Because youre in a confined space, not a soundstage. They get their tips and kick up to local crime lord Fergus Fergie Colm, played by veteran character actor Pete Postlethwaite. The funny thing isand I found this out laterhe met John Cena for that role. Hogan: I went in to go see it in a screening room in Manhattan like two months before it came out. Its not the same town as it was in the early 1990s and the 1980s.. And its absolutely authentic. Hamm: I met with Ben and he was like, You know, I think were gonna have plenty of Boston accents in this. I was like, You know what, youre absolutely right. Once I started meeting all the Federal agents in the [FBI] office, very few of them are actually from Boston. Thats how you drive a f----n caaar, declares the getaway driver, Gloansy (played by rapper Slaine). In 2018, there were just over 4,000 robberies in Massachusetts compare that to 1980, when there more than 13,500. These were to prove fundamental to the films success, yielding some of its most memorable moments. WebThe Town. 'The Town': Is Charlestown really America's 'bank robbery capital'? And was critically acclaimed. WebAccording to lore, when the Boston Police Department hears of a bank robbery happening in the city, the first thing they do is close the Charlestown bridge. Thats the thing, that theres a kind of ownership and its beautiful. It was as simple as that. 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. Ben wasnt in Boston. Claire foretells the doom of Charlestowns criminal culture. Hall: It felt like cinema in the classic sense. Affleck: Those little streets created something visually interesting that you dont see in many car chases. And I was talking to people right next to him. I knew that many of these bank robbers had gone to Catholic schools as children and been taught by nuns. WebCharlestownis the oldest neighborhoodin Boston, Massachusetts, in the United States. 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. the movie the TOWN WAS Mde after SQUARE OFF T.V 249 subscribers Subscribe 6 Share 1.2K views 1 year They wore wigs, fake bears and masks; in the film, brilliantly, these became nun masks and habits. 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. He had participated in a bunch of these armored car robberies, and we had been talking for two hours, and time was almost up. After a seven-day trial, they were Then they look up to find a Boston cop reading a newspaper in his police car. Shooting there had been a condition of Afflecktaking on the film. It was wild. Which I like, and its good, but I want to sort of put our perspective on it.. 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.. 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.. Affleck: The Red Sox were really smart and understood how vital and central their organization was and is to the city, and they loved the idea of it. Hall: It was like being alongside Prince Harry and Meghan Markle in London. The gentrification of Charlestown is the huge pile of rotting wood fueling The Towns bonfire of crime. The crew at the center of The Town resembles a gang of five masked robbers who pulled holdups from 1990 to 1995. 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. Claire represents the real problem at the center of the proceedings. 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. My father insisted that I go over. 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. Its ruined my life, literally, but Im proud.. He said, Shes slightly different. Marblehead is a little chi-chi. But they said, We have this project that we think youd be right for. Ill use them because Im from Boston to get into Fenway. IS Charlestown MA known for Bank robbers? Hes crazy. Hes from Modesto, and hes kind of got that bulldog, kind of dirtbag sensibility. The film makes Jem out to be the loose cannon in the arsenal, but he makes criminal sense. Affleck: That was fascinating. 1 hospitalized after fire in West Town, CFD says . Hamm: Another smart move by Ben was to populate this movie with people that have an actual, real-life connection to these things. The former bank robber-turned-aspiring-movie producer who tried to claim it is back to prison. 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.. Jem is also Riff to Dougs Tony in West Side Story. I was up there for what Im sure was a good half hour. 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. Some were ex-convicts for whom a judges permission had to be sought for them to carry weapons, even fake or unloaded ones. It was like a different world, the actor and filmmaker says. Affleck: In a world of increasing homogenization, having this fresh place that I think stood out, it was appealing. Crockett: Pete had a reputation for being kind of a hardass. I went in to audition. 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. They really loved the idea of putting these masked avengers in minivans. 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. They were all from Charlestown. Its an action movie where you get to root for the bad guys. When fans of The Town think of Charlestown, they think of banks and bars and punchlines. We literally took over Fenway. The two banks In 1995, The Boston Globe reported that the neighborhood was a community to which more armored car robbers are traced than any other in the country, according to FBI statistics. Hogan recalls reading that and filing it away. ). Theres two ways that this can go. That was the moment where I realized that I could differentiate one bank robbery from another. Hamm: Theres nothing weirder than an empty stadium. He loved it, optioned it. And we had a lot of days for a movie that was relatively inexpensive. They dont fink. Alexander Witt (second-unit director): We talked and we said, Lets do it as classic as possible.. Affleck: Blake Lively took the train from New York. Free shipping for many products! 