Production
"The Great Money Caper" was written by Carolyn Omine and directed by Michael Polcino. It was first broadcast on the Fox network in the United States on December 10, 2000.
Originally, the episode would be about pool hustling, however as writing ensued, the script went through several incarnation until the Simpsons writers settled on the grifting story seen in the episode. Omine read several books about grifters for preparation for writing the episode. The other writers also prepared themselves by watching several heist films, including House of Games, Paper Moon and The Sting, the latter two of which are referenced in the episode. For example, the revelation that Devon Bradley, the FBI agent in the episode who is revealed to be a con artist, was inspired by such films.
In a scene in the episode, Homer and Bart exit the Magic Palace's gift shop, only to end up in another gift shop. The scene was based on an experience of the episode's show runner Mike Scully, who, in order to exit the Lance Burton Theatre after a magic show, had to pass through a gift shop. The ending scene of the episode went through several changes and was as a result completed late in the episode's production. The writers had conceived the courtroom scene, but they were stuck trying to come up with an ending after Skinner had been shot. They eventually decided that the trial was a scam staged by the townspeople, and Simpsons writer George Meyer pitched the surfing scene that closed the episode.
Read more about this topic: The Great Money Caper
Famous quotes containing the word production:
“From the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
—Charles Darwin (1809–1882)
“An art whose limits depend on a moving image, mass audience, and industrial production is bound to differ from an art whose limits depend on language, a limited audience, and individual creation. In short, the filmed novel, in spite of certain resemblances, will inevitably become a different artistic entity from the novel on which it is based.”
—George Bluestone, U.S. educator, critic. “The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film,” Novels Into Film, Johns Hopkins Press (1957)
“The repossession by women of our bodies will bring far more essential change to human society than the seizing of the means of production by workers.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)