Carlito Can’t Count
I just got to get this off my chest because it’s been bothering the hell out of me for a long time.
In the final scene of Carlito’s Way, Al Pacino is dying on the Amtrak platform and slips Penelope Ann Miller $70,000 in cash from the vault to raise the unborn baby. But in my estimation, this wad looks like maybe $20,000, at most. Seventy grand would be like two bricks stacked on top of each other. There’s no way this wad is anywhere close to $70 grand.
Relieved. Whew — now, I feel much better.
Unless there are $500 or $1,000 notes in there. US govt ceased producing them in 1969, but in 1975, they may still have been in circulation. The notes remained legal tender.
if you stack paper money, you can stack bill 231 per inch. $70,000 would be one brick about 3″ thick. But if it was $500s mostly behind that $100 in the scene, it could be 3/4″ thick and rollable.
NOLAN REPLIES:
Good addition. IMDB page notes that the scene with the money being removed from the vault shows wad of $50 bills. But they didn’t note the error in size of this wad just a few hours later, which looks to be $100s. Of course, there’s no way that a NYC bar and nightclub would be handling $500 bills back then. He accumulated the cash from the bar, so it had to be smaller bills. Isn’t this fun?
— ND