I have been cast in a local theater production. In looking over the props list, I see one listed as a billfold with currency. Since the show is set in London 1922, I presume these bills would be pound notes.
I know the theater has tons of theater-style American dollars, which can pass for “real” at a distance of 50 feet or so. Where can I find toy money or prop money that would sorta kinda pass for British money 50 feet away? I’d even be willing to print something half-assed close on my printer, but I honestly have no idea what British paper money looks like.
Note: I am not asking for techniques about counterfeiting or creating lookalike fake currency, just something that would fool a theater audience at a distance.
Ebay is worth a look…start off with ebay.co.uk and expand the search to worldwide (and banknotes are listed under ‘coins’). This is the kind of thing you’d want, if you just need a few notes. If you want to start throwing around bunches of money, it’s a different matter!
(Oh, and if they say they post to UK only, contact them and ask if they would be able to post to the US - ‘post to UK’ is the default option when creating a listing from the UK, and they will probably be happy to oblige, if you make it clear you’ll pay the full postage)
This link will take you to Wikipedia’s page on British currency. Click on whichever ones you think might work best, and do some playing around in Paint or whatever program you may have.
Or you could head down to your library and try to find this book by Thurston James on prop making. I seem to remember he has an article on making fake foreign currency.
But before you do any of that, first ask if you’ll really be needing to use currency. My experience in community theatre (23 years and counting) is that we usually use about 1/3 of the prop list that comes with the script.
What would be wrong with finding some very small JPEG or GIF images of a pound note, like this one, blowing them up to an appropriate size with PAINT and printing them off in color? Up close they’d be completely unpassable; nobody could possibly be fooled. But from a distance, they’d resemble the real deal enough. Anyone know if there would be any legal issue with this?
That’s a good point, actually. I’m still relatively confident that these props will be used since they are the focal point of the entire scene: Rose goes to her husband Frederick and asks for money to go on holiday.
In 1922, I don’t think there were 1 pound notes. The smallest note was a 5 pound. Just going from memory. And those suckers were BIG. I have one in stock. WAY big.
Nah, don’t use Monopoly money. It’s very recognizable. And don’t bother counterfeiting any real Brit money either. Just call a prop house and tell them you need some fictitious currency. As long as it isn’t green, or pink, from 50 feet away no one is going to think twice about it. The audience will believe whatever they are told to believe, as long as you don’t give them any reason to doubt it. It’s not as if anyone in the audience will pull a Brit pound note out and exclaim “that’s not a real pound!”
Most larger prop houses, and perhaps some of the theatre houses in Seattle, would likely have some fictitious currency on hand that would work for you.
You can obtain permission to reproduce Bank of England notes for purposes such as stage money etc from this link. Since the notes are so old, and don’t need to be particularly accurate, I don’t see why you would have a problem.
On the other hand, since the notes in question would, I think, look like these, (ie. very simple designs, black ink on white paper, printed one side only) it should be pretty easy to knock up something that would look appropriate from a short distance, without being an actual reproduction. If you have a fancy script font, you could put together something in Word, even. Since the audience won’t see it up close, you can use any wording you like.
I know you can’t make color copies of US dollars. Black and white is okay, but they have to be smaller than 75% of normal size, or 150% greater than normal size. cite
Besides, you might not be able to do it at all if you use Photoshop or Paintshop Pro, or several other pieces of software.
This certainly wouldn’t apply to the OP replicating early-20th century banknotes! The system relies on particular patterns of circles on the banknotes, which the software identifies (on a british £10 they’re somewhere near the watermark, and on the £20 they’re the noteheads of the music).
