One of these $100 bills is real, and the other one is a piece of prop money made for movies. Can you tell which one is which? They both have a blue security ribbon, textured ink, and even the smallest detail, like text from the Declaration of Independence. The answer is obvious when you flip them over.
That's what happened 20 years ago on the set of "Rush Hour 2." Gregg Bilson Jr.: Money is more work than it's worth, in the long run.
Narrator: The fake money looked so real that some extras on set pocketed some of it and tried to spend it at real stores. That alerted the US Secret Service, which confiscated and destroyed the fake bills and the digital files used to print them. It had cost $100,000 to print all of that fake money, so losing all of it was a financial blow to Gregg and ISS.
Bilson: We didn't try to make fake money to dupe the public. We made fake money to make a movie. But we just made the prop too good.
Narrator: The "Rush Hour 2" incident underscored an obvious dilemma for printing fake money. The money needs to look realistic on camera, but it can't look too realistic up close, or people might try to spend it in real life. The problem has become even greater in recent years, with better cameras capturing more and more details from the background of scenes. So the prop industry has come up with two different types of prop money, each with its own strengths and weaknesses.
For scenes where the cash is filmed from far away, productions typically use standard-grade bills. The iconic money scene from "Breaking Bad" uses these bills, which were rented from Gregg and ISS. These bills look real from afar, but up close are obviously fake, with lots of clear differences when compared to the real thing. The portrait on the bill is poor quality compared to the real one. And instead of "one hundred dollars," it just reads "one hundred." The smaller details on the bill are also altered. The seals are a different design, and the signatures on the bill have been changed. Then there are the obvious additions, like the prominently displayed "for motion picture use only."
In fact, if you zoom in to this scene from "Breaking Bad," while it's blurry, you can actually see that each bill says "for motion picture use only." These changes should keep the Secret Service away, but they also mean standard fake bills are no good for close-ups. So for those shots, movies will often use high-grade bills. High-grade bills are identical to real money but are printed on only one side so that they can't be confused with the real thing. Like the one we showed you earlier, which was printed by RJR Props in Atlanta.
Bilson: I see fake money used all the time, and I think it is appalling, because I'm a property master, and I want things to be authentic and accurate and look right.
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