A column about curious stories from the worlds of science, technology, and film. Today’s “random film of the day” is William Friedkin’s 1985 neo-noir To Live and Die in L.A., based on a novel by Gerald Petievich, a fifteen-year veteran of the Secret Service who wrote the book about matters close to its plot. Budget — 6 million dollars; box office — 17. Variety called it “a rich man's Miami Vice” at the time — gloss without warmth or soul, according to the verdict of New York reviewers — but decades later the film became a cult neo-noir classic, with one of the decade’s finest car chases.
Now another date. August 1985: while the film is shooting, the Washington Post runs a piece titled “L.A. Streets Paved With Hollywood Gold.” The Secret Service is investigating counterfeit money entering circulation, and the trail leads to the set of a film — the very one about hunting a counterfeiter. Service spokesman Robert Snow put it with lethal calm: “We know of no other instance in which a motion picture company used in the production of a film counterfeit money that looked so real.”
The coincidence is not superficial. A film about an agent crossing the line that separates him from the criminal produced exactly the same mechanism in real life: a studio hiring a convicted counterfeiter to print more than a million convincing dollars; a teenager trying to pay for groceries with a fake; agents paying nighttime visits to the film’s property master; and an ending without charges. I checked where all this led — and found something better than an anecdote: a cyclical story in which Hollywood steps on the same rake twice, sixteen years apart, while the regulator catches up with the industry one film too late each time.
There are two things worth remembering about Gerald Petievich. First: he was not a cop with a writing hobby, but a professional with fifteen years in the Secret Service — protecting presidents, investigating counterfeiting, serving as an attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Paris, and representing the Service on the Los Angeles interagency organized-crime task force. Second: he studied Russian and history at California State University, served in Army counterintelligence in West Germany, and received a commendation for his work during the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. In Paris, he began writing novels in the mornings — his first, Money Men, was later adapted as Boiling Point. But what mattered most in this biography for our story was something else: the man writing a thriller about hunting a counterfeiter had fifteen years of real hunts behind him — and firsthand knowledge of the people being hunted.
Friedkin read the novel in galley proofs — before publication — and immediately wanted to adapt it. He bought the rights, wrote the first draft of the screenplay himself, but consulted Petievich so extensively that he ultimately gave the novelist a co-writing credit. The famous line about the Service’s “surrealism” was his: an agent who protects the President of the United States in the morning, plays cards with him and trades jokes, then spends the evening catching a petty crook in a poor neighborhood over fifty dollars’ worth of bad credit cards — the director thought that was material every bit as good as any noir. MGM gave him a budget of just six million dollars, so there were no top-tier stars in the film: William Petersen got his first leading role, while Willem Dafoe turned in one of his last performances before Platoon, which brought him his first Oscar nomination.
For the film’s central sequence — Masters methodically printing twenties in a country house — Friedkin wanted not plausibility, but authenticity. Petievich found the contact: as a former agent who had put several counterfeiters behind bars, he knew whom to call. A consultant turned up quickly — because he did not have to look far: a convicted counterfeiter, freshly out of prison, took on the job every prop master dreams of and no producer dares request — printing real counterfeit money for a movie. A funny detail from his post-prison résumé: manager of a print shop — in a neighborhood you would be wise not to enter at night without a police escort.
The process was authentically laboratory-grade. The paper was rag stock, a cotton-linen banknote base that the consultant procured and the studio paid for; the inks were the very same ones used for real printed currency sheets. The bills were printed in sheets: one side first, then, after drying, the other — gray and green. “Those twenties were as good as anything the government was printing at the time,” Friedkin recalled. The bills were given deliberate markings so that, on close inspection, they could not be mistaken for genuine currency. By various estimates, more than a million counterfeit dollars were printed.
That same man is on screen, too: in the close-ups of hands where Masters aligns the sheets and runs the impressions through, those are not Dafoe’s hands but the consultant’s. Dafoe, according to the director, honestly learned how to print money, but the master class was still handed over to the professional. The irony has three layers here: the government service, in the person of Petievich, brought into film production a man whom it had once considered a point of honor to imprison; a film about how hard it is to catch a counterfeiter hired a counterfeiter and gave him professional equipment; and the system that normally fights underground printing supervised and funded it in this case.
The money scattered across the soundstage floor — one- and two-sided sheets, trimmings, misprints — made its way out. Someone on the crew took about five hundred dollars’ worth home as souvenirs and shoved it into a desk drawer. What followed was a script no script doctor could invent: the man’s teenage son found the bills, called a friend, and went to a grocery store. Teenage logic, ironclad: Twinkies. They handed the cashier a one-sided twenty — half a banknote, a gray blank without its face side.
