In the 70s, New York was that. I was at that point in my career where every place I walked into I was trying to figure out how to write a robbery in that space. Carter: Someone was getting married. Affleck: There did kind of get to be a glut of Boston movies, and everybody did a Boston accent. I walked the city for something like two, three hours, and by the end of it, I realized two things: The first thing was, I really like the movie and I cant wait for it to come out. The funny thing isand I found this out laterhe met John Cena for that role. Alexander Witt (second-unit director): We talked and we said, Lets do it as classic as possible.. In Black Mass, Johnny Depp plays South Boston mobster James Whitey Bulger, an Irish gangster who informed on the Italian mob to the FBI. Chief Judge Frank Caprio#CaughtInProvidence#thetown#bankrobber See less Comments Most relevant Connie Ann My husband and I watched the movie right after I saw the Providence clip. It just read like a good old-fashioned, kind of 70s cop movie, where the good guys are the bad guys and the bad guys are the good guys. Eventually, homogenization came for those tales, too. And so, constantly, Ben and I are trying to make it as real as possible. Carter: There was a guy, Joe Lawler, who was helping us. I liked the way it was released, man. All three were from Charlestown. Gone Girl we shot a hundred days for a two-hour thriller. soap.. Stockard: Ben had a good relationship with the Red Sox. By the time Affleck directed and starred in the film, Bostons oldest neighbourhood, a small squarish outcrop situated north of the Charles river, was no longer the crime capital of America. Claire represents the real problem at the center of the proceedings. Director: Ben Affleck. Fury of the Gods Brings Back the "Shazamily": Inside DC's New Superhero Adventure, Scream 6's Brutal NYC Trip: "You Can't Trust Anyone" This Time, Cocaine Bear Is Not Just About a Killer "Coked-Up" Bear, It's Also an "Underdog Story", How Marvel's Wastelanders Podcast Created an Exciting Story with No Visual Safety Net, The Town: Ben Afflecks Heist Movie Love Letter to Boston. Ill do that., My place in Connecticut is only three hours from Boston, so I just, on a whim, jumped in the car, drove up to Boston, went to the production office and walked in, and David Crockett, one of the producers, and Chay were like, Hey, what are you doing? And I said to Chay, Oh, Im Detective such and such. And she was like, You fucker. I said, Is he here? And she said, Yeah, hes down doing auditions downstairs., I kind of slipped in and waited in line and then said to the production assistant, Dont say my name. WebIn a stroll of Charlestown on a sunny day, its hard to believe this tiny Boston neighborhood could be the bank robbery capital of America the Warner Bros. hype about Ben Hamm: I got to meet Pete Postlewaite, rest in peace, at the hotel bar. If the criminal culture that The Town associated with Charlestowns Irish-Catholic working-class community ever existed, it had dwindled away with the neighbourhoods traditional residents. All three men were arrested and sent to prison. He has that capacity, and I think that makes him a classic American filmmaker. This is the script I want. And I said, Adrian, this is gonna be a three-and-a-half-hour movie. Hes like, Well, if Scorsese can make a three-and-a-half-hour movie, I want to.. I keep waiting for someone of color, anyone whos not like me, this sort of Irish American crime writer, to figure it out and write another great Boston crime movie that doesnt look like all the ones weve seen. Burch: We did one of the premieres at Fenway. Burke: It was not on my radar at all. And so they said they had this script based on this book, and I said, OK, let me look at it. I read the adaptation, and it had been developed by Adrian Lyne, who I just worked with. Chuck Hogan (author, Prince of Thieves): When the book came out, I was scheduled to do a reading at the Charlestown Public Library. Just because the echo in the ballpark. The film makes Jem out to be the loose cannon in the arsenal, but he makes criminal sense. Thats where I got my best stuff. And then she recorded her voice, read some of the pages, so that we shared that with Blake Lively, so she could try to get the accent down. He made my job easy. Pulling off the heistDoug and his team steal the $3.5 million in cash amassed during a four-game series against the Yankeeswithout it devolving into a cartoonish homage to the iconic setting took precise coordination. It is sloppy, sleazy, quickie. Ten years ago this week, Ben Affleck and his crew put on nun masks, robbed Fenway Park, and made the ultimate Boston movie. But it couldnt be Bruins. Carter: They were looking at Chris Pine in the very beginning, because of course Star Trek had just come out. Burke: There were the most narrow streets you could find in the North End. ], Affleck: Having been through an experience myself where I felt that people had a sense of me that wasnt really fair, Im very sympathetic to and interested in people who are, I think, sort of pigeonholed. Ben Affleck (director/star): He had an adaptation that was very, very different and it was really focused on the love story. And Major League Baseball was open to itthat was what I was really afraid of. Hamm: We could all go, hang out at the bar; me and Rebecca, and Renner, and Titus, that whole crowd. What if something happens to you? But hes so agile, and hes so athletic, and he has no fear, just absolutely no fear. The top of his head was really messed up. Slaine (Albert Gloansy Magloan): I was born in Dorchester, grew up there as a kid. A decade after establishing his Boston bona fides by cowriting and appearing in Good Will Hunting with Matt Damon, he was offered a chance to adapt Prince of Thieves for the screen. Afflecks reluctant bank robber Doug desparately wants to redefine himself as a serious Hollywood player after misfires like Gigli and Jersey Girl. They were shooting a scene. I knew it was one scene and it was gonna be an important scene: [Dougs] relationship with his father. It was concealing a character-based drama centered around themes that I was interested in, particularly the theme of children paying for the sins of their parents, Affleck says. Theres so many shots and so quickly, that at the end, OK, what happened? It has a failed romance, a foiled heist, an unsolved crime, enough car chases for three movies, and yet is a coming-of-age film and a portrait of an eras end. They dont fink. And I still am. Hall: I just remember him being so mercurial. Culture Editor Tony Sokol