan. Just sent us the radio to me. It just says, Dear 99 Chi,

Oh my god, that's so much money. I love your work. Please treat yourself to something special when I am just people. How much money is it? Is this real? This isn't real. Promotion picture use only. Shut up.

OK, so Delaney could see it was fake as soon as it was in her hand. But from a couple of feet away, the money does look really convincing. And Trent Everett told me they're actually investigating some fake money that looks a lot like the stuff you guys bought from Amazon. Currently, we are investigating the motion picture note that has been popping up all over e-commerce sites, but it's too cited. It is similar size. It is in the likeness of a $100 US note.

And the only difference on it is that it says motion picture. You so only. So don't be surprised if some secret service agent show up at the 99PI offices. No charges necessarily. We brought on the person for purchasing it. They just aren't legally able to possess it. Okay, just for the record, the person who purchased it, it's Katie Mangle.

M-I-N-G-L-E. Given how difficult it is to make money that looks real but not too real, it's hard to imagine who still wants to be in the business of creating and supplying fake money for the movies. But there are a few people still doing it, including RJ Rappaport. I'm Rich RJ Rappaport, and I'm the president of RJer Props. We are a props house for film, television, music industry, commercials, and the entertainment industry. When I visit RJ at work, he shows me around a huge warehouse. There are all kinds of different props.

A hospital bed, a prison cell, a futuristic machine with lots of knobs and buttons. We've got giant control panels like this. Blue lights spinning across circuit boards and flashing LEDs and all sorts of interesting things. RJ's been in this business for years, but he's still seems so excited by it. It's almost like he's a kid playing pretend with all the perfect toys. For instance, if somebody had to disarm this, it's the

missile control system. Not the missile control system. Yes, the missile control system. Not the missile control system. Yes, the missile control system. Cut the red wire. Okay, cutting the red wire. Now the blue wire. When we step into the room with the prop money, it's like seeing a bunch of movie clichés side by side. There are stacks and stacks of bills

wrapped with paper bands like they just came from the bank. So I noticed you also have a briefcase of money. Is that one whole prop that you give out the briefcase with the stacks of cash in? It is. This is an entire prop ready to go. And we have other briefcases like this. It's a black leather briefcase.

And this is a brown leather briefcase. Sometimes we fill them with fake drugs as well. RJ says it took three years of back and forth between him and the Secret Service to agree on a design for prop money. That kind of guidance isn't something the Secret Service normally provides, by the way. RJ managed to finagle an exception. We worked with the Secret Service and we went over all of the laws, all of the updates,

all of the changes. It's a very tedious process where you're just doing original artwork from scratch. R.J. says when he makes bills that are blank on one side, he can make them pretty realistic. But otherwise, you have to be really careful. Jump through a ton of hoops. And even then, sometimes the Secret Service

will end up asking you to destroy everything you've made. It's so much hassle that, ironically, there's no money in it. And it's not a big money maker. No joke intended. It's not the way that we make a living. It's really not. This is really just a service that we do for our clients. And we know that if they're going to come back to us for something bigger and better, then we'll make a living on that.

RJ has supplied money for a bunch of popular movies and TV shows, like the Netflix series Ozark. Okay. Money laundering 101. So you come across a suitcase with 5 million bucks in it. In this scene, there's a montage that includes cash on a glass table, cash running through a county machine, and cash in a suitcase. The IRS won't let you buy anything of value with it.

TV and movies are full of characters who come across suitcases full of money. It's a fun plot device. But behind all this cash is someone like RJ, who has been through a meticulous design process and years of back and forth with the Secret Service. Because for the film producers, there's no such thing as easy money. You know what's not on US currency? A dollar symbol. Kurt explores the origin of the S with a line through it after this.

So I'm in the studio with Digital Director Kurt Colstead. And as we mentioned earlier, when those really strict anti-counterfeiting laws were on the books, movies used pesos to stand in for US currency. But the idea of seeing pesos circulating in the United States wasn't actually all that new or crazy back then. Yeah, in fact, from the late 1700s, all the way up to 1857, Paisels were legal tender in the United States. And around the same time that Congress officially approved their use, the dollar sign started to appear. And so where did the dollar sign come from?

Well, nobody's really sure who first designed the dollar sign, and there's a lot of intriguing theories about how it came about. Some people have speculated that the S, with the double lines, those two vertical lines over it, is actually a U superimposed on an S, but with the bottom of the U removed. So it's supposed to be U S as in U S currency. Right, and that's an appealing theory in theory. I mean, it makes the dollar sign seem distinctively American, like a national symbol,

but it's widely believed to be false at this point. Okay, so that's one hypothesis. What's your favorite version of how the dollar sign came to be? Well, there's this rather epic theory that the dollar sign traces back to the pillars of Hercules on either side of the Strait of Gibraltar. This famous Strait is effectively the threshold between the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean, and according to legend, the flanking pillars were once inscribed with the Latin words non-pluse ultra, which translates as nothing further beyond.

Oh, is in once you leave the Mediterranean Sea, there is nothing beyond there, just the endless ocean. Right. This is the end of the world as we know it, and that motto ended up on old Spanish currency. But it was later changed when Christopher Columbus reached America. They actually dropped the non-part and made it pluse ultra, meaning further beyond. To reflect this new realization, that in fact, there was a lot more to the world out there. And on Spanish coinage, the motto was shown on banners

that wrapped a flanking pair of Ornate pillars. So you have this kind of eschaped banner that winds down around a vertical column. So in other words, with a pillar and a banner wrapped around it, it looks like the single line dollar sign. Pretty much. And it's a fun story, but the prevailing theory is actually that the dollar sign was never really about the new world. It wasn't something distinctively American. In fact, it all comes back to the Spanish pesos and their plural abbreviation, which is PS. So as I said before, the peso is getting a lot of use

the P.S. So as I said before, the pace I was getting a lot of use in American businesses and the 1700s. And the idea is that as it was getting written down over and over again on documents, the P started to overlap with the S and the curve part of the P just got dropped over time. So you end up with something that looks like the single bar dollar sign with that vertical line going up through an S that we know today. And so that is thought to be the true story. It is thought by many to be the true story and that is what the Oxford English Dictionary claims is the true story. But you know, we may never be sure. 99% of visible was produced this week by Elizabeth Nakano, edited by our senior producer Katie Mingle. Sharif Yusuf did the tech production and mix. Sean Real composed the music. Kurt Colstead is the digital director

and the rest of the staff includes Delaney Hall, Avery Trouffman, Emmett Fitzgerald, Taren Mazza, and me Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7K ALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown, Oakland, California. This show is part of Radio Topia from PRX, Yo-ro, in beautiful, downtown, Oakland, California. This show is part of radio Tokyo from PRX, a collective of the best most innovative shows

in all of podcasting. We are supported by the Night Foundation and sticker-loving listeners, just like you. You can find 99% of visible and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars in the show at 99PI org, or on Instagram, Tumblr, and Reddit too. If you want to read an article about car-free cities or see our video about biomimicry

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