"SHOW BUSINESS," AN OLD Hollywood saw has it, "is high school with money." In an industry motored by equal parts ego, envy and status lust, a Hollywood player's coffer has always been of interest to voyeurs of excess. But now wages for stars and studio bosses have spiraled toward the gross national products of several small underdeveloped countries, and fiscal unreality has percolated down to the screen itself. Story lines feature sums of money that have no more connection to life as most people know it than do space aliens or fairy godmothers.
In "Shallow Grave," a thriller set in Scotland that will open on Friday, three young professionals sharing an apartment in Edinburgh find a suitcase gorged with £50 notes in the room of a new flatmate who has died. The remaining roommates, who are best friends, decide to dispose of the body and keep the cash. But friendships perish under the weight of the apparently huge amount of money.
Initially, perhaps in keeping with the current fiscal unreality, the film's director, Danny Boyle, had asked his props people to mock up £2.5 million (roughly $4 million) in £50 notes. "They started," he said; "then they told me they'd need a small lavatory to hold it all. So we decided to leave it unspecified."
The boldest recent statement of the new economic idiocy may be "Dumb and Dumber," a box-office smash about two quarter-wits, Lloyd (played by Jim Carrey) and Harry (Jeff Daniels), who stumble upon a briefcase filled with ransom money. Giddy, Lloyd pays $250,000 in cash for a Lamborghini and hands out clumps of currency for tips. When he is moved to tears, he dries his eyes with crumpled $100 bills.
No one, of course, wants cinema verite from a master of slapstick like Mr. Carrey. But whereas film makers used to bow to how money was actually used, more recent Hollywood story lines seem based on Life, the old Milton Bradley board game designed to mirror daily living, except that participants played with fistfuls of $100,000 bills, each bearing a picture of Art Linkletter.
While current F.B.I. statistics show that the average bank robbery yields only $3,039, no self-respecting heist movie would dare offer such stakes. In Hollywood the yardstick most often used is the $640 million in negotiable bearer bonds sought by the bad guys in "Die Hard," the 1988 thriller starring Bruce Willis.
"Ever since 'Die Hard' there's been an increasing sense of inflation in scripts," said Michael France, who with Sylvester Stallone wrote the screenplay for "Cliffhanger" (1993), which featured Mr. Stallone scaling mountains in search of $100 million pilfered by John Lithgow, who plays a crazed intelligence expert, and his gang of thieves. "You can no longer go into a pitch meeting and talk about a story revolving around $1 million," said Mr. France. "Now it's got to be about hundreds of millions or billions."
In "Shaft" (1971) the private eye Richard Roundtree is able to buy critical help with a double sawbuck from an informant who says, "There's nothing I won't do for $20." In the recently released "A Low Down Dirty Shame," Keenen Ivory Wayans's sendup of the blaxploitation genre, Shame (Mr. Wayans) can't get his informant to squawk for less than $20 million.
Even in independent films, the supposed last bastion of reality, the decimal points are moving ever right. Take "The Usual Suspects," directed by Bryan Singer. An entry at this year's Sundance Film Festival, it features an offer of $91 million to five men for stealing drugs off a boat.
Increasingly, economic reality, like narrative sense, seems a quaint relic from those olden-day movies when a dollar was a dollar. "Money in these action films is now just another prop or jarring special effect, like watching a car blow up," said Art Simon, a professor of film studies at Montclair State University, in New Jersey. "Plausibility doesn't matter."
The price of love -- or at least of seduction -- has also skyrocketed. In "Double Indemnity" (1944), Fred MacMurray had only to write up an insurance premium to seem to win the love of the femme fatale Barbara Stanwyck. By 1990, in "Pretty Woman," Richard Gere ponied up $3,000 for a week's worth of Julia Roberts. Two years later came "Honeymoon in Las Vegas," in which James Caan offered to forgive a $65,000 gambling debt from Nicolas Cage in exchange for a weekend with Sarah Jessica Parker. And by last year's "Indecent Proposal," the price for Robert Redford to bed Demi Moore for a night had gone to $1 million.