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. Craig: I lived in Somerville for a while in the 90s. The Town stages heists in both places. Slaine: I think he was just really going for authenticity. He made my job easy. These interviews have been condensed and edited for clarity. He also ran afoul of the law himself, recruiting real ex-cons as extras and giving them guns. Affleck: I made sure that we had enough money to do the Fenway heist sequence in total, which was a lot. The way we did that was to make the days inexpensive. Carter: They were looking at Chris Pine in the very beginning, because of course Star Trek had just come out. To get to Charlestown was to live free. Its like 50 percent of why people buy tickets. Theyre both from Boston and theyre doing the whole Boston thing, and Ben being Ben, in a very playful way, tries to like, wrestle him. With no real attachments, Doug never has to fear losing anyone close to him. Job. We all want to be from Douggies Charlestown and we all know its a fantasy. Affleck: There did kind of get to be a glut of Boston movies, and everybody did a Boston accent. If the Herald said that, I mightve taken it more personally. After all, there are only so many Massachusetts-set crime stories about Irish American antiheroes that you can tell. Get the best of Den of Geek delivered right to your inbox! Chucks such a good writer that you get the tone from his details. 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. 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! The one thing I miss about Boston is you saw a fistfight every day. 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. He has that capacity, and I think that makes him a classic American filmmaker. In 2010, after his gang was eliminated, he fled to Tallahassee, . Cooper: I think he was just having a ball with this character. Director: Ben Affleck. So we had access to all of the underneath [of it], because thats where we shot a lot of it. The movie opened on September 17, 2010, to overwhelmingly positive reviews and eventually grossed $154 million at the worldwide box office. He was doing a long sentence. But mostly a Boston accent depends on your socioeconomic status, by and large. Thousands. Hamm: It was impressive. He humanized that character in that moment. Well, not take notes, because you couldnt bring in a pencil. Ill tell you what Im gonna do. And so we were a little bit extra, extra respectful. Tuesday October 30, 2012. He flew in. There are three tiers of cells. 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. He didnt want to option it himself, so they set him up with [producer] Graham King, who got the option. He was a local hockey star who got drafted by the NHL, but started beating on his own teammates and got sent back home. McCoy, 29, was reportedly a member of the Utah Air 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. This makes it a mini-epic. 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. I had somebody from Marblehead quote all her dialogue. So I leave the movie theater and Im really kind of numb, trying to figure it out. The actor who played James Jem Coughlin, Dougs ex-con buddy, however, wasnt from Boston. By contrast, Afflecks Doug MacRay heads a four-man gang. Both robbers were shot, one in the back and one in the head, and the getaway driver promptly rear-ended a parked car. Its more general American but with a kind of East Coast, sort of slightly privileged vibe. Another botched job referred to in the film the one for which Douggies father (Chris Cooper) was sent down for life for killing two guards was also inspired by a notorious bank heist gone wrong. It all felt sort of very impossible and glamorous. He poses as a florist, just like Dean OBanion, the Irish gang leader who celebrated St. Valentines Day with Al Capone in Prohibition Chicago. Welliver: I still think that The Town and Gone Baby Gone, thats the bar. Cooper: I dont know Jeremys height, but Ben is a pretty big boy. The Boston area was prime cinematic crime fields during the early 2000s. And he got really excited. Everywhere we went people were so excited to see him. I lived in South Boston, Roslindale. The full version. The case of the Charlestown robbers in the show grows to encompass and eventually upend Bostons citywide criminal justice system. Kim Mahoney of the 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. Jason Bourne kills the bad guys. 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). Hall: Hes just a very good storyteller. Hall: I remember going to the premiere and a group of Charlestowners were there and they all said to me, You ever come back to Boston, well get you a car. We went back to his hotel room right after. When its done great its Joe Pesci in Goodfellas. So many broke the code, shattered the code. 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 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. They had all these Blaupunkts. [1] Originally called Mishawumby the Massachusetttribe, it is located on a peninsulanorth of the Charles River, across from downtown Boston, and also adjoins the Mystic Riverand Boston Harborwaterways. 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. It has a broad appeal. We had bank robbers, we had career criminals, people that couldnt show up certain days because theyd be violating their parole. Afflecks crew of bank robbers needed genuine local flavor. But does it? He had robbed a couple of banks in Boston years before. I showed up, I did the reading. You woke me up.. In Quentin Tarantinos Reservoir Dogs (1991), the crew had color-coded names; in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid they wore 10-gallon hats. I had never even been in a drama class or nothing like that. I was fine with that. This database contains birth information from several towns included in the Massachusetts (U.S.A.) Town Vital And I was like, Why are the people who live here letting us do this? The story was much clearer and cleaner. To Charlestown, our one square mile of brick and Whats the best way to get there?. You definitely get more of that in BPD and the local cops. When its not, its predictable and obvious and trite. The movies center is Charlestown, right across the bridge from the rest of Boston, a legend in illicit locales. Welliver: It [was] like doing photo shoots in front of Graceland with Elvis when Elvis was still alive. Its been in development here for a while. As for Affleck, the success of The Town helped advance his career as a director. I watched a screening with a different ending and it hadnt been testing well. Every large theft needs an inside man, but Inside Man (2006), directed by Spike Lee, had Clive Owen as a bona fide genius. Something the character of James (Jeremy Renner), aka Jem, could appreciate. The story appealed to Affleck. The Town is loosely based on Chuck Hogans novel Prince of Thieves. Talking to people right next to him loosely based on Chuck Hogans novel Prince of Thieves this character 2010 after! Felt like cinema in the early 2000s Boston cop reading a newspaper in police! Actor who played James Jem Coughlin, Dougs ex-con buddy, however, wasnt from Boston to get there.... Schools as children and been taught by nuns so they set him with. 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