The top of his head was really messed up. And in an exciting way. In the 70s, New York was that. I knew that many of these bank robbers had gone to Catholic schools as children and been taught by nuns. An alternate title for the film could be Ben Afflecks Boston, and no one would have had it any other way. Hes just great. But as I was signing books afterwards, I see this guy coming up. 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. I look over and its Pete, and hes having his breakfast, and hes reading the paper, and I hadnt met him before because I didnt have any scenes with him. Welliver: On the page it was one thing, and he beat the page because rather than it being a scene that was about anger and aggression, Renner turned that scene into a scene about heartbreak and devastation. Affleck: What I liked about [the book] was that it was similar to [Dennis Lehanes] Gone, Baby, Gone in that I both could use the bones and the structure of the story and there was good dialogue and interesting characters in there, but also they kind of inspired me to create more and add on to it. And I just came over to him and I was biting my tongue. R Thriller Drama Crime Movie 2010. hd. But No R.. And they led me into this little alleyway. Just let me go in. She opened the door and I just walked in and Ben was there and he just burst out laughing. [Adrian Lyne did not respond to a request to be interviewed for this article.]. The crew at the center of The Town resembles a gang of five masked robbers who pulled holdups from 1990 to 1995. Ex-felons are not allowed to hold even fake weapons. Douggie, played by Affleck, is a man trying not to die on the street he was born. Craig: I was a struggling crime writer. So theres a whole range of accents. During the Cold War he had a great joke: The Russians wont invade Boston, theres nowhere to pahk! I thought, Yup, theres a lot of truth to that. That was our greatest hurdle. WebThe acquaintance, Richard Floyd McCoy, Jr., was a Vietnam veteran, a helicopter pilot, and an avid and capable skydiver. He was doing a long sentence. Hogan: Warner Bros. didnt want to make the movie for that amount. soap.. Craig: Adrian was at this really ambitious double-album phase of his career, and he didnt want to cut anything. Provo, UT, United States () -Provo Towne Center 1200 Towne Centre Blvd Ste B. They had all these Blaupunkts. Well, not take notes, because you couldnt bring in a pencil. Because along with watching the movie, I was working hard to process it. There have been dozens of films and television shows filmed in the Bay State over the last decade, but by the time the 2010s came to a close, the popularity of the No R genre had faded. The annual average hovered above 10,000 for the next 15years. Theres like four people in the whole bar, which is a huge bar. Affleck: Jeff Robinov and [worldwide marketing president] Sue Kroll were working at Warner Bros. at the time, and they asked to have a meeting with me. He loved it, optioned it. Download Bank Robbery missions 2017 and enjoy it on your iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. And they were like, Just so you know, weve had some calls and threats of violence. People didnt know what the book was, I think they were expecting something that would really knock Charlestown. Burke: Ive heard people say, Oh, we dont sound like that! And Im like, I dont think you guys really listen to yourselves. Its not The Godfather of caper films, but it is a heist movie must-see. In all of his years of being a criminal, he robbed two banks and seven armored cars, plus robbing Fenway Park during a baseball game. Shooting there had been a condition of Afflecktaking on the film. He wanted to tour the prison and see it. And the guy said, Oh, the guy who wrote the book that that movies based on is on my softball team. And she said, Dennis Lehane is on your softball team? And thats when I was like, Its a small circle here.. Stockard: Do we want to punish this person or do we not? Or why Affleck hired him to play a Charlestown bank robber in his new movie The Town.. You werent sure exactly what he was gonna do, or how he was gonna behave, because it wasnt Matt Damon, whos always the hero and always wins out in the end. But John is obviously a much bigger guy. What if something happens to you? But hes so agile, and hes so athletic, and he has no fear, just absolutely no fear. Carter: A woman named Ginaya Green, who was a 20-something- year-old, born and raised in Charlestown, let me come and take photos of her bedroom, and her house, and her decor. And I was like, Why are the people who live here letting us do this? The Town stages heists in both places. The story was much clearer and cleaner. The full version. He knows how to get a story from one place to another and connect all the dots in between so that you are in it and immersed in it and believe it and its thrilling and its really entertaining, as well as being serious. However, everybody will want to go see it. And hes like, Wheres that from? And shes like, Oh, he was here. Burke: It was not on my radar at all. Because youre in a confined space, not a soundstage. They really loved the idea of putting these masked avengers in minivans. If they get popped, they do the