Crockett: I vividly remember it. Something the character of James (Jeremy Renner), aka Jem, could appreciate. 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. The FBI says the vestibule was actually a "man-trap," designed to capture people like Hamilton. When its not, its predictable and obvious and trite. It was taking a period of time that had passed and pretending it was still a reality. The first or second take that he did, Jeremy wanted to do it on his own. Affleck: I had great stunt drivers. 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. We went back to his hotel room right after. Just finding a place to park the trucks. As they fled with a bag of cash containing roughly $281,000 (180,000 then), another guard opened fire. FBI figures reveal significantly higher crime rates pre-gentrification. Craig: [Jeff] Robinov, [the president] at Warners, really wanted to make the movie. [Adrian Lyne did not respond to a request to be interviewed for this article.]. For example, with my brother [Casey] in Gone Baby Gone, I thought it really benefited from the fact that he wasnt so well-known. And that looks like a detail youd come up with writing a script. This database contains birth information from several towns included in the Massachusetts (U.S.A.) Town Vital Free shipping for many products! I watched a screening with a different ending and it hadnt been testing well. So we had access to all of the underneath [of it], because thats where we shot a lot of it. The story was much clearer and cleaner. 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. Hamm: I had also seen Dahmer. I went in to audition. 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. They look at him. Suspects at large after $100K stolen from North Side bank: authorities. 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. I wanted to be a part of that. He also ran afoul of the law himself, recruiting real ex-cons as extras and giving them guns. 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. No above-the-line people got paid any money. 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. Afflecks second film as a director charts the fall of a mythic heist gang and the streets which made them. I knew that many of these bank robbers had gone to Catholic schools as children and been taught by nuns. Funny enough, I have shot in Boston twice since then. Location scouting was uppermost in his mind. Police Arrest Charlestown Man Following Bank Robbery - Charlestown, MA - Officers responded to the Santander Bank at 437 Rutherford Avenue early Sunday morning. What if something happens to you? But hes so agile, and hes so athletic, and he has no fear, just absolutely no fear. We all want to drive a f----n caaar like Gloansy. 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? To get to Charlestown was to live free. It was wild. Welliver: [Renner] switches it on and I love watching him work. Just let me go in. She opened the door and I just walked in and Ben was there and he just burst out laughing. 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. And we got in the car and kept going. I totally put that directly in the movie. Ive never felt all that interested in literally translating from book to page. After all, there are only so many Massachusetts-set crime stories about Irish American antiheroes that you can tell. Jon Hamm (FBI special agent Adam Frawley): I knew he had some serious Boston cred. He was in his early 20s. A Boston bank robber looks for a way out of his criminal lifestyle after beginning a passionate romance with the woman that his gang briefly took hostage. 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. It all went to the actual production of the movie. The 1995 article in The Boston Globe, which inspired the films prologue, actually noted more armored car robbers are traced to Charlestown than any other neighborhood in the country. Did they know that this was in the plans?. Its not a super cheap movie but its not expensive like a studio movie. 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. Crockett: Pete had a reputation for being kind of a hardass. Solemn now: To The Town. Hall: I just remember him being so mercurial. 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. FBI responds to bank robbery on NW Side. Its this movie and its already got a script. The Friends of Eddie Coyle starred Robert Mitchum in the title role and Peter Boyle as a hitman who ran a bar. 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. It was really more of an erotic thriller: The criminal who falls in love with the captive kind of thing. "Ben Affleck Played Me". Affleck: Those little streets created something visually interesting that you dont see in many car chases. Theres so many shots and so quickly, that at the end, OK, what happened? So I was thrilled. Its an action movie where you get to root for the bad guys. All they see are yuppies. Welliver: When we were doing The Town is when he was up for the role of Hawkeye. Burke: Ive heard people say, Oh, we dont sound like that! And Im like, I dont think you guys really listen to yourselves. Then it might as well just stay a book. Hes probably still there. That was the moment where I realized that I could differentiate one bank robbery from another. Cooper: I dont know Jeremys height, but Ben is a pretty big boy. 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. But he could not have been happier to be there. 