Twenty Bucks - Production

Production

The film was based on a screenplay that was nearly 60 years old. It was originally written by Endre Bohem in 1935, but was never filmed; his son, Leslie, discovered it in the 1980s and revised it, modernizing the language and some of the plot. This version of the screenplay was then used for the film. The elder Bohem wrote his spec script soon after the release of If I Had a Million.

In one of the production featurettes, Rosenfeld says that the bills used in the production were figured into the production costs of the film. The producers obtained several bills with consecutive serial numbers, as well as "every thousandth bill" so that some bills would have the right first few digits of the serial number and others the right last few digits. The bills were then selectively damaged in specific ways as required by the script. When they were done with the bills, Rosenfeld says the bills were dropped into the petty cash fund money.