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. Cooper: Hes had a wonderful career, but [The Town] was a big shot in the arm for him. Its a fun heist movie. [Owner] John Henry visited the set. He contributed to Altvariety, Chiseler, Smashpipe, and other magazines. Because youre in a confined space, not a soundstage. The team, while sporting nun costumes and masks, quickly attempts to make an escape from downtown Boston to the bridge and beat the police department to the closing. "Ben Affleck Played Me". 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 In adapting the script, itself adapted from Chuck Hogans novel Prince of Thieves, Affleck and Aaron Stockard (with whomhe also worked on Good Will Hunting and Gone Baby Gone) changed the cinema setting of the second heist to an armoured-car robbery and car chase based on a real incident that took place in Harvard Square. Welliver: When we were doing The Town is when he was up for the role of Hawkeye. 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. So many broke the code, shattered the code. Its gentrified and diverse now, a local TV show host told The Christian Science Monitor. It is because the small community adheres to omerta, silence unto death. The first bank robbery in Melrose was shot on location. Affleck: Those little streets created something visually interesting that you dont see in many car chases. The actor who played James Jem Coughlin, Dougs ex-con buddy, however, wasnt from Boston. He was kind of hemming and hawing a little bit and I said, Look, unless they make you wear the fucking purple outfit and the mask, you gotta do this. He went, I know.. And I said, Yeah, its just so great that he can come back and do this and dig in. In the film, the crew get away, largely thanks to the kind of driving that puts Daniel Craig to shame. That was the moment where I realized that I could differentiate one bank robbery from another. FBI responds to bank robbery on NW Side. Crockett: [Lively] would go out every night and hang out with Townies. Cooper: I wanted to spend some time in Walpole [at MCICedar Junction] and just observe. You dont know where they come from. Crockett: Gone Baby Gone, which I did with him, was a relatively small movie. Affleck: Its parochial and kind of a small town in some ways. September 2009. And then we put her and her cousin in the movie. 1 hospitalized after fire in West Town, CFD says . 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. Robert Brady, 40, was arrested in Charlestown shortly after he allegedly robbed the branch at 11:21 a.m. And someone had forgotten to tell them that we were downstairs shooting. Affleck never had so much fun, One blue-collar Boston neighbourhood has produced more bank robbers and armoured-carthieves than anywhere in the world: Charlestown.. She is the interloping gentry and renovates Dougs headspace. So we had access to all of the underneath [of it], because thats where we shot a lot of it. In Quentin Tarantinos Reservoir Dogs (1991), the crew had color-coded names; in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid they wore 10-gallon hats. Chris Cooper (Stephen MacRay): Ben had me at prison. It was great. He had really bad scars. And more than anything, just from a noise standpoint, it was kind of unique. Determined to get a better grip on the place, he brought in another local, his old school friend Stockard, and began an intensive period of research. The one thing I miss about Boston is you saw a fistfight every day. Affleck turns it into a redemption story which beats the bank alarm at under two hours. You can come over to my house for dinner. It was just short of, If you need protection, were here for you. It was incredible. Four men in ski masks ambushed and hijacked the Northeast Armored Transport truck Aug. 25, 1994, in a parking lot of a branch of the NFS Savings Bank in Hudson. UPDATE: Ordered held in lieu of $50,000 bail, the Suffolk County District Attorney's office reports. What is the penalty for bank robbery in mass? Its called The Hurt Locker. The only thing that I had seen of him was the Jeffrey Dahmer movie, which couldnt have been more different from what I wanted. 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. When I got there, I went up on the walkway, on the first-base side, looking down. They had all these Blaupunkts. When its done great its Joe Pesci in Goodfellas. WebThe Town (2010) is a heist film that follows a group of bank robbers in Charlestown, Boston, and the law enforcement personnel attempting to stop them. He had participated in a bunch of these armored car robberies, and we had been talking for two hours, and time was almost up. Three friends and acquaintances who had lied on the stand before testified against the five, along with four convicted bank robbers from Charlestown. It eventually just blew up. 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. Hes crazy. Hes from Modesto, and hes kind of got that bulldog, kind of dirtbag sensibility. 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. Dillinger assembled a crack team and he himself would hop over the bank booths like a jack-rabbit, hence his nickname. The Cambridge native and his crew were back in Charlestown last week re-shooting an alternative ending to the bank robber thriller. In so many ways, the project came along at the exact right time. Eventually, homogenization came for those tales, too. Affleck didnt just direct, he played the lead alongside a cast of present and future superstars and locals. So he uses them in that way. In 2010, Affleck directed The Town, a drama about a gang of Charlestown armored car robbers. Especially when youre in a park thats not open to the public. We had this huge screen over the third base dugout. Affleck: The Bruins have been extremely shortsighted and wrong with their policy, where if theres swearing or violence, you cant use their logo. When we started, I said, I need a driver whos Charlestown born and bred. Interestingly enough, my driver was a guy named John Fidler who was a major suspect in many bank robberies, and also bread truck robberies. 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. I said, Im so sorry to bother you Mr. Postlethwaite, but Im on the movie, sorry we dont have any scenes together, but Im so excited to be in a movie with you. I gushed for a while, and he just smiled as broad as he could, and hes like, Come on, come on, sit down, have a drink. I was like, Well, its 11 in the morning.. Ben Affleck (director/star): He had an adaptation that was very, very different and it was really focused on the love story. Everyone was making New York movies. So I leave the movie theater and Im really kind of numb, trying to figure it out. Burke: There were the most narrow streets you could find in the North End. Theres like four people in the whole bar, which is a huge bar. And hes like, Wheres that from? And shes like, Oh, he was here. The movies center is Charlestown, right across the bridge from the rest of Boston, a legend in illicit locales. Not noir, French for black. Even with the shorter length hes afforded, Affleck tells multiple stories. Stockard: As much as it felt like, We know this story, we know these people, there was also this entire world for us to discover. They had to look and sound like they just rolled out of Old Sullys at 2 a.m. on a Sunday. Oct 31, 2012. And she really focused specifically, not only on like, an American accent, but what it sounded like in Marblehead, which doesnt sound like Charlestown. Theres something so tomb-like and archaic about Fenway. And in an exciting way. 