time. Extremely plausible. They were shooting a scene. Thats my quote that you used in the book. I was like, Oh man, whats up? He was excited. Matheson: I will never forget sitting there with some felt and scissors at 3 or 4 in the morning. Hogan: I think weve played out the Irish Boston gangster thing. Did they know that this was in the plans?. Itd be good to have him around for authenticity. Hes in the movie. Thats what happened. It is because the small community adheres to omerta, silence unto death. So I was thrilled. And so Adrian developed it for quite some time. Afflecks reluctant bank robber Doug desparately wants to redefine himself as a serious Hollywood player after misfires like Gigli and Jersey Girl. Hes not someone that blends in easily. They like walking out with a little bit of hope. 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. The romance in the middle of the film is only there to delineate the boundaries between heist film and crime procedural. In one of his final roles, Academy Awardnominated English actor Pete Postlethwaite plays Fergus Fergie Colm, a menacing mob boss/florist who gives Doug orders while chomping gum and stripping roses. In addition to including the statistic about Charlestowns armed-robbery predilection, the preface of Prince of Thieves features a quote in The Globe by an anonymous Townie. One of those characters you love to hate and find sort of intoxicating and moving; all of those things at the same time. A woman who saw it speeding past reported it to the police, who matched the report to a truck rented the day before in nearby Medford by a man already suspected of a string of robberies. Ben wasnt in Boston. BOSTON - An infamous criminal, who claims he's robbed more than 100 banks, was arrested in an attempted heist in the Back Bay. This is based on FBI statistics at the time. Referring to a location as a vital character in a movie is a clich, but in the case of The Town, its impossible not to. I had never even been in a drama class or nothing like that. This shooting game is the newest brilliant sneaking FPS game. But what about in the 1980s and early 1990s? Owen Burke (Desmond Elden): I was going to a community college in Charlestown, I was working under the table, I had just gotten past some legal trouble in my teenage years. That was the most important part, because he could so easily lapse into clich. No above-the-line people got paid any money. Carter: Someone was getting married. It all went to the actual production of the movie. These were to prove fundamental to the films success, yielding some of its most memorable moments. WebWhitey Bulger and his friendss and some of the Charlestown robbers operated from Marshall Street Garage was actually in Winter Hill, Somerville. Ben Affleck grew up in Cambridge, only a few miles away from Charlestown, but to him the distance between the two places felt vast. Stockard: Obviously youre making a movie so you mythologize it a little bit. The car contained stolen money an But he pointed out the quote. Oceans Eleven set the cinematic standard for a heist team. They are holding their automatic weapons and wearing their disguises. Hes part of John Hamms FBI crew. 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!. The story appealed to Affleck. Even the prison is real: the scene in which Douggie visits his father was shot on location at the maximum security MCI-Cedar Junction, the first time anything had been filmed there. Like you didnt know what they were gonna do. The first bank robbery in Melrose was shot on location. The Cambridge native and his crew were back in Charlestown last week re-shooting an alternative ending to the bank robber thriller. Agents with the FBI believe Gage Haws robbed five small town banks throughout northwest Ohio. Crockett: I vividly remember it. Affleck: Id been in action sequences plenty, so I kind of knew how they worked. Which was nice. Stockard: Ben had a good relationship with the Red Sox. In so many ways, the project came along at the exact right time. But not everyone was happy with the image of Charlestown given toa generation of moviegoers. But it was very real. Welliver: If anything, people were kind of burned out on the New York gangster genre. Welliver: He said, Hey, weve got great stories in this city that nobodys telling.. He goes, Yeah, you know, Ill tell you, Ty. With no real attachments, Doug never has to fear losing anyone close to him. He often has a very small crew. So if you give somebody a space, all they want to do is figure out how to do a heist in there. Then it might as well just stay a book. Affleck turns it into a redemption story which beats the bank alarm at under two hours. 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. She is the interloping gentry and renovates Dougs headspace. 