Scene 1 (2:57-4:30): The True Story of a Real Fake

Welcome to the Steal!

Or still: “My escape [from an Atlanta prison] made the front page of one New York paper, ‘Frank Abagnale, known to police the world over [...] and who once flushed himself down an airline toilet to elude officers, is at large again…’ the story commenced.” (book “Catch Me If You Can”, page 204)

The former police chief of Houston once said of me: “Frank Abagnale could write a check on toilet paper, drawn on the Confederate States Treasury, sign it ‘U.R. Hooked’ and cash it at any bank in town, using a Hong Kong driver’s licence for identification.” (book “Catch Me If You Can”, page 91)

(Nowadays, some banks require all non-customers — people that don’t have an account with them — that come in to cash a check to leave their fingerprints in ink on the check. When somebody objects, the teller does not accept the check. According to F.B.I. statistics, this single security measure reduces check fraud instantly by 50%!)

Some extra info is found in Abagnale’s white paper “Check Fraud and Identity Theft, Volume III” (2004) (page 2): “I had 50 legitimate driver’s licences.”

In the interview included in the 2003 edition of the book, Abagnale claims about 80% of the movie is accurate (book “Catch Me If You Can”, page 214). In his foreword to “Catch Me If You Can — The Complete Screenplay” (page 8), he goes even further: “[...] 90% of the film is accurate. [...] the movie really captures my essence of the story.”

Notice the movie’s tagline, “The true story of a real fake”!

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The Float

As a check forger, Frank Abagnale was an absolute master and a true innovator: he was the first forger to exploit the routing of checks as indicated through numbers on the codeline. This type of fraud is now called “the float”.

Scene 3 — 17:40

Says Abagnale: “What landed me in jail was my other habit, which was my enthusiasm for passing bad checks. The main reason I adopted those guises was to give me credibility when I cashed hot checks — and to satisfy my great taste for women. Hotel clerks and merchants didn’t question pilots and doctors too closely. Through my various hustles, I passed something like $2.5 million worth of checks, a blizzard of paper that I scattered in earnest throughout all fifty states and twenty-six countries, all before I was legally allowed to drink. [The legal drinking age in the U.S. is 21.] I was proficient enough at cashing fraudulent checks that I earned the distinction of becoming one of the most hunted criminals by the F.B.I.” (book “The Art of the Steal”, page 6).

Scene 6 — 29:18

Abagnale used a number of aliases — he reportedly used 8 identities, basically variations such as Frank Adams, Dr. Frank Conners, Frank Williams, Robert Black, Robert Conrad and Robert Monjo. In the movie, he uses the aliases Frank Black, Frank Roberts and Frank Taylor. (Incidentally, Frank Taylor is also the name of the first pilot to get off the spaceship in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”!) For instance, during Abagnale’s aborted engagement party — he’s known to the family as Dr. Conners —, he admits to his fiancée Brenda Strong that he uses the aliases Frank Black and Frank Taylor when he’s traveling (scene 16, 1:36:12).

Scene 14 — 1:25:47

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The Basics: To Tell the Truth… on TV

In 1977, Abagnale appears on a TV show called “To Tell the Truth” to tell his amazing story. This TV quiz has a simple formula: three friends play the same character, people have to guess which of the three is for real.

Abagnale did appear on that program, here‘s the picture (signed by Abagnale!) that proves it. He’s the pilot in the middle. Here, one “impostor” is dressed as doctor, the second as pilot and the third as inmate.)

Not only that, Abagnale decided to write up a book about his life after he’d gone on another TV show, the famous “Tonight Show” with Johnny Carson (later presented by Jay Leno and now by Jimmy Fallon). His segment was scheduled for six minutes, but went on for 20! The next day, hundreds of people called the broadcasting company to ask where they could buy the book. There wasn’t any book to buy, but the many reactions gave Abagnale the idea to write one. (He could use the money because he was getting married at the time…)

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Frame Freeze: The Odyssey of a Movie

Abagnale has written the foreword of the book “Catch Me If You Can — the Complete Screenplay”.

