This movie was a bad idea. And yet, I now kind of want to watch it. — Dan

You probably have never seen the 1987 movie Million Dollar Mystery, and for good reason: it’s awful, garnering a 0% critic rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It’s hardly unique in that regard — there are dozens if not hundreds of movies that have been almost universally panned — but Mystery is different. It wasn’t made to be good. It was barely made to be a movie.

It was made to be a lottery. But people still didn’t buy tickets.

Million Dollar Mystery is a screwball comedy with a simple premise. A White House aide named Sidney Preston, played by Tom Bosley (best known for his role as Howard Cunningham on Happy Days) shows up at a random diner in Arizona and suffers a fatal heart attack. But before he dies, Preston tells those gathered that he stole $4 million from the government and hid it, in four even sets of $1 million each, somewhere in the United States. He gave them a few vague clues to go on, and the rest of the movie is a madcap scamper to find the money. And, by the time the movie ends, they successfully find three of the $4 million.

It’s the last $1 million that makes the movie interesting. In the closing credits of the film, one of the characters addresses the audience directly, telling ticket-paying theatergoers that the producers of the film had actually hidden a million bucks somewhere in the United States, and there were clues in the movie that could help them figure it out. (There was no need for people to actually go fetch the money; as the American Film Institute noted, “Moviegoers and non-moviegoers alike were invited to send in their guesses based on clues provided in the movie, with the person correctly guessing its location winning the $1 million.”) And that was the entire point — this was a contests hidden under the guise of being a movie.

The film, or whatever you want to call it, was the brainchild of producer Dino De Laurentiis, a longtime film maker with a handful of successes (Serpico, Conan the Barbarian, and while campy, a personal favorite, Flash Gordon) to his credit. But when he had the idea for Million Dollar Mystery, his production company was flailing and in need of a quick win. As Collider reported, inspiration set in:

To help get people excited, De Laurentiis’s production company, DEG, partnered with Glad, the maker of trash bags. (Not so coincidentally, Tom Bosley was a celebrity endorser for Glad at the time, appearing in many of their ads.) People who didn’t want to see the movie could still get clues as to the whereabouts of the hidden money by buying specially-marked bags of Glad trash bags. And that was a very good thing for anyone who wanted the money but didn’t want to watch the movie, because the movie was awful. As famed movie critic Roger Ebert wrote in his one-star review of the film, “As nearly as I could ascertain, it is not absolutely necessary to see this movie in order to find the million dollars. All the clues are in the Glad boxes. That is a good thing, because the search may easily last longer than the movie’s run.”

Ebert was right and De Laurentiis was wrong — there wasn’t much of a movie to be had, and Million Dollar Mystery barely made a dent at the box office. It earned only $989,033 on a $10 million budget, a terrible result for a movie or a lottery. In fact, a 14-year-old girl named Alesia Lenae made more money from the movie than DEG Productions did — she won the $1 million prize. She was one of many who correctly guessed that the money was hidden on the bridge of the nose of the Statue of Liberty, and was selected at random from the correct guessers to receive the reward.

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Invest While You Still Can

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Today’s Bonus fact: In 2016, a woman named Katrina Bookman struck it rich at a penny slot machine in New York — or so she thought. As seen in this CNN story, the machine told her that she won in excess of $42 million. But when she went to claim her prize the next day, the casino told her that she wasn’t getting anywhere near that. Per CNN, the machine malfunctioned and the New York State Gaming Commission, by law, said “they can only award Bookman her actual winnings of $2.25.” The casino, as a gesture of goodwill, also offered her a free steak dinner, but Bookman declined and sued instead. Her lawyer suggested that she’d settle for $6,500, the maximum payout the machine can give if not broken, but the two parties couldn’t reach an agreement. And that’s too bad for Bookman, because she lost in court. It’s unclear if she got her $2.25, but she didn’t get the $42 million, or $6,500, or even the free steak.

From the Archives: You Can’t Win If You Don’t Pay: The woman who lost the lottery that everyone else won.

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And thanks! — Dan