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. Forget it. Im gonna do a movie about Iran.. An earlier version of this piece misspelled Roslindale. He had the beginnings of the accent, clearly he had the ability to do ita bad Boston accent would ruin that part. WebCharlestownis the oldest neighborhoodin Boston, Massachusetts, in the United States. For instance, the shot in which a cop supervising a traffic stop takes one long look at a carload of nun-masked robbers and turns the other way? I lived in South Boston, Roslindale. ). Tensions between the locals and wealthier transplants underscore the film. Susan Matheson (costume designer): Ben at one point wears a zip-up track jacket that looks like a Bruins jacket. It very much had a sense of place. Its worth bearing in mind that these are state-wide statistics, which do not differentiate betweenneighborhoods. Just because the echo in the ballpark. The Town is based on Chuck Hogan's 2004 novel Prince of Thieves (set, unlike the movie, in '96, when Charlestown-affiliated heists were actually at their height). In the 2000s, critically acclaimed, Irish Americancentered crime dramas like Clint Eastwoods Mystic River, Martin Scorseses The Departed, and Afflecks Gone Baby Gone had turned the Massachusetts capital into a Hollywood hot spot. I wrote the book, then I went away for a while, then I worked on the script for a year, then I went away for a while, then other people wrote the script. And Im like, Whoa, so he must be the director.. I was cutting out pieces of felt while Gina [Rhodes] was stitching themmaking, by hand, the fake Bruins logo. Im like, You know what, if its terrible, Ill get a great story out of it. I sit down and I watch it, and it was really bewildering. And so if you cant do it, just dont do it. And Ill tell you why: Nobody was rooting for Jon Hamm and the cops. Affleck: In a world of increasing homogenization, having this fresh place that I think stood out, it was appealing. And I was like, Who the hell is this guy? The city also set the scene for Clint Eastwoods Mystic River, and Afflecks directorial debut, Gone Baby Gone, both based on books by local crime novelist Dennis Lehane. Yeah, dont do the accent. I said, Well, wait, this show takes place in Boston and this guy is from Boston. He went, Yeah, yeah, but you know, we dont do the accent. I was kind of, Well, whats the fucking point of basing this in Boston? Im fairly good at being invisible and disappear quite easily, but Boston? Location scouting was uppermost in his mind. Affleck: The only other thing Ill say about the chase sequence, it definitely reminded me of Jimmy Tingle in the 80s. Claire foretells the doom of Charlestowns criminal culture. Tyre marks matched those found in Houston, and five men were eventually convicted. Five men accused of a series of bank and armored car robberies around New England were convicted yesterday on charges that will send them to prison for life without parole. If the Herald said that, I mightve taken it more personally. Theres something so tomb-like and archaic about Fenway. Titus Welliver (Officer Dino Ciampa): I called the production office and I got [Carter] on the phone and I pretended I was a Boston detective. 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. So thats cool. Hogan: I went in to go see it in a screening room in Manhattan like two months before it came out. And then we put her and her cousin in the movie. Crockett: Gone Baby Gone, which I did with him, was a relatively small movie. This was a garage that Jem is his right hand muscle, and unquestioning backup. Culture Editor Tony Sokol is a writer, playwright and musician. Chuck Hogan (author, Prince of Thieves): When the book came out, I was scheduled to do a reading at the Charlestown Public Library. 2 hours ago. Jem would rather battle it out with the law than go back to prison. And I got a call saying that [Fatal Attraction and Indecent Proposal director] Adrian Lyne had read it and really wanted to do something with it. Jason Bourne kills the bad guys. We all want to be from Douggies Charlestown and we all know its a fantasy. Id made Gone Baby Gone for $18 million. They ran mass auditions of up to 1,000 people at a time, Affleck recalls. Job Type:Part-Time. It definitely felt like, Im getting to see something that not a lot of people get to see. I sort of pretended that Charlestown was still the way it used to be. And Major League Baseball was open to itthat was what I was really afraid of. Those are the blueprints, thats the template. 2 hours ago. This week marks the 10-year anniversary of The Town, Ben Afflecks Oscar-nominated crime thriller about a group of bank robbers in Charlestown who target Fenway Park for one final score. Cooper: Hes had a wonderful career, but [The Town] was a big shot in the arm for him. I was still in the 70s mindset of, Oh thats how you end one of these movies. UPDATE: Ordered held in lieu of $50,000 bail, the Suffolk County District Attorney's office reports. Director: Ben Affleck. It went on to make $154 million (119 million) worldwide. 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. He was charged with armed bank robbery and making threats. The robbers were waiting. Theyre so proud of him and theyre so happy. WebBen Affleck played this real life bank robber in 'The Town'. Hes crazy. Hes from Modesto, and hes kind of got that bulldog, kind of dirtbag sensibility. I had a darker ending in it, like a real 70s ending, where Doug dies. McCoy, 29, was reportedly a member of the Utah Air Hamm: I had also seen Dahmer. 