is a writer, playwright and musician. Stockard: The movie that we thought about was [Michael Manns] Heat. Crockett: Pete had a reputation for being kind of a hardass. This isnt because those criminals made the sloppiest getaways. Cooper: I dont know Jeremys height, but Ben is a pretty big boy. It was like a different world, the actor and filmmaker says. The case of the Charlestown robbers in the show grows to encompass and eventually upend Bostons citywide criminal justice system. Kim Mahoney of the Director: Ben Affleck. Thats what happened. And he said, Well, there was a time I remember when we all had just robbed a truck and we pulled up to the switch car, and we all had our masks, and we were carrying a bag of money, and we pull up to the car, and we look over, and theres a cop doing lazy construction. And he just looked at us, and we looked at him, and he looked the other way. [Chairman] Tom Werners a friend of mine. Thats the one moment that gives you a glimpse into how damaged and how profoundly broken Jem is. I had never even been in a drama class or nothing like that. Its a fun heist movie. [Owner] John Henry visited the set. They think theres no more serious white people in Charlestown, says local girl Kris (Blake Lively) early in the film. Tyre marks matched those found in Houston, and five men were eventually convicted. She was doing Gossip Girl, which at the time people thought like, Oh, thats just a CW Y.A. And its absolutely authentic. As robbers in Halloween masksbrandish machine guns and snarl at the terrified staff in heavy Boston drawls Everybody on the f----n flaar! you wonder: is this just an average day in Charlestown? Affleck: I was able to get access to the FBI and the division that chased and caught most of these armored car robbers, particularly in Charlestown. So unexpected. Afflecks second film as a director charts the fall of a mythic heist gang and the streets which made them. The North End, Bostons Little Italy, is one of the citys smallest, densest, oldest neighborhoods; the asymmetrical Fenway Park, which fits snugly on a single block, is picturesque but impossibly cramped. The Town was originally set to be a three-and-a-half-hour-long epic directed by Fatal Attractions Adrian Lyne. I was fine with that. Craig: I was a struggling crime writer. And so I think at first we were sort of like, Oh, how can we not be Heat? And at some point we said, Look, embrace Heat. And it is a bit like visiting royalty there, for me, in a way that I dont get in any other town or city in the world. The way we did that was to make the days inexpensive. He goes into the family business. They ran mass auditions of up to 1,000 people at a time, Affleck recalls. After shooting one guard outside the car and one inside the bank, they escaped in a rental truck. But they liked it and they wanted to meet with me, and I was like, of course. I was willing to meet with anyone who was interested in hiring me as a director. Burch: When theyre down in Gate D, where the shoot-out scene was before they exited the ballpark, that was probably the most challenging part of it. Its a hard movie to watch. NEW YORK -- The mystery began when a Boston ex-con dropped dead on a New York train platform with a backpack stuffed with $180,000. And I was talking to people right next to him. Jem is also Riff to Dougs Tony in West Side Story. In March 1995, two men held the guard of an armoured car at gunpoint as he tried to delivercash to a branch of the Bank of Boston on Massachusetts Avenue. Matheson: Weve had this official tour [of Bostons FBI office] and as were leaving, I notice a picture across the room, pasted to the wall, of a person in a mask, from the CC TV. Hamm: I had also seen Dahmer. Iran. Carter: Hes 6-foot-3. Many of them testified that they had grown tired of a life of stealing, of drugs, of broken relationships.. Download Bank Robbery missions 2017 and enjoy it on your iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. He looks at them. Colm bribed a man on the inside to show the crew into the basement of the stadium, where they would enter the cash room and steal $3,500,000 in gate money (money spent on beer, food, admissions, etc. A long moment passes with intensity. I came back and met with Ben, and I was so excited. And I said, Is there anything just weird or strange or unexpected or bizarre in the course of this? And I mean, the guy had lived a pretty bizarre life. Affleck was born in Berkeley, California but grew up in Cambridge, also across the Charles River from Boston but far removed from the inner-city neighborhood of the film. Welliver: If anything, people were kind of burned out on the New York gangster genre. They had to look and sound like they just rolled out of Old Sullys at 2 a.m. on a Sunday. 10 Patty Hearst The way John tells the story is, Of course I do two [moves] on him and Ive got him and he cant move, and [Afflecks] like, alright, alright, alright!. I was playing a character that was from Boston and I worked really hard on the accent and went in and did my first rounds and the director said, That was great. He was given just 13 days, during which the sound of automatic gun fire spooked a wedding party that had hired Fenway as a venue and were apparently not made aware that there was also a film shoot in progress. Theres two ways that this can go. Jem would rather battle it out with the law than go back to prison. He was able to hold his own with a lot of those dudes who are the real deal. It kind of had a post-apocalyptic feeling to it. You didnt really know what was coming. The feds, they get shuffled around all over the country. Affleck said he picked up the term from a guy at New Sullys bar:I asked, Whats the thing with the Tunies? And he said the Tunies moved in and the Townies stole all their car stereos. But if Charlestowns present reality as a yuppie stronghold is easy to establish, its past status as a mythical crime mecca is difficult to entirely dismiss. The budget that we had previously was too high for us to make it. And then I realized, Maybe they think I can make movies more on the cheap.. But not everyone was happy with the image of Charlestown given toa generation of moviegoers. With a relatively modest budget of $37 million, he made a classic heist flick thats well, porn for New Englanders: the heavy Boston accents; the scene in a Dunkin Donuts; and, oh yeah, the fact that a crew of robbers takes down Fenway Park. Hogan: I had a friend who worked at Fenway Park, who snuck me in while they were shooting that whole sequence. 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