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. Suspects at large after $100K stolen from North Side bank: authorities. Job. It all felt sort of very impossible and glamorous. This shooting game is the newest brilliant sneaking FPS game. They were excited. 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.. The Town was initially supposed to end with Doug paying for his sins with his life. 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? And Ben Affleck was incredibly famous already. They get their tips and kick up to local crime lord Fergus Fergie Colm, played by veteran character actor Pete Postlethwaite. 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. They were all from Charlestown. Slaine: When he cast me in Gone Baby Gone I had no acting experienceand I wasnt the only one. And everyone was like, Ah, you cant, really. And I was talking to people right next to him. And on Afflecks instructions, Blake Lively, a California girl, spent three months hanging around with locals in bars and apartments to prepare for her role. Now, William shares his story after his Caught in Providence case went viral. They went to jail because there were cracks on the pavement, leaks on the street. It kind of had a post-apocalyptic feeling to it. Theyd closed off the street, working on this story that I had cooked up in my bedroom at home. He poses as a florist, just like Dean OBanion, the Irish gang leader who celebrated St. Valentines Day with Al Capone in Prohibition Chicago. Affleck: Rebecca worked just as hard on the accent. . I had somebody from Marblehead quote all her dialogue. Stockard: Obviously youre making a movie so you mythologize it a little bit. 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. He humanized that character in that moment. 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 movies center is Charlestown, right across the bridge from the rest of Boston, a legend in illicit locales. It really wasnt gonna work. The one thing I miss about Boston is you saw a fistfight every day. They dont squeal. Hall: It felt like cinema in the classic sense. I was only comforted by the thought that no one with a Boston accent has ever actually read the Boston Phoenix. 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. Crockett: I remember being on the streets of Charlestown talking to some people. On Feb. 7, 2019, Brady pleaded guilty to bank robbery. 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. You woke me up.. Burke: To go sit in the stands with Jeremy Renner in an empty stadium, it was surreal. Los Angles police on high alert for grand theft and planned robbery in town. Crockett: He knew from the beginning that [Magloan] was gonna be Slaine. I feel like were still in the black. You didnt really know what was coming. When fans of The Town think of Charlestown, they think of banks and bars and punchlines. Staging a chase scene in the North End was difficult, but shooting a robbery inside and around Fenway Park was unprecedented. So many broke the code, shattered the code. Jem is his right hand muscle, and unquestioning backup. This makes it a mini-epic. 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. It went on to make $154 million (119 million) worldwide. Theres a lot of different stories to tell. 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. Agents with the FBI believe Gage Haws robbed five small town banks throughout northwest Ohio. The productions biggest scoop, location-wise, was being granted permission to shoot the Fenway Park heist scene in the real Fenway Park, home of the Boston Red Sox. Hogan: Warner Bros. didnt want to make the movie for that amount. Welliver: It [was] like doing photo shoots in front of Graceland with Elvis when Elvis was still alive. The blue-collar neighborhood produced more bank robbers and armored car thieves than anywhere else in the world, according to the movies prologue. And I was like, Who the hell is this guy? 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. 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. Thats what happened. To observe this life. Which was nice. When I was a kid, I was scared to go there. Peter Craig (cowriter): Theres a really great detail that I always loved where Doug just sticks his gun in one of those portholes in the armored car, and so the bullets like ricochet and rattle around in there. He came over and he was a little bit shy but she was speaking for him. In the film, the crew get away, largely thanks to the kind of driving that puts Daniel Craig to shame. So I read this new version of the script. Jason Bourne kills the bad guys. September 2009. 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. 2 hours ago. And Im like, Whoa, so he must be the director.. Thats the one moment that gives you a glimpse into how damaged and how profoundly broken Jem is. He was doing a long sentence. Or rather, close enough for himto understand how little he knew about it. He has that capacity, and I think that makes him a classic American filmmaker. It took him to the next level because it made him a filmmaker who also had box office appeal. 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. I thought I had something to add to it. Welliver: He said, Hey, weve got great stories in this city that nobodys telling.. And to that end, its 100 percent on Ben. In real life, they were not so lucky. Affleck was determined to make sure that his main cast could at least pass as true Massholes. We all want to be from Douggies Charlestown and we all know its a fantasy. I dont know exactly what happened, but I know that the option was running out. Extremely plausible. 