The Business of Fake Hollywood Money
priceonomics.com
priceonomics.com
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.
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.
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.
^ This. The overlap is extremely high, and most of the time, the budget (read: VC) is much, much higher and the timeline is way faster for realizing the bulk of the return on investment. Shark tank my ass, try film. :)
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.
http://priceonomics.com/why-do-all-hollywood-movies-lose-mon...
Still, I suspect a more honest studio could quickly gain a lot of traction.
As the talent, it's just easier to demand a large payment up front and just forget about the royalties. As the studio, it's easier just to pay that amount up front. Then, magic voodoo accounting and poof any statutory royalties are eliminated.
I suppose in this case, the "honest" studio is negotiating that large up-front payment to its talent rather than trying to sell the talent on the eternal royalties that never come.
"Bullock's deal with Warner Bros. for the Alfonso Cuaron-directed space epic calls for her to earn $20 million upfront against 15 percent of first-dollar gross. "
USD $70 million
USD $50 million for Robert Downey Jr. on Iron Man 3
Not too bad
You overestimate Hollywood tremendously. They'll create a GUI interface using Visual Basic and see if they can track an IP address. [1]
The more rage the better.
Whereas this one ...
Antitrust and Social Network also show real source code that compiles (C, Java, Perl, Bash, HTML), Antitrust even explains "Open Source" to the audience. The camera work (especially showing relevant parts of the computer monitors and pan around to keep it engaging for a longer time) on all four movies is really fantastic.
* The Net (1995) - filmed one year before the World Wide Web got traction with the first fully graphical Mosaic web browser: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113957/
* Antitrust (2001) - famous for highlighting the open source movement, features a "CEO" that resembles a mixture of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs in one person as evil character, shows Linux desktop and command shell, and shows real Linux developer: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0218817/
* Social Network (2010) - very realistic, based on real detailed technical blog posts from 2004 on LiveJournal from Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin's memory: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1285016/
* The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) - nmap tool, etc.: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1568346/
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* Jurassic Park (1993) - real 3D file manager application on Unix desktop, first use of OpenGL: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107290/ , see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaRHU1XxMJQ and http://fsv.sourceforge.net/
* movies (like The Matrix reloaded) that use the nmap tool: http://nmap.org/movies/
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.
Unfortunately this is usually going to require flipping the actor, creating an even worse problem. A man wearing a suit, for example, will suddenly have his jacket buttoned right-over-left rather than left-over-right, wristwatches and jewelry will appear on the wrong hands, and so on.
Of course, mistakes like this show up in movies all the time, but it's professionally embarrassing and would reflect badly on someone if it was a regular issue in their work.
Different denominations seems like the best solution, but that's still a problem waiting to happen to the unwary art director/continuity supervisor.
No legal problem, though, I think. As making stuff continues to get easier, this solution gets better, though probably still not practical. And of course as making stuff gets easier we'll eventually need a different kind of approach to counterfeiting.
Color correction, on the other hand, might be a practical approach...
I have a colorist friend that does a lot of mega-budget projects so I'll drop him a line and ask...although I suspect his answer will be 'anything's possible if you're willing to write a large enough check.'
>According to the Counterfeit Detection Act of 1992, a reproduced bill must be: a.) either less than 75% or more than 150% the size of a real bill, b.) one-sided, and c.) made with only one color (so as to discourage the reproduction of identifying factors).
Less so celebrities, in general, though still the case... But anywhere you could swap in a stunt double you could almost certainly get away with mirroring the person.
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.
3. Make something which meets Federal laws for fake money.
4. Make something which could not be passed ever.
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?
This phrase is glorious. Rent cash.
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.
When I had seen 50 foot humanoid robots on film they were everything but realistic, also the fact that you don't know how a 50 foot robot really behaves helps a lot. Normally they hide the problems using light, making it dark, like a night scene.
Making video realistic with bright light is really really hard and really really expensive because in the real world there is dust and rust, and dirty mud and imperfections everywhere, but those are hard to model.
Even then most film professionals will know instantly is something is created digitally. It is exponentially more expensive to improve in this area, so they compromise on what most people would consider ok for the least price.
Even super expensive productions like Starwars look very artificial for the trained eye.
Sure, handling piles of real cash is a bit tricky - but it's a well-practiced routine that is a cheap&efficient commodity, since so many businesses need it for their everyday operations.
(I was a part-time bank teller while in college.)
A flood of fake US $20s in Vancouver could really screw people over.
from the Bourne Identity's Swiss bank scene he briefly touches the subject of bank
notes not being too close to the real stuff
"That was perfect!" "What about the money? It looks faded. Is that faded?"