Burke: I was at a point where I was still looking for what I was gonna do with my life. The bank robbers step out of their vehicle. 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. You dont know where they come from. I had an interesting moment with him at one point, we were in the car and I said, Whats the deal? And he called me Ty, as all the guys did because they didnt want to say Titus. Affleck: Blake Lively took the train from New York. Hall: Hes just a very good storyteller. 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. It all felt sort of very impossible and glamorous. 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. The violent film starring Jeremy Renner, John Hamm and Ben Affleck centers on the Boston neighborhood of Charlestown. 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. It also had a scheme so ingenious that Frank Sinatra supposedly considered pulling the job over doing the film. I was fine with that. Agents with the FBI believe Gage Haws robbed five small town banks throughout northwest Ohio. Im gonna do a movie about Iran.. Jem is furious when he finds Doug cozying up to Claire, the bank manager who could finger them to the Feds. Both robbers were shot, one in the back and one in the head, and the getaway driver promptly rear-ended a parked car. The Town stages heists in both places. Carter: They were looking at Chris Pine in the very beginning, because of course Star Trek had just come out. Starring: Ben Affleck Rebecca Hall Jon Hamm Jeremy Renner Blake Lively. Three friends and acquaintances who had lied on the stand before testified against the five, along with four convicted bank robbers from Charlestown. He has a certain thing in that town. In the 70s, New York was that. And then a few months later I got a call and they were like, Oh, we want you to come back in and audition for the director. I show up at this office in Cambridge to go in and read and all of a sudden I see Ben Affleck walk in. WebMassachusetts, U.S., Town Birth Records, 1620-1850. I went in to audition. Especially when youre in a park thats not open to the public. The Town captures the locale expertly, and the atmosphere masterfully. They were about to buy it but they wanted to cut it, too. He was the leader that he is. Find out more, The latest offers and discount codes from popular brands on Telegraph Voucher Codes, That's how you drive a f----n caaar: the second bank robbery was based on the 1995 Harvard Square heist, The moment when a cop sees a carload of nun-masked robbers and turns away was based on real life, Affleck sent Blake Lively to hang out in Charlestown bars to prepare for her role, Ben Affleck directs Jon Hamm on the set of The Town, Close, review: a soul-scorching portrait of boyhood friendship and loss, Whats on TV tonight: Stephen Fry: Willem & Frieda Defying the Nazis, Anorexic and more, When are the Oscars? Crockett: Gone Baby Gone, which I did with him, was a relatively small movie. Affleck turns it into a redemption story which beats the bank alarm at under two hours. I could tell it was hard on Ben because literally going out to dinner was not really an option. Stockard: I think the rule that Ben and I always kind of operated with, was like, Look, there are people like me and you who are very much from Boston who dont talk like that. Its not some weird thing that someone from Boston doesnt have a Boston accent. Affleck had a personal stake in the film that went beyond proving himself as a sophomore director. And then we put her and her cousin in the movie. I was still in the 70s mindset of, Oh thats how you end one of these movies. There were 150 people down there working. But I certainly was familiar with his work. Jem spent nine years in prison for killing a local thug who was planning to kill Doug. He had the beginnings of the accent, clearly he had the ability to do ita bad Boston accent would ruin that part. Welliver: When we were doing The Town is when he was up for the role of Hawkeye. And to that end, its 100 percent on Ben. 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? I dont think you know how you sound. Actors tell me that thats one of the toughest ones they have to do. And then he was out, so we were using him again for research. 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. The story appealed to Affleck. For the film, Affleck talked to locals, visited the maximum-security prison MCICedar Junction, and consulted with the FBI Violent Crimes Task Force in Boston. Which I like, and its good, but I want to sort of put our perspective on it.. 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. We literally took over Fenway. 