Hugh Jackman wears a Hamilton Valiant

In Bad Education, Frank Tassone sits on a bean-bag chair in a wood-paneled school reading room, a student on either side, his jacket sleeve fallen back from a white cuff and a gold watch. Tassone ran the Roslyn Union Free School District on Long Island, and the film, directed by Cory Finley from a script by Mike Makowsky, a Roslyn graduate, dramatizes what a state audit later put at 11.2 million dollars taken from the district between 1996 and 2004, the largest public-school embezzlement in United States history. Hugh Jackman plays him as the charming superintendent who pushed the district's schools toward the top of the national rankings while skimming more than two million dollars for himself. Allison Janney plays his assistant superintendent, Pam Gluckin, who took roughly twice that.

The watch is a Hamilton Valiant Auto, which Hamilton describes as two-tone, steel and gold. It is a plain automatic dress watch: the H-10 movement with an 80-hour power reserve, a 40mm case under sapphire, Roman numerals and a date at three. In the frame it reads as a gold case and a pale dial sitting above his shirt cuff. It is a real watch you can still buy. The man who skimmed more than two million dollars from the district wears one that costs a few hundred.

Hamilton points to the placement itself. On its own Watch Spotting in Hollywood page the company files Tassone under well-dressed villains: by its account, "Villains might be bad but they can still have style," before telling readers to spot Jackman in "our classic two-tone Valiant Auto." The real Tassone pleaded guilty to grand larceny in 2005 and went to prison. The scandal that put him there first surfaced in the Roslyn High School student newspaper.