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Coins in books and Films


Ætheling

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I don't mean books or films about coins here, but rather have you ever been reading a fiction book or watching a film and suddenly what turns up?

 

 

Well one notable example i can think of straight off of the top of my noggin, anyone here read Stephen King's It?

 

 

The book is set in two decades, the late 1950s and the 1970s. The characters are having to relive a nightmare that happened to them as children in the late 1950s. And one character in a philosophical moment remembers how his father (or grandfather, i forget which) gave him some of the old silver dollars, King's description of the coins leaves you in no doubt that he's talking about Morgans and Peace dollars here. And if i recall correctly the character was carrying one around as a pocketpiece. The coins also ended up as part of the storyline rather than being just a side reminicense. The 1970s adult character remembered he'd had these coins as a child but he can't remember what happened to them. But as the horrors of their childhood that they'd thought they'd dealt with in the 1950s seemed to be resurfacing the memories began to trickle back, memories that should have been long buried and thus slowly the character remembers what happened to the dollars. They had melted them to make bullets.

 

If you need to know more i suggest you read the book. :ninja: (It's a good one!)

 

So have you suddenly found coins turning up in stories or even films (and getting special mention) when you least expected it?

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The dime in Titanic is a 1912 Philadelphia in AU. The Director has it in a protective holder and carries it as a watch fob. Because of the way Kate Winslet was holding it in the movie the date was not visible.

 

I often notice coins used in tv and movies. I have frequently seen them used on Gunsmoke (It's the best thing on at 5AM while I'm at work.) Now Gunsmoke is set in the 1870's and usually the coins shown are proper for the period. But there was one episode a while back where they were playing poker betting 20 dollars a hand where they showed a clear image of the table and they were using Saint-Gaudens Double eagles. In 1870's Kansas!

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Yummy!

I've been wanting to do this thread for a while!

 

A couple of film coin appearances I have taken note of...

In Seabiscuit, when Tobey Maguire wins a race on a farm he tells his parents that he won two dollars and he holds up two Peace dollars to prove it.

 

In the Untouchables when Eliot Ness makes Frank Nitti empty his pockets outside the courtroom, he dumps two mercury dimes and a SLQ. All well circulated and reverse side up.

 

On last weeks episode of Rome Cleopatra was admiring the profile of Caesar on a coin.

I can't think of how many times I have tried to spot the coinage types and failed while watching Deadwood.

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I can remember them in television shows, and in Movies, how many of us stopped the Titanic DVD at the scene where Kate Winslet hands Leonardo de Crapio a Barber Dime just to get the date off of the coin

 

 

 

And I thought she just gave him a couple of thrupenny bits. :ninja:

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Goonies was on television yesterday, and they found one-eyed willy's pirate ship with all sorts of gold coins, though they were supposed to be Spanish, so I couldn't tell exactly what they were!

 

And didn't Titanic also have the large size notes at the end when the bad guys were trying to bribe their way to a lifeboat? To me those looked like series 1914 FRNs which would have been 2 years too early for them.

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Most recently, the film with Matthew MacConaughey (sp?) in which a celebrity salvage crew is in Nigeria and an artifact dealer shows the central character what is supposed to be a "Confederate gold dollar". The coin is the size of a Morgan, supposedly struck in gold as a specimen, one of six struck at a nonexistent Richmond mint.

 

I had already given the film about twelve raspberries for the high BS level (less than 15 minutes into the sorry thing), and this scene contributed to my decision shortly thereafter to stop wasting time watching it.

 

Hollywood seems infested with imbeciles who have no knowledge of history, or of anything else besides Marxist social justice dogma.....

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My most disappointing coin moment in movies was the silver dollar that Two-Face flips in Batman Forever.

Instead of using an existing silver dollar design they made up their own ugly one.

Well, I should add that compared to everything else in Batman Forever the coin actually looks not too bad!! :ninja:

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Goonies was on television yesterday, and they found one-eyed willy's pirate ship with all sorts of gold coins, though they were supposed to be Spanish, so I couldn't tell exactly what they were!

 

 

 

That's after they found all those coins with Martin Sheen on them. Which makes me think, the Goonies was filmed in 1985. If they really had been down a wishing well and people had been throwing money down there presumably for several decades, how many of those coins would be silver?

 

Forget the gold coins on the ship, i'd be scouring through the money in the well for the silver! :ninja:

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It's kind of funny that this thread started. I just watched Sahara. And a few weeks ago I was watching a show called Wild West Tech, about the old west and they showed a robbery, the "cowboy" had a stack of bills flipping through them it happened real fast but Patrick said, "look at that!" He paused it and they were the brand new 50's. We got a big kick out of that.

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