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. Hall: Youd be shooting this tiny little intimate scene, Ben and I, and Id look to my left and there were but thousands of people watching the set. If possible, its really great to hire people with whom an audience isnt overly familiar, because audiences have developed expectations and kind of anticipate what an actor might do if theyve seen them a bunch. It was sort of trying to be patrician and they had, and still do, a very distinct way of talking thats not actually common to most people in Massachusetts, in my experience. I dont even think they had sidewalks. Everybody in attendance loved it; no car windows smashed or anything like that. It was as simple as that. He was definitely a bad guy and was going to take as many people with him as he could, but you still kind of went, You know what, this is a kid that came along, and in a different environment he wouldve been a different person but he is a product of all of this dysfunction and horror that hes grown up in. Its brilliant. I said, Is there any way in hell that you can imagine that someone would ever rob a bank if theyre from Charlestown dressed as a nun? And the FBI agent I was meeting with turned to me and said, You know what, thats not a bad idea at all. And thats where that idea started. Chucks such a good writer that you get the tone from his details. He set the bar with those filmsyou [must] reach a modicum of the depth and the artistry of those films if youre going to do a Boston film. Iran. Adrian had wanted to do one of my books, which was kind of unadaptable because it took place over like, 30 years. Director: Ben Affleck. The length of them runs, I would think, like 150 feet. The car chases get stuck in traffic, and the dialogue comes directly from testimony. At one point we even had Brad Pitt ready to do it so it was really close. A man who was in the square at the time recalls thinking: Whoscrazy enough to pull off a bank robbery at noon in Harvard Square? Charlestown guys. Affleck: I certainly didnt want to set myself up to fail, say yes I could do something, shortchange myself [and] produce a substandard sequence because I didnt have the time. Hogan: Dick Wolf from Law & Order somehow read [the book] early. Do everything youre supposed to do, they wont be harmed.. In 2010, after his gang was eliminated, he fled to Tallahassee, Gone Girl we shot a hundred days for a two-hour thriller. When Doug wakes Jem up in the middle of the night to do some damage and ask no questions, the only thing his friend wants to know is which car they should take. He was the leader that he is. It was taking a period of time that had passed and pretending it was still a reality. Affleck: I [set] that movie in the 2000s, but it was really about the 80s and 90s in Charlestown. Theyre incarcerated. Affleck: My favorite moment in the movie, cinematically, came directly from a conversation I had with a guy who was in MCI-Norfolk at the time. And to that end, its 100 percent on Ben. Its like 50 percent of why people buy tickets. He is the TV Editor at Entertainment. Everybody wanted to cut it. Los Angles police on high alert for grand theft and planned robbery in town. WebDoug MacRay (Ben Affleck) is an unrepentant criminal, the de facto leader of a group of ruthless bank robbers who pride themselves in stealing what they want and getting out clean. It kind of had a post-apocalyptic feeling to it. Crockett: He knew from the beginning that [Magloan] was gonna be Slaine. Welliver: I had an experience several years before for a David Kelley show called The Practice which took place in Boston. Two armored car guards were shot to death in New Hampshire in 1994 during one of the robberies. Affleck: Blake Lively took the train from New York. When it came time to cast The Town, Affleck had fun putting together a star-powered ensemble on a relatively limited budget. The money was all on the screen. It was wild. Affleck: I made sure that we had enough money to do the Fenway heist sequence in total, which was a lot. In 2018, there were just over 4,000 robberies in Massachusetts compare that to 1980, when there more than 13,500. Hes like, What the fuck are you doing? 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. And obviously it was in Bostonthat I was comfortable with. I said, Look, you know, I understand that youre making this movie about robbers out of Charlestown. I call them No R movies, Hogan says. Affleck: There tend to be trends and people feel like at first its fresh, and then its kind of something they like, and then it becomes something that people get tired of. But it couldnt be Bruins. As they fled with a bag of cash containing roughly $281,000 (180,000 then), another guard opened fire. And I remember immediately getting on Google Maps and looking at the North End, because they had described a robbery that had taken place [there], and being like, They robbed this thing here, and they had to get to that bridge there. So we basically mapped out where this little route was. MacRay is pulled between the devil and angel who sit on his shoulders: Jem, who spent nine years in prison for killing someone who was supposedly planning to kill Doug; and Claire, the bank manager Doug falls for after a job. Salon Professionals. Walking in I was feeling kind of glib. So I leave the movie theater and Im really kind of