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.. He saw it and he was like, This is perfect. Slaine: Ive seen other cuts of the ending, like the one they put out, the extended version. Hamm: Another smart move by Ben was to populate this movie with people that have an actual, real-life connection to these things. They had to look and sound like they just rolled out of Old Sullys at 2 a.m. on a Sunday. Its an action movie where you get to root for the bad guys. Burke: Ive heard people say, Oh, we dont sound like that! And Im like, I dont think you guys really listen to yourselves. 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. An earlier version of this piece misspelled Roslindale. Hamm: Theres nothing weirder than an empty stadium. Hamm: It was impressive. Hamm: We had this 15-day stretch where we had to shoot at Fenway. Stockard: The movie that we thought about was [Michael Manns] Heat. Its this movie and its already got a script. WebThe Town. Nothing kills a Boston-set movie like bad Boston accents. Im fairly good at being invisible and disappear quite easily, but Boston? Every take had the same amount of tension and edge but it was just all over the place. Carter: Ben actually went and sat down with the guy that his character was based on, and was able to see him and take notes in person. The annual average hovered above 10,000 for the next 15years. I love Adrian. Slaine: I was hanging with Gronkowski, and hes like, Dude. Hes like, The Town, is there going to be a sequel? He was like, You gotta do it, you gotta be in the sequel. I said, Dude, I died at the end.. Two armored car guards were shot to death in New Hampshire in 1994 during one of the robberies. Affleck: I [set] that movie in the 2000s, but it was really about the 80s and 90s in Charlestown. If youre gonna make a film of it, you have to add something to it, or try to. Director: Ben Affleck. I was doing that. 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. But does it? And its absolutely authentic. Martin Scorseses The Departed cast Jack Nicholson as Frank Costello, who was loosely based on Bulger. It included a mastermind, a distraction, a partner, a coordinator, a backer, hacker, con man, and gadget guy. 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. Craig: Adrian was at this really ambitious double-album phase of his career, and he didnt want to cut anything. Its kind of like a safety thing. Some residents felt it portrayed the locals as in the words of onequoted in The Christian Science Monitor, a bunch of dumb bums. 2 hours ago. The bank robbers, who were very much an element of life in the neighborhood for decades, have been gone for 15 years, replaced by a new Charlestown where gentrification has taken hold and the more accurate stereotype of the moment is: Oh, you must be a yuppie. 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. But one of the greatest films about Boston goes back to 1973. I knew that many of these bank robbers had gone to Catholic schools as children and been taught by nuns. His first reaction is to take her out of the equation.. Carter: Hes 6-foot-3. He goes into the family business. According to FBI statistics from the same year, the entire state of Massachusetts had fewer than 3 per cent of all bank robberies nationwide. 'The Town': Is Charlestown really America's 'bank robbery capital'? [Through a representative, Renner declined to be interviewed for this article.]. WebFind many great new & used options and get the best deals for Lego Jail Prisoner Robber Crook Minifigure Lot of 12 w/ Accessories Town City at the best online prices at eBay! Solemn now: To The Town. Everybody wanted to cut it. When its not, its predictable and obvious and trite. By the way? Published in 2004 and set in the 90s, it follows a team of stick-up men led by Doug MacRay, a washed-up NHL draft pick and recovering addict whose traumatic childhood has led him to follow his incarcerated father into the family business. They were shooting a scene. 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. Bill Simmons saysthere were a lot of Boston ladies like Kris in real life. It seems likely that Lively had met a few. What it allowed me to do is privately observe the prison population. So I read this new version of the script. Dillinger assembled a crack team and he himself would hop over the bank booths like a jack-rabbit, hence his nickname. Affleck: I had great stunt drivers. Its not The Godfather of caper films, but it is a heist movie must-see. Ben Affleck grew up in Cambridge, only a few miles away from Charlestown, but to him the distance between the two places felt vast. 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. I had a darker ending in it, like a real 70s ending, where Doug dies. 1 hospitalized after fire in West Town, CFD says . Theyre locked, loaded, and trained in automatic weapons, and launder their take immediately. Stockard: Do we want to punish this person or do we not? Welliver: The upside of that is everybody is rooting for him. But John is obviously a much bigger guy. Hes part of John Hamms FBI crew. In the history of crime, the best crew was headed by John Dillinger. Afflecks crew of bank robbers needed genuine local flavor. Who was in which car?, Burke: I remember we were all standing around and they were like, Oh yeah, were gonna blow this thing. There was a van parked there and they fucking blew it up. 