He provides lots of details in it on the tumultuous journey of the movie rights (page 7-13). Quoting pages and pages from a book exceeds “fair use” of source material, but let me summarize the journey of the movie:

• Soon after his TV appearance, Hollywood showed interest in his story. He entered into a agreement — an option contract — with Bud Yorkin in 1978. After two years, Bud Yorkin told him he was no longer interested.
• The next years, Columbia TV and Grosso-Jacobson optioned the movie rights.
• Hall Bartlett optioned the movie rights in 1986 for four years. Tom Cruise, Eddie Murphy and David Hasselhoff were considered for the part.
• After four years, Abagnale hoped to see the movie rights returned to him, but Bartlett paid the full purchase price ($250,000) for the movie rights. At this point, Abagnale lost all control and rights over the movie.
• In 1990, an independant producer Michel Shane, bought the rights from Bartlett for $300,000. He optioned the movie to Hollywood Pictures, a division of Disney, who returned the rights to Shane after two years.
• During the 1980s, the Coen brothers considered the project.
• In 1994, Sony Tri-Star optioned the rights for one year.
• In 1996, Barry Kemp and Bungalow 78 optioned the rights for two years.
• It was Barry Kemp and his associate Devorah Moos-Hankin that took the project to Walter Parkes and Laurie McDonald, Spielberg’s producers at SKG Dreamworks, then still a starting film studio. Halleluyah! (Moos-Hankin is credited as co-producer, Kemp as executive producer.)

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Truth or Fiction?

Scene 1 gives this info on Frank Abagnale.

• Committed financial crimes from from ’64 to ’67.
  There’s a continuity error in the movie: according to scene 20, he was arrested on March 3, 1970.
  All these dates are wrong, actually!
• Impersonated an airline pilot, a doctor (chief resident pediatrician) and an assistant D.A. As a pilot, he flew over two million miles for free.
  Abagnale summed it up succintly in his foreword to “The Art of the Con”, the book of another fraud expert, R. Paul Wilson (Lyons Press, 2014): “For five years, I lived as an impostor. I pretended to be a pilot, a doctor, a teacher, a lawyer, and a peace officer.”
• Cashed bouncing checks in all 50 U.S. states and 26 foreign countries.
• Stole “almost” $4 million with fraudulent checks. The real figure was $2.5 million. (According to Abagnale’s own estimate, he wrote some 17,000 bad checks!)
  Note that we’re talking about greenbacks from the 60s here, not the inflated dollar of today!
  We have a second continuity error here: when F.B.I. agent Hanratty and Abagnale speak over the phone on Christmas Eve in scene 15, the figure of “almost” $4 million is repeated. The problem is that Abagnale only gets caught on Christmas Eve… of a later year! How can the end total be “almost $4 million” (scene 1, 3:47) when the intermediate score with Abagnale in Louisiana — at least 1 year before his arrest in France — already reaches the same amount (scene 20, 1:33:05)? And during that extra year, he tours around the world and gets caught in France… printing “real” fake checks on a Heidelberg. Here’s what Carl Hanratty has to say about this period: “The kid’s gone completely out of control [...]” (scene 18, 1:45:25) with checks from South America, Australia, Singapore, Egypt and Spain.
  (Just don’t blame the actors for the mix-up! The mistake is right there in the screenplay (on page 20 and 112).)
• Did it all before his 19th birthday.
  More poetic liberty here: he did it from the age 16 to 21. Abagnale was born on April 27 1948.

None of which makes Abagnale a modern Robin Hood, as some naively think. Abagnale did not rob the rich — he stole from large companies, mainly banks, not the same thing! — and he certainly never distributed his loot among the poor. This is true: he did not steal from mom and pop stores and he never committed violence, it was all guile and cunning from a gentleman criminal!

He could do this because, as a kid, he looked 10 years older than he was. Says Abagnale: “It had always surprised people, especially women, to learn that I was still a teenager.” (book “Catch Me If You Can”, page 24) Here he is at the age of 16…

(Let me talk some more about film technique in passing: when agent Hanratty recognizes Frank Abagnale in a school yearbook (scene 12), Spielberg and his editor Michael Kahn make use of multiple jump cuts — a favorite style figure of Spielberg!)

Scene 12 — 1:06:39

His fourth career was left out of the movie because of time constraints and because it didn’t add any new elements. Indeed, Abagnale also handled a summer course as a sociology professor at the Brigham Young University in Utah. He was very well liked by his students, although he just read one chapter ahead of them every week. Having read in a local paper that Brigham Young was looking for sociology instructors, he forged a transcript (diploma) from the Columbia University (New York) for his interview with the dean. (book “Catch Me If You Can”, page 86)

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When the truth becomes fiction, the con is a con…

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