Mad Money (film)

The film begins with the suspects getting caught and being interrogated. Then it flashes back three years earlier and the film continues forward from there, interspersed with occasional bits from the interrogation.

Three years before getting caught, Bridget Cardigan (Diane Keaton) lived a comfortable upper middle-class life until her husband Don Cardigan (Ted Danson) was "downsized" from his position and sank into debt. Salina, (Sylvia Castro Galan) the Cardigan's housekeeper, check has bounced once again. Selina confronts Bridget and suggests she take a job as a janitor at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City.

On her first day on the job, Bridget hatches a scheme to steal worn-out dollar bills slated for destruction. For her team, she chooses Nina Brewster, (Queen Latifah) who works the dollar bill shredder, and Jackie Truman, (Katie Holmes), who takes bill carts from the Secret Service room to the shredding room. It takes some work to persuade Nina to join, but Jackie joins them quickly.

The plan is that in the Secret Service room, Bridget will switch a cart's official Master-brand lock with a nearly identical lock she purchased at Home Depot. Bridget will tell Jackie the cart number and give Nina the official lock. When Jackie gets the chosen cart, she dumps some bills from the cart into a trash can before taking the cart to Nina, who then uses Bridget's key to open it, restores the official lock, and then proceeds to shred the remaining bills. Meanwhile, Bridget, in the course of her janitorial duties, retrieves the dumped bills from the trash and splits them among Nina and Jackie in the women's restroom.

Their first robbery is a success though the take is not as big as they had hoped. However, they're emboldened to do it repeatedly. Once Don and Bridget pay off their debt, Don suggests they stop before they get caught. Bridget rejects this idea and persuades Nina and Jack to keep going. They almost get caught but they end up cutting in Barry (Roger Cross), one of the security guards, who is attracted to Nina.

A Federal Bank Examiner shows up at a party at Bridget's house, and the next day, Jackie sees him at work. The Examiner confronts Glover (Stephen Root), the manager of the Federal Bank, who is unwilling as a matter of professional pride to admit anyone has stolen a single bill out of his bank. Tipped off, that night Bridget and her accomplices begin trying to get rid of all the loot stashed in their houses, but the cops move in before all the evidence is destroyed. Bridget escapes but the others get caught.

Bridget hires a tax attorney to defend them. The lawyer gets Bridget, Don, Nina, Berry, Jackie and Jackie's husband Bob Truman (Adam Rothenberg) off the hook for their crimes, because neither the law enforcement nor the examiner can prove that the large stash of cash in their homes came from the Federal Reserve Bank. It isn't illegal to have a couple of hundred thousand dollars in cash lying around inside a private residence. However, they spent a large sum of that stolen cash to buy expensive objects and improvements on their houses and didn't pay the taxes for them because they couldn't justify the income. The IRS demands they pay their taxes, which turn out to equal in the amount to the money that still remains.

Eight months later, Bridget reveals to Nina and Jackie that she had stashed away much of the stolen cash in the basement of a friend's bar.

Hot Money (2001), the original UK TV film produced by Granada Television, is based on the true story of three women who worked at the Bank of England and embarked on a plan to steal thousands of pounds of banknotes that were due to be destroyed at the bank's incinerating plant in Essex.^[4] No one except these women know the exact details of the theft. In the director's commentary for the Mad Money DVD, director Callie Khouri credits producer Jay Cohen with having brought the TV film to her attention and obtaining the rights to adapt it.^[5]

Khouri and Cohen worked for five years to bring a deliberately Americanized version of Hot Money to the screen using various writers. Both Diane Keaton and Queen Latifah were attached early on to the project and writers began designing the characters specifically around the two actresses.^[6]