He found $1.2 million in a bag in South Philly. The movie it inspired made much less.

It’s a decades-old cliché of the movies: When a character finds a bag of money, things seldom turn out well.

That was certainly the case for a particularly notorious story in Philadelphia back in February 1981, when an out-of-work longshoreman named Joey Coyle found nearly $1.2 million on a street in South Philly, after it fell off the proverbial truck near the intersection of Swanson and Porter Streets. The money was being taken from the Federal Reserve to the nearby offices of Purolator Armored Services.

“Those who grow old in the uneven matrix of [South Philadelphia’s] streets know more answers than they will give. For instance, there is an old expression in South Philly that a man uses when he comes into money he would rather not explain. He says, “It fell off the truck.” It means: Don’t ask,” Inquirer journalist Mark Bowden wrote in the first of his three-part series on Coyle, in Dec. 21, 1986.

The installments — “Finders Keepers,” “Running Scared,” and “The Final Frenzy” — eventually culminated into Bowden’s 2002 book, Finders Keepers.

Coyle spent several sleepless days doing a series of things that a person who has found a bag of money shouldn’t do: He told way too many people about it, including reputed organized crime figures. He made dubious attempts to launder the money, and even put some of it in a hot water heater. He was arrested at New York’s JFK Airport in a failed attempt to flee to Mexico, and was charged with several crimes, including theft and conspiracy. But he was found not guilty by reason of insanity in the subsequent trial, with help from prominent local attorney A. Charles Peruto Jr. Coyle emerged as something of a local folk hero.

It was perhaps inevitable that this story would be made into a movie. Money for Nothing released on Sept. 10, 1993, 30 years ago this week. Based on Bowden’s three-part series, the film starred John Cusack as Coyle.

The film’s promotion and release were muted, in large part because, three weeks before its scheduled release, Coyle died by suicide in his South Philly home. Cusack and Coyle, who had spent some time together in Philadelphia previously, had been scheduled to go on a promotional tour. Following Coyle’s death, the film was essentially buried, making just over $1 million at the box office — less money than the amount Coyle had found.

However, Money for Nothing had plenty of problems prior to the passing of its protagonist. As Bowden writes in his book, the filmmakers struggled to find the right tone for Coyle’s story, and never quite landed on one that worked.

Cowriter and producer Tom Musca, Bowden writes in Finders Keepers, envisioned the film as “a gritty, cheerful, urban parable about greed.” Ramon Menendez, the director, “saw it as a window on a larger social problem, the declining industrial base and the loss of blue-collar jobs in the Northeast.” Cusack leaned more toward the director’s interpretation, while also wanting to capture some of the “generational angst” of the 1990s period when the film was made.

And Coyle, Bowden writes, “did not fit the story. He was not the lovable, simple, charming character the story seemed to want him to be.” He described the on-screen version of Coyle as an “unwieldy amalgam of artistic visions.”

“It was entertaining, and John Cusack played a good Joey Coyle,” Peruto, Coyle’s former attorney, told The Inquirer. “But factually, what really unraveled there, was much worse. Joey was really a typical guy who was down and out on his luck, and was severely using and abusing methamphetamine.”

“Joey Coyle got busted for possession of methamphetamine eight months after his acquittal, the first of three arrests over the last four years on drug-related charges,” Bowden’s 1989 report said.

Coyle’s drug addiction was omitted from the film, with that type of moral ambiguity having no place in an early 1990s movie released by a Disney subsidiary. “Everybody will hate him,” Bowden wrote that an executive told him, when he described Coyle’s “addictive personality” as the key to what the story was about.

Peruto added Coyle was so “scrambled” due to the drug abuse that it explained many of the unwise decisions he made in the days after he found the money. In the movie, he’s just a guy who was bumbling.

“The hilarious comedy for everyone who’s ever dreamt of instant millions!” read the film’s promotional tagline. Not only was it at odds with the underlying story, but didn’t really fit the movie itself, which is barely a comedy.

Money for Nothing was mostly filmed in Pittsburgh and other parts of Pennsylvania, with brief shoots in Philadelphia.

“My legal advice would be to shut your mouth, come see me or another lawyer right away,” Peruto said when asked what someone should do if they find themselves in a predicament like Joey’s. “Then immediately go to a psychiatrist who may say you’re insane at the time of the crime. And you get to keep the money.”

Money for Nothing is on most major video-on-demand services.