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. Then it might as well just stay a book. 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.. Also, Starr starred in a silent movie based on his criminal activity titled A Debtor to the Law. Al Pacinos Sonny in Dog Day Afternoon wants enough money to give a better life to his wives. WebThe acquaintance, Richard Floyd McCoy, Jr., was a Vietnam veteran, a helicopter pilot, and an avid and capable skydiver. From 1874 to 1921 it is estimated that Starr robbed over 21 banks, stealing $60,000 in cash. We had this huge screen over the third base dugout. And Blake spent some time with her. The robbers were waiting. WebFind many great new & used options and get the best deals for Lego Jail Prisoner Robber Crook Minifigure Lot of 12 w/ Accessories Town City at the best online prices at eBay! There was a script written. Theyre stopping at an exactly certain point and if they go too far, peoples lives are at stakeits a very serious thing. Staging a chase scene in the North End was difficult, but shooting a robbery inside and around Fenway Park was unprecedented. Cooper: It was kind of this crisp evening. Its not the same town as it was in the early 1990s and the 1980s.. Hall: It felt like cinema in the classic sense. 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. He claims that Ben Affleck played him in the movie, but now this former bank robber i. When I got there, I went up on the walkway, on the first-base side, looking down. Jason Bourne kills the bad guys. The two banks I kind of got to tiptoe around and watch them shooting from afar without them knowing I was there. And I hadnt seen it with the new one tacked on. The Town was originally set to be a three-and-a-half-hour-long epic directed by Fatal Attractions Adrian Lyne. It was really more of an erotic thriller: The criminal who falls in love with the captive kind of thing. In Stanley Kubricks The Killing (1956), a marriage-minded Sterling Hayden leads a crew to take down one last racetrack for $2 million. Good God, some of them may still be there today. Hamm: I got to meet Pete Postlewaite, rest in peace, at the hotel bar. 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. 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. Jem would rather battle it out with the law than go back to prison. If you say its a bank heist movie, people are like, Ill see that. I think it was a great step. 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. The cunning group is robbing city banks to steal money and making the getaway with diamond Heist. Bens standing there and hes doing his public relations things, and people are swarming him. Everywhere we went people were so excited to see him. And more than anything, just from a noise standpoint, it was kind of unique. Burch: We did it during off days. He gets punished. I just still really thought that way. Those are the blueprints, thats the template. They dont rat. This shooting game is the newest brilliant sneaking FPS game. There are three tiers of cells. 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. I sort of pretended that Charlestown was still the way it used to be. It kind of had a post-apocalyptic feeling to it. 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!. Some of the scenes were shot on the real crime locations depicted. I knew it was one scene and it was gonna be an important scene: [Dougs] relationship with his father. The crew at the center of The Town resembles a gang of five masked robbers who pulled holdups from 1990 to 1995. The story was much clearer and cleaner. Its a fun heist movie. [Owner] John Henry visited the set. Los Angles police on high alert for grand theft and planned robbery in town. Because along with watching the movie, I was working hard to process it. Affleck unequivocally contributed to that proliferation. Adrian had wanted to do one of my books, which was kind of unadaptable because it took place over like, 30 years. Welliver: [Renner] switches it on and I love watching him work. But it still has to be divvied up among the team. Simmons saysthere were a lot of Boston ladies like Kris in real.! Pete Postlewaite, rest in peace, at the hotel bar his nickname been taught by nuns Ben was populate. The bank alarm at under two hours youre gon na be an important scene: [ Renner ] switches on... With diamond heist if youre gon na do with my life the deal at an certain. 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