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 I leave the movie theater and Im really kind of numb, trying to figure it out. We did not have legal clearance to use the logo. With the premiere of The Town 10 years ago, the No R genre peaked. Its something Ive seen other directors do. A long moment passes with intensity. Especially when youre in a park thats not open to the public. Susan Matheson (costume designer): Ben at one point wears a zip-up track jacket that looks like a Bruins jacket. By contrast, Afflecks Doug MacRay heads a four-man gang. MacRay, who is a recovering addict with mommy issues, is more of a sociopath than Jem, who is only living the way the streets taught him. 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. Hall: I wouldnt really say I did a Boston accent. Welliver: I still think that The Town and Gone Baby Gone, thats the bar. Douggie, played by Affleck, is a man trying not to die on the street he was born. Not noir, French for black. Ben Affleck grew up in Cambridge, only a few miles away from Charlestown, but to him the distance between the two places felt vast. Affleck: Jeremy came in and was just awesome. I was fine with that. The Cambridge native and his crew were back in Charlestown last week re-shooting an alternative ending to the bank robber thriller. Culture Editor Tony Sokol is a writer, playwright and musician. Chris Cooper (Stephen MacRay): Ben had me at prison. It was great. The Town captures the locale expertly, and the atmosphere masterfully. Hes like, What the fuck are you doing? Hed be happy to settle down with his former hostage, Claire Keesey (Rebecca Hall). WebMassachusetts, U.S., Town Birth Records, 1620-1850. And thats just sort of the natural progression. It at least had that upswing. But mostly a Boston accent depends on your socioeconomic status, by and large. It definitely felt like, Im getting to see something that not a lot of people get to see. Besides being the lovable and erudite wrinkle in the scheme, she is not a townie, someone who was raised in the neighborhood. The cunning group is robbing city banks to steal money and making the getaway with diamond Heist. I knew it was one scene and it was gonna be an important scene: [Dougs] relationship with his father. Affleck: I made sure that we had enough money to do the Fenway heist sequence in total, which was a lot. Affleck also embarked on a series of interviews with locals, including convicted robbers and members of the FBI violent crimes force. If you say its a bank heist movie, people are like, Ill see that. I think it was a great step. And Blake spent some time with her. The way we did that was to make the days inexpensive. Its not just an accent, its more of an attitude. 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. In 2010, estate agents were pitching waterfront redevelopments to young professionals and families. After managing to evade a manhunt and escape to Florida, his character says goodbye to Claire via a letter. The Boston Police 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. Affleck: Typically people you saw who did it badly would err on the side of doing the Kennedys. The gang torches their escape cars and their transfer vehicles. And she really focused specifically, not only on like, an American accent, but what it sounded like in Marblehead, which doesnt sound like Charlestown. Or why Affleck hired him to play a Charlestown bank robber in his new movie The Town.. He often has a very small crew. Whats better than that? Also, Starr starred in a silent movie based on his criminal activity titled A Debtor to the Law. Like you didnt know what they were gonna do. Pretty much everyone on the set was an ex-con of some sort,Jeremy Renner told the LA Times. WebCharlestownis the oldest neighborhoodin Boston, Massachusetts, in the United States. A Providence man who claims he's robbed at least 100 banks and that Ben Affleck's character in "The Town" was based on him was held without bail Thursday on charges of robbing two Boston banks and attempting to rob a third, the Suffolk County District Attorney's office said. According to the Associated Press, Shea, along with Patrick McGonagle, Michael OHalloran, Stephen Burke, and Matthew McDonald, were all from the same His father, Stephen MacRay (Chris Cooper) was a thief, just like his father, and all of Dougs friends were thick with thievery. And he got really excited. We all sat there, and he did it. Violence, unsolved murders . 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. She prepped for that for God knows how long. McCoy, 29, was reportedly a member of the Utah Air And this was toward the end of the shoot. Affleck: The attitude in that scene where [Jem] shows up and discovers me with Claire, in front of Grendels in Cambridge, and the audience knows what he knows, but she doesnt know, and I know that hes discovered me Hall: Jeremy Renners character was just so brilliant and frightening. 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. The crew at the center of The Town resembles a gang of five masked robbers who pulled holdups from 1990 to 1995. Bill Simmons saysthere were a lot of Boston ladies like Kris in real life. It seems likely that Lively had met a few. Way we did not respond to a request to be interviewed for this article ]! Next level because it made him a classic American filmmaker he cast me in Gone Baby Gone I cooked... Youd come up with writing a script his new movie the Town Charlestown, right across the from. 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