The store manager followed protocol: the call to the Treasury took minutes. The kids, naturally, immediately named their father — and their father was the film’s property master, the person officially responsible for the counterfeit money: Barry Bedig. According to Friedkin, for “weeks, if not months,” Secret Service agents came to Bedig’s house in the Valley: the first visits came at three or four in the morning — a knock at the door, “Mr. Bedig, Treasury Department, Secret Service, we’d like to talk to you” — followed by interrogations. For weeks, a grown man had to explain to federal agents that there was such a profession as making movies, and that movies sometimes needed props resembling money. “Nobody prints money like that. Not for any movie.” The cashier at the store had not understood. The agents found it even harder to understand: in their world, money like that simply was not printed.
From Bedig, the trail quickly led to the director. Then they began calling Friedkin — first the Treasury, then the U.S. Attorney’s Office. By then, Friedkin was ready: Petievich, a man who knew the procedure from the inside, had told him in advance what to do. For every call without a warrant — demand a warrant. “Do you have a warrant? No? Then go get one and come back with it.” The prosecutors tried to apply pressure through his “willingness to cooperate” — Friedkin shut that down with the same key. They had nothing to bring: the money was made for the film, marked, stored, and destroyed; there was no crime. “We’re not counterfeiters,” Friedkin later summed up. “But the guy who made the money was convicted of counterfeiting and did time. So the money and the process in this film are completely authentic.”
At the same time, there was a more mundane props audit: of the more than one million dollars in prop money, most was burned after shooting ended, but some of it was unaccounted for. In that arithmetic, the five hundred “leaked” dollars were a drop — but a drop that entered circulation: people really did try to spend them, and it was this episode that the Washington Post publicly linked to the film in August 1985. Snow cautiously stated the Service’s position at the time: “The allegation is that someone took money from the set and it entered circulation... That too is part of the investigation — the company’s use itself of theatrical money that looks quite real.” Friedkin, for his part, noted that the Treasury had been offered the chance to review the film and remove anything it considered a threat to national security — after which the investigation was quietly closed, with no one charged.
To a producer today, such freedom would seem fantastical. The current regime is tight: currency illustrations are allowed only if they are one-sided, less than three-quarters or more than one and a half times the linear dimensions of the original, and if all plates, negatives, and digital files are destroyed after use (18 U.S.C. § 504 and 31 CFR § 411.1; things became stricter with the Counterfeit Detection Act of 1992). Prop bills are now marked “For motion picture purposes only” or “Copy,” and their resemblance to real banknotes is monitored more closely than plot quality — because the Secret Service is legally responsible for counterfeiting and reads stacks of movie money as a potential threat.
In 1985, the modern regime was not yet in force: the Counterfeit Detection Act, which established the current strict rules for color copies, did not arrive until 1992. The basic bans on making and passing counterfeits with intent to deceive existed before then; the film rested on different grounds — the money was intended for shooting, not fraud, it was marked, and most of it was later destroyed. Even so, the fact that a federal agency spent months figuring out what had happened on the set shows just how close film had come to the line.
The story did not end with a moral. Sixteen years later, in 2001, the production of Rush Hour 2 in Las Vegas blew up prop bills with a face value of around a billion dollars. Some of them blew beyond the set — and the people who picked them up took them into stores. “The product was too close to the real thing. The bills were successfully passed,” stated Assistant Special Agent Chuck Ortman. The Service ordered California’s Independent Studio Services to stop printing, recall, and destroy every bill it had produced; the story was covered by the NYT, BBC, and AP.
Funny how the mechanism of the leak had not changed since 1985: in Friedkin’s case, one person took money from the set, and a teenager found it with a friend; in 2001, the bills were carried by the wind into a crowd of extras and bystanders. What changed was the scale and quality of the counterfeits. The modern rules already existed by 2001, but the scandal revealed something unpleasant: even formal restrictions and printed warnings cannot replace control over props on set. The pattern — “Hollywood steps on a rake, the regulator catches up” — played out twice, and both times with the same agency involved.
The ending of the film is suspiciously similar to its production history. In the movie, Agent Chance dies without ever seeing that his methods are more contagious than he thought: his partner Vukovich, the story’s only “straight” cop, takes what was stolen from the counterfeiter and carries on from the point where Chance stopped. In reality, though, it all ended happily — and far more tellingly: the system interrogated itself, found the culprit in the mirror, and went home. In the middle of it stood a property master whose door was knocked on at four in the morning for months, just to ask: “Do you really make movies?”
Friedkin’s rule — “the best cops think like criminals” — worked literally: in order to film the truth about counterfeiting, the movie had to become, for one take, the very thing it depicted. You could not invent better advertising for Petievich’s method — “write about what you’ve caught yourself”: a novel written by an agent became a film investigated by that agent’s former colleagues. The circle closed not in the credits, but in the files of a federal case that no one opened and no one closed with a conviction.