SEATTLE — After being arrested early this morning for firing a gun on a Belltown street while carrying around $1,000 in counterfeit cash, a 33-year-old Seattle man told officers he was just filming an action movie, and then unsuccessfully tried to bribe his way out of police custody.
Around 1:15 AM, officers responded to a report of gunfire in an alleyway in the 2400 block of 1st Avenue.
Surveillance footage from a nearby business showed a man pointing a handgun at two people before fleeing the scene.
Officers found the man near Wall Street and Western Avenue, took him into custody, and found he was carrying a more than $1,000 in fake cash in a satchel.
After being driven to the precinct and taken to a holding cell, the suspect called an officer over and offered him $100,000 to “fix” his current predicament (of being in police custody, presumably).
He said the fake cash in his bag was actually a prop for a movie he was shooting. The movie, he told officers, was still untitled, but claimed, if you wanted to be overly reductive about it and pigeonhole it in a single genre, it was an “action” movie.
Intrigued, the officer, apparently a film buff himself, began quizzing the man on the film’s producer and director. The man initially provided a name for a producer, but clammed up when asked for the name of the film’s director or prop master (perhaps due to some sort of non-disclosure agreement, like they use on fancy Hollywood movies!)
The officer then booked the suspect into the King County Jail for assault and bribery. No one was injured in the incident.
SPD / Jonah Spangenthal-Lee
