The movies do it, and the TV does it. Why during the course of a ransom, or a bank robbery, or a huge drug deal, is the money shown, obviously, not real? You see stacks and stacks of banded bucks in packs of fifties or hundreds, and it is ‘stage money’. Is there a law against showing real US currency on the screen, and, if so, why?
My WAG would be that the People In Charge don’t want to have stacks of fifties or hundreds just laying around for any stagehand or camera man or caterer to shove in a pocket.
even if your rich, which is easyer? getting stacks and stacks of bills, or just drawing a few dollars for a shot that will last 20 seconds at most.
haveing thousands of dollars sitting around it a bad idea. especially if its for a minor minor shot.
It just seems to me, and I’m not in the business…they could make up a 2 inch stack of blank paper and, at least, put a real bill on the top, no? I just find it so obvious, that there must be a law against it. 
I’ve seen real money in movies. They showed real 100 dollar bills in a suitcase in The Sting, for example. (Ironically, though, the 100 dollar bills shown were modern-for-the-time 1970s currency, but the movie was set in the 1930s.)
My suspicion is that Johnny Bravo is right. However, I gotta wonder whether a shot of a bill projected onto a movie screen at just the right magnification to be actual size wouldn’t run afoul of U.S. anti-counterfeiting laws.
There were Treasury regulations about photographing a bill, because the photo could be used to make printing plates. So in older movies, they used stage money. In addition, audiences weren’t so hysterical about “realism” as we are today, and didn’t care that the money wasn’t real money.
I suspect the Treasury relaxed the rule, especially since there are plenty of easier ways to counterfeit.
The studios may have wanted to save money, but it wouldn’t have been all that expensive to have a suitcase filled with 20s – you just need one legitimate bill atop a stack of blank sheets of money-sized paper to make it look like a stack of them. So for about $400, you could make a suitcase look like it was filled with millions.
This concept can really ruin the circumstance it shows up in.
Case in point, There is a local “Cash for your junk car” commercial, however, the only currency that changes hands is one- 1 Dollar Bill (US). A friend and I both saw this, and laughed at it. Then again, if it is that much of a clunker…
(The bill, or what was seen of it, looked “real”)
Totally un-related comment;
The movie “Memento” has a scene that uses real US 20 dollar bills. There is a continuity error in the scene that shows an “old” 20, and a newer “Big Face” 20 in place of each other. I have never seen this first hand, and I own the DVD.
I’ve always wondered why movies use funny money too. There is no law against photographing real money as long as the resulting image (in this case a 35 or 70mm film negative and positive) bear no approximation to the size of the real thing. You can even print micro or macro money on a printing press with impunity as anyone who has purchased a currency catalog (filled with pictures of specimens) from a coin shop can attest.
As previous posters have noted, the rules against photographing U.S. currency used to be very sweeping. In some films from the 1940s one can see, on close examination, that Mexican currency is being used.