The large dollar amounts are a simple cover-up for stories that aren't worth telling in the first place, according to Allen Hughes. Mr. Hughes, with his brother Albert, directed 1993's highly lauded "Menace II Society" and recently finished shooting a film in New York called "Dead Presidents." Titled after the street jargon for cash, the script called for a heist of a relatively paltry $250,000.
"Those out-of-control Hollywood movies make the money pay off big but not the movie," Mr. Hughes said. "They'll make everything large except the characters. They'll have characters doing $60 million robberies because they think that will make the audience lean back in their seats and go, 'Whoa, $60 million!' "
In Hollywood this is the unconventional wisdom. Nowadays suspending an audience's sense of disbelief must extend not just toward the money but toward its treatment. In "City Slickers II" (1994), Billy Crystal and Jon Lovitz almost blew their search for $20 million in lost Old West gold because they neglected to make a 10-cent photocopy of their treasure map.
Even history isn't safe in money-mad Hollywood. Take last year's "Maverick," set in what appears to be the late 1800's, in which Mel Gibson plays the frontier charmer headed for a high-stakes riverboat poker game. Mr. Gibson flashes and sometimes loses a cash wad of $22,000 (a grubstake of about $350,000 today) that he has procured inexplicably. His nonchalance over the cash might be explainable if he could easily get more. However, Mr. Gibson spends most of his time scraping up the $3,000 he'll need to meet the $25,000 entry fee for the poker game.
Along the way, others also brandish huge bankrolls; even a small group of pious settlers carry $30,000 in their wagon train. And the grand prize in the poker tournament is $500,000, which is the equivalent of more than $7 million in 1995. According to Howard Schwartz, the research director of the Gambler's Book Club, in Las Vegas, there was no tournament with those stakes during that period in history.
SUCH CASH GRANDIOSITY in scripts wasn't always the case even in the comic-book tradition of action movies. In 1974's "Taking of Pelham One Two Three," Robert Shaw and three accomplices hijacked a New York subway car in a plan to reward themselves with $1 million. Transported two decades later to a shanghaied bus in 1994's "Speed," this story now finds the ransom for hijacking public transportation at $3.7 million for just one bad guy (Dennis Hopper).
The reason for this particular case of inflation may be found by comparing the police officers who nab the hijackers in the two movies. In "Pelham" Walter Matthau played a dowdy, doughy desk cop who triumphed in head games. In "Speed" Keanu Reeves was a buffed commando-type officer able to perform Wallenda-like stunts in the face of high explosives, ultra-speed chases and airplane detonations.
"If there's all that action, it has to be for a big payday," said the director and screenwriter Mr. France, whose $100 million jackpot in "Cliffhanger" was accompanied by a midair airplane explosion, a helicopter crash and a villain impaled on a stalactite.
HOW DID MR. FRANCE come up with an actual figure? Originally he scripted a booty of $50 million in $50 bills. He did his research by carefully measuring and calculating how many $50 bills could be crammed into three suitcases that would hold it. However after Mr. Stallone rewrote the script, Mr. France remembered, the suitcases were filled with $100 million.
One reason for the inflation may be that movie people are accustomed to dealing with a lot of money in their own lives. Would Mr. Stallone, recently given $20 million simply to star in an action movie for Savoy, play a character who gallops through avalanches, climbs peaks and swims beneath the ice for anything less than $100 million?
Amy Holden Jones, the screenwriter for "Indecent Proposal," said Hollywood is psychologically wired to improbable amounts of cold cash: "It's a gold-rush town." And so she was left to pen the tale of a man who purchases a night with a woman for $1 million.
"One of the themes of my script was that money can't buy you love," she recalled. "But when they cast Robert Redford, the theme became that money can buy you love." The film makers, she said, "sided with the millionaire."
Yet Ms. Jones refused to blame the director, Adrian Lyne, for the casting choice. Movie customers, she contended, have given up rooting for the underdog. "The American audience doesn't feel ambiguous about money at all," she said. "They always want the rich guy to get the girl."