Fred Reed

A relatively unknown actor won an Academy Award several years ago with his memorable refrain “Show me the money! Show me the money!” When Cuba Gooding Jr.’s character, Rod Tidwell, hopped around the locker room repeating that line, it became a cultural event. Its message resounded across the landscape like a tsunami tidal wave. It wasn’t simply a football player spouting off to his agent Jerry Maguire (played by Tom Cruise).

Gooding’s lyrical, “Show me the money! Show me the money!” from the 1996 Columbia-TriStar film Jerry Maguire resonated in our culture. Standup comics and grocery clerks alike popped up, “Show me the money! Show me the money!” A TV series with that name sprung up quickly and aired, too. Tidwell, David Letterman and the teenager at your local supermarket needn’t have worried. Hollywood has been showing us the money for more than a century now.

In fact, movie money is often one of the key factors in cinema plots. Characters on the silver screen fight for it, lie for it, marry for it, steal it, counterfeit it, bet with it, burn it. But movie money, like its counterpart in the real world, is more than dollar signs and electronic blips on bank accounts. The green stuff must be seen, smelled, fondled and caressed. To fill that important role in film after film, Hollywood’s storytellers have produced a wealth of imitation greenbacks, which has become a diverse, colorful, and eminently collectable series.

Show Me the Money! The Standard Catalog of Motion Picture, TV, Stage & Advertising Prop Money reveals for the first time just how graphically interesting these theatrical prop notes are in their own right. . . .

Money Makes the World Go Around

“Money may (indeed) make the world go around,” as the Krazy Kat Klub Master of Ceremonies (played by Joel Grey in Cabaret) sang in the 1972 Bob Fosse hit. At least Hollywood appears to think so. Moviemakers have turned out hundreds and hundreds of film plots revolving around the green stuff. ’Twas ever thus. Way back in 1914 a film asked the question Money God--Or Do Riches Bring Happiness? Tinseltown has been looking at the matter cinematically over and over since.

A quick check of movies released since then shows more than 300 films with the word “money” in their titles. These range from 1915 when two silents with the same name, simply Money, were put out by rival studios on opposite sides of the Atlantic. Since then, there have been eight more pictures released with that provocative title, Money, including a 1990 film starring Eric Stoltz, and a 1993 Indian film with that moniker. But it doesn’t stop there. There’s a lot more money reveling going on in Hollywood’s view. There are also Money, Money, and even Money, Money, Money.

Other financially motivated motion pictures run the gamut from Money and Mystery (1917) to Money and Power (1998). Evidently money can’t always buy tranquility. At least five movies have been called Money Mad or Money Madness, while a pair bore the title Money Mania. Don’t forget The Money Tree. Bet we all wish we knew where that was located!

Although many of these films are comedies, Hollywood also takes its money seriously, if somewhat ambivalently, too. There’s 1999’s hopeful Money Buys Happiness, which was countered resoundingly two years later in 2001 by a film titled Money Is Not Everything. Hollywood has offered up money for every disposition. It has released films titled Bad Money, No Money, Big Money, Hot Money and of course Mo’ Money.

Perhaps you find it difficult to acquire. Check out one of the more than a dozen films called Easy Money, or the several called Fast Money and Quick Money. Don’t forget Free Money, Good Money, Hush Money, Jinx Money, Lost Money or Milk Money (which will be long remembered for the two juvenile males who attempt to use their lunch money to purchase the sexual services of Melanie Griffith!). This should not be confused with either of the movies entitled Milk and Money, or the recent made-for-TV film Beer Money. . . .

Often times the prop money may be only a supporting player, but sometimes it is the star. In The Money Game (MTI Home Video, 1998) film students try to launder faux cash created as props for a student movie. Boy do they get more than they bargained for when their prop money finds its way into a drug deal and the Mob comes after them with a vengeance. Graduating from $50,000 in fake twenties to a million dollars in bogus 100s, the larcenous students counter by attempting to swap their homemade paper for the Mob’s real dough with disastrous results.

In a recent segment of HBO’s sitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm, star Larry David is hauled off by police charged with passing a counterfeit bill. He had inadvertently spent prop notes from a Martin Scorsese production in which he’d played a mobster bribing a grave digger to move his deceased mother to a more agreeable plot in a Jewish cemetery.

A less dire example occurred when dashing screen character Tom Baxter (Jeff Daniels) walked off a New Jersey silver screen in The Purple Rose of Cairo (Orion Pictures, 1985) and attempted to buy a night on the town for new-found paramour Cecilia (Mia Farrow) at a dive called “Dine and Dance.” The waiter to whom Daniels offered a handful of prop money pulled from his jodhpurs thought something was amiss when the gentleman told him to take a 30 percent tip. Examining the bills, he called them “phony money;” and Cecilia, confronting her date with a dose of reality exclaimed: “They’re not real!” The pair dash out the door ahead of the waiter and irate restaurant manager and make their get-away. . . .

If that’s not enough to whet one’s pecuniary interests, add in the hundreds of other films that have sported the word “dollar” since 1910’s The Almighty Dollar and 1912’s slightly devalued The Mighty Dollar. Examples abound, like Esther Williams’ biography of naughty Annette Kellerman and her one-piece bathing suit, The Million Dollar Mermaid, or Walt Disney’s $1,000,000 Duck, and Michael Caine’s spy thriller The Billion Dollar Brain.

For the technically inquisitive, there’s How They make Dollar Bills (with Woody Allen, 1970), or A Day in the Life of a Dollar Bill (Oxford, 1972), or The Last of the Two Dollar Bills. Want cash? There’s Hard Cash, Spot Cash and dozens more of their ilk. Need currency? Check out Deadly Currency, or Foreign Currency. . . .

Memorable Money Shots

Money shots traditionally include scenes such as poker games, bank robberies, payoffs, ransoms and old time gangsters lighting up stogies with $100 bills. Today, with film fare in transition, money shots of drug buys, lap dances, and dollar bills stuffed in G-strings or rolled to snort coke have proliferated. The history of money in films predates the silver screen and Hollywood. In fact, Thomas Edison’s ca. 1895 kinetoscope movie of a cock fight clearly shows the two young sporting men in the background of the contest passing money wagering on the result of the action. . . .

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