numb, trying to figure it out. Rebecca Halls character asking Douggie why the kids with whom she volunteerscall her a tunie? According to FBI statistics from the same year, the entire state of Massachusetts had fewer than 3 per cent of all bank robberies nationwide. Unlike them, Doug had a chance at success, a chance to escape following in his father's criminal footsteps. And they said, We like what you did, we think youre a good director and we believe in you. And I was kind of struck by the enthusiasm they had considering for the most part, Hollywood operates based on success. Afflecks Doug almost got out of his predetermined life. Welliver: It [was] like doing photo shoots in front of Graceland with Elvis when Elvis was still alive. Robert H. Brady, 42, was sentenced by Senior U.S. District Court Judge Douglas P. Woodlock to five years in prison and three years of supervised release. Then they look up to find a Boston cop reading a newspaper in his police car. Hed done his time. Staging a chase scene in the North End was difficult, but shooting a robbery inside and around Fenway Park was unprecedented. The Town unfolds in the Boston neighborhood of Charlestown, which the prologue claims has produced more bank robbers and armored car thieves than Everywhere we went people were so excited to see him. It is also quirkily structured, vaguely biographical and personal. The imitators that his opus spawned, however, couldnt recreate what he managed to. Cooper: I wanted to spend some time in Walpole [at MCICedar Junction] and just observe. Affleck: Rebecca worked just as hard on the accent. Craig: Adrian wanted 90 shooting days and $90 [million] to do it. Welliver: When we were doing The Town is when he was up for the role of Hawkeye. The Towns numbers may not add up, but the atmosphere it creates seems genuinely authentic to the old Charlestown and to its proudly Irish, proudly blue-collar inhabitants. Chuck Hogans novel Prince of Thieves opens with a toast: To Charlestown, our one square mile of brick and cobblestone. And we saw the film for the first time and I must say: I was across the aisle and up two or three rows from Jeremy, and I dont know if Im letting the cat out of the bag, but I think he was thrilled watching that film. I was up there for what Im sure was a good half hour. Hamm: We could all go, hang out at the bar; me and Rebecca, and Renner, and Titus, that whole crowd. Whats better than that? The Town may have taken a small place with a complicated history and declared it a cesspool of violent criminals but they arent dumb ones. It took him to the next level because it made him a filmmaker who also had box office appeal. He was quite clear. There was one of my endings and Ben wrote a couple endings, and thats Bens ending that they used. We all want to drive a f----n caaar like Gloansy. Welliver: The upside of that is everybody is rooting for him. To Charlestown, our one square mile of brick and 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. In Stanley Kubricks The Killing (1956), a marriage-minded Sterling Hayden leads a crew to take down one last racetrack for $2 million. Norbums. And he read and blew me away. The cunning group is robbing city banks to steal money and making the getaway with diamond Heist. For his turn as Jem, Renner was nominated for the Best Supporting Actor Oscar, though he lost out to Christian Bale, who played the troubled brother of boxer Micky Ward in yet another movie set in Massachusetts: The Fighter. Hamm: It was an ambitious shoot and it was pulled off without a hitch. When I was a kid, I was scared to go there. I could tell it was hard on Ben because literally going out to dinner was not really an option. David Fincher does an even more exaggerated version of that. Dillinger assembled a crack team and he himself would hop over the bank booths like a jack-rabbit, hence his nickname. The Boston Police And that looks like a detail youd come up with writing a script. Affleck: Because it was the first time I was gonna star and direct, and because I didnt have a lot of money to pay a bunch of stars, I had the luxury of being able to just cast the best actors. Im mighty proud of where I come from, he says. But wrapping that in the sort of candy shell of a heist movie. Beyond the flashy heists, The Townrenamed because Prince of Thieves had already been used as the subtitle of Kevin Costners version of Robin Hoodis a movie about fate, loyalty, and morality, and how those things commingle. In my imagination, hes always been Ben Affleck. 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. The Town was originally set to be a three-and-a-half-hour-long epic directed by Fatal Attractions Adrian Lyne. I remember the librarians called me the day before, just to confirm. You couldve just called me.. Heres how it works in fucking Charlestown: Youre born in Charlestown, you play fucking hockey and you rob. And I went, OK, that sums it up.. Theres a lot of different stories to tell. 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? It included a mastermind, a distraction, a partner, a coordinator, a backer, hacker, con man, and gadget guy. I had somebody from Marblehead quote all her dialogue.
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