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. Affleck unequivocally contributed to that proliferation. Culture Editor Tony Sokol is a writer, playwright and musician. Then put it in Connecticut.. The length of them runs, I would think, like 150 feet. Hes been forever. I dont know exactly what happened, but I know that the option was running out. The money was all on the screen. Afflecks Doug MacRay, the leader of the gang, is the one whos gotten tired of the life. But they said, We have this project that we think youd be right for. But as I was signing books afterwards, I see this guy coming up. I liked the way it was released, man. So thats cool. I was fine with that. Free shipping for many products! The romance in the middle of the film is only there to delineate the boundaries between heist film and crime procedural. And so yes, they rob Fenway, but its not like hes running across the outfield getting tackled by Tom Brunansky with a bag of money in hand. Theyre incarcerated. Jem spent nine years in prison for killing a local thug who was planning to kill Doug. He made my job easy. The film makes Jem out to be the loose cannon in the arsenal, but he makes criminal sense. Police figures from 2010 showed that Charlestown accounted for barely 2 per cent of all Boston robberies (not just bank robberies). I dont even think they had sidewalks. Hamm: It was impressive. Get the best of Den of Geek delivered right to your inbox! Agents with the FBI believe Gage Haws robbed five small town banks throughout northwest Ohio. And obviously it was in Bostonthat I was comfortable with. Or rather, close enough for himto understand how little he knew about it. Her performance was savaged by some critics it features the Bride Wars of Boston accents, Wesley Morris wrote in the New York Times but history has been kinder to her. Those are the blueprints, thats the template. He grew up in Cambridge,which was close enough to Charlestown for him to know a little about it. Some residents felt it portrayed the locals as in the words of onequoted in The Christian Science Monitor, a bunch of dumb bums. They have an allegiance which goes from womb to tomb, and sperm to worm. Jems family took Doug in after his mom deserted him, and his father fell apart for a little while. That was the most important part, because he could so easily lapse into clich. Crockett: I vividly remember it. Hes probably still there. Which I like, and its good, but I want to sort of put our perspective on it.. FBI responds to bank robbery on NW Side. Just finding a place to park the trucks. The full version. 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. 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. But it isnt. But he could not have been happier to be there. Two guards -- Lawrence Johnson, 57, and Ronald Normandeau, 52 -- were shot to death while delivering money to the bank for North East Armored Transport Inc. of Manchester, N.H. The 6-foot-tall Dorchester-born rapper is an intimidating physical presence with a raspy grumble of a voice flavored with a thick Boston accent. Affleck: Im glad to have worked on movies that are part of that tradition. The former bank robber-turned-aspiring-movie producer who tried to claim it is back to prison. The only time I attempt it is when Im basically making fun of Ben, his character, about the Stah Mahket. Thats my quote that you used in the book. I was like, Oh man, whats up? He was excited. Hamm: It was an ambitious shoot and it was pulled off without a hitch. Around 3 p.m., two armed men robbed the Hingham Institution for Savings on Charles Street, according to police spokeswoman Rachel McGuire. Chuck gets credit for that. Suspects at large after $100K stolen from North Side bank: authorities. You woke me up.. A U.S. District Court jury delivered guilty verdicts on 54 of 55 counts, including ones charging the five in the Aug. 25, 1994, robbery in Hudson in which two 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. Boston Police report arresting Thomas Hickey, 49, of Charlestown, for a Nov. 30 bank robbery on Austin Street in which he allegedly pushed an elderly man who was in line before him out of the way at a teller window.. Police report arresting After a seven-day trial, they were convicted on 54 of 55 counts of robbery, including one which resulted in the death of two armored car guards. Most of the heists in The Town were inspired by real crimes from that era. Its an action movie where you get to root for the bad guys. I was only comforted by the thought that no one with a Boston accent has ever actually read the Boston Phoenix. Id been in good ones and bad ones, but I knew that it took time, that they were the result of the assembly of a lot of little pieces. There were 150 people down there working. According to FBI statistics from the same year, the entire state of Massachusetts had fewer than 3 per cent of all bank robberies nationwide. Colin Burch (vice president of marketing and broadcasting, Boston Red Sox): We had filmed a number of movies before at Fenway, starting with Fever Pitch, and we did Ted, and RIPD, and Moneyball. The Friends of Eddie Coyle starred Robert Mitchum in the title role and Peter Boyle as a hitman who ran a bar. Los Angles police on high alert for grand theft and planned robbery in town. 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. But the sketchy details and the cast of characters sound like a story line from The Friends of Eddie Coyle, a classic movie about low-level wiseguys in the Boston underworld, or the sequel to The Town, the Ben Affleck movie based on a group of Charlestown bank robbers. Also, Starr starred in a silent movie based on his criminal activity titled A Debtor to the Law. Its something Ive seen other directors do. This shooting game is the newest brilliant sneaking FPS game. Affleck: The day that were shooting the shoot-out with Jeremy, where he gets killed out in front of the McDonalds behind Fenwaywhen you do these stunts with cars, you have to really clean the streets immaculately because these drivers are precision drivers. With the premiere of The Town 10 years ago, the No R genre peaked. 1 hospitalized after fire in West Town, CFD says . If you say its a bank heist movie, people are like, Ill see that. I think it was a great step. 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