Eli5: What are the substitutes used in movie making for e.g. Cigarettes, cocaine, alcohol, dangerous weapons, etc?
In: 5
* Herbal cigarettes are used for actors who can’t or won’t smoke tobacco cigarettes on set.
* Cocaine usually is powdered milk or vitamins. Jonah Hill apparently had a vitamin B overdose from snorting too much of it on the set of *The Wolf of Wall Street*.
* Alcohol is often replaced by water or juice that resembles the real stuff. If it’s a beer can, it’s usually seltzer water with a label slapped on it.
* Drug needles often use syringes with spring-powered retractable needles that hide inside when you press them on your arm.
* For knives, they tend to operate similarly: spring-powered collapsible blades. If it’s not used for stabbing, it’ll typically be a rubber or blunted metal prop. One movie (I wanna say the Halloween remake) used a real knife for a scene where someone had a whole prosthetic throat on their neck.
* For guns, it’s common to use a real gun loaded with blanks (gunpowder with no bullet, like really powerful toy cap gun), or airsoft/nonfunctional guns with the gunfire added with special effects. Blood effects are done by either shooting them with what are essentially blood paintballs, or sqiib charges (little blood packets hidden on the person wires to burst on cue).
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