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Affleck, Damon, to stretch dramatic wings with TV pilot about armored-car robbers from Charlestown

What an original idea! Our own local stars are working with Showtime to produce a series about the Boston Miracle - you know, that 1990s period involving "a family of armored car robbers from Charlestown in a case that grows to encompass and eventually upend Boston’s city-wide criminal justice system," not some silly idea about trying to get the gangs of Roxbury and Dorchester to stop killing each other:

O’Connor noted, "Chuck wrote a pressure-cooker of a script steeped in the tribal codes of a Shakespeare play — family, blood, betrayal, honor. His take on the ties that bind is handled with a deep honesty and insight. I see the show as a brawling thriller — and an intimate family drama — played out on the rough streets of Boston.”

And wow, it's "based on an original idea" by Affleck and that Chuck Guy! Man, we really need something like this. How long has it been since we've had a movie or series about Irish-American Boston gangsters?

And we're really looking forward to the original interpretations that Affleck and Damon can bring to the idea, especially the part about "a corrupt yet venerated FBI veteran who is invested in maintaining the status quo," teaming up with the black DA imported from Brooklyn to wipe out the mobsters rather than, oh, helping them escape.

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Comments

NO!!!!! ENOUGH, ALREADY!!!! These 'people' they portray DO NOT deserve to be glorified in any way!

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Geez chill don't watch the movie then..

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Unless there is curmudgeonly retired cop turned P.I., a red head know it all vigilante suburban bike riding woman, incorruptible Officer Nice, an adorable dog named Elmer, a fat local guy in Buick that "knows the streets", militant turkeys, an independent reporter named Gaffin, Ron Newman, guest appearances by Dukakis, and a cast of over 100 anonymous locals, why should anyone here watch the show?

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is the abysmal decay of the few remaining apartments most people can afford.

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Here are some scenes they can use (first one NSFW):

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I read an article about this show yesterday and it gave a completely different spin. From what this other article wrote, the show is about how law enforcement stopped the violence.
http://deadline.com/2017/07/showtime-city-on-a-hill-drama-pilot-ben-affl...

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Looks like they took the same press release I read and just put the paragraphs in a different order - it still says it's focusing on a family of armored-car robbers from Charlestown confronted with a black DA from Brooklyn and (and here I paraphrase) a corrupt but lovable FBI agent (and that this is how the "Boston Miracle" got its name, even though it actually isn't).

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And the fact he's black matters why?

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If you do, think about why that might be an important plot point in a series about Boston in the early 90s. If you're too young or weren't around Boston then, go look up "Charles Stuart."

The fact that we don't import DAs from other places (and especially not New York) and that the "Boston Miracle" had absolutely nothing to do with white bank-robbing Charlestown punks is irrelevant when we've got Daffleck here executive producing a gritty Boston street drama about people with their gritty Boston accents in a pilot that will bear absolutely no resemblance to the 6,000 or so gritty Boston street dramas about people with their gritty Boston accents they've both already been in. But they probably remember hearing something about race issues in Boston as they grew up in their gritty homes in, um, Cambridge.

Still, props to, well, somebody involved in this thing for remembering that, yes, Boston (technically, Suffolk County) actually did have a black DA in the early '90s. But we didn't trade for him with the Yankees - Bill Weld appointed him. And he actually had something to do with the "Boston Miracle," which took place far, far from the gritty streets of Charlestown.

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Hey, lay off of Cambridge. We can be gritty too. It's just a fine grit, or maybe extrafine. That's how we get our polish.

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Even if you didn't live in a gritty zone, all the kids went to the same high school.

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I was alive in well in the 1990s and before in Boston and elsewhere.

Chuck Stewart was ONE....ONE incident where a murderer claimed some black guy(s) killed his wife....ONE incident. Boston's murder and violence rate peaked during this period, as it did in, for example, NYC. Murders in the city were grossly disproportionately committed by male POCs(as we PC call non so called whites today). Not just grissly disproportionate,but the actual overwhelming majority of murders and shootings.

So cut the crap. And I mostly grew up, when I moved to Boston from NYC with my family, guess where? JAMAICA PLAIN! THE GHETTO PART, not Moss Hill. I know Mission Hill and The Bury better than probably 95% of white people commenting on here....pre-WF, Starbucks, and million $ condos.

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OK, now that you've established your bona fides, let's get down to brass tacks and take a stroll down memory lane.

First, as mentioned, Boston actually did have its first (and only) black DA during that period - and he played a role in the "Boston Miracle" that Daffleck is going on about, even if they are getting everything else about it wrong. So mentioning his race makes sense (also, the press release makes a point of mentioning that the crusading DA is black).

Second, I brought up Stuart as an example, not THE single defining moment of the era. Since you grew up in the "ghetto" part of JP, then surely you remember how the cops were stopping pretty much every young black guy, solely on the word of a white guy who, we now know, was, in fact the murderer.

Now throw that on top of the wounds still left over from busing (would a black person have felt safe on Carson Beach in 1990?) and from other incidents (remember Darryl Williams? Remember how Dee Brown was ordered at gunpoint to the ground by Wellesley cops?) and layer on top of that how society in general was framing and treating the crack epidemic (which again gets back to how young black men were treated during the Stuart hysteria), and maybe you can begin to remember that race relations in Boston were not exactly at their peak in the early 1990s, even despite a lot of the good work that Ray Flynn did (much of which seemed to evaporate during, yes, the Stuart case).

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I LIVED IT. And I'm white and grew up in a majority Pocket neighborhood. I had black friends. I had PR friends. I got jumped MULTIPLE times solely because I am white. Last time, coming homenfrom school, they beat the shit out of me. So please, spare me any lectures about racism, I don't need it.

BTW:

I made the OMFG post above.

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New phone, damn spell check.

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a skinny, teenage, Casper the ghost white kid. There was A LOT of random violence in JP and elsewhere during that time. It was mostly caused by black kids young adults who lived in the projects. I understand it's un PC to say that, but it's essentially true, especially the really bad violence and gun related stuff.

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No. You shahhhdahhp! (Boston accent)

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"Chuck wrote a pressure-cooker of a script..."

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It just shows how disconnected Hollywood is to all of us white-collars and/or blue-collar types

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I'm surprised that no one took offense to him referring to the Boston-based drama script as a "pressure cooker" given the circumstances of the Marathon. And what happened to Carlos Mencia in that South Park episode about Kanye West needs to happen to Ben Affleck after reading about this trite....

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Yes, this movie description desperately needs a trigger warning.

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When Law enforcement was corrupt and racist! Then the Boston miracle happened and racism and corruption disappeared. The real miracle is where they are going to film this movie about the gritty streets of gentrified Boston. My guess is Lynn or Brockton.

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right? Where in Boston is gritty? Even Revere, Malden and Everett aren't gritty anymore. Gonna have to go to Brockton. You are right. Far out.

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Wait... people think it's a miracle that Boston's crime fell in the mid 90s? Crime fell everywhere in the mid 90s. It was probably lag from lead abatement.

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An legal accessible abortion.

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The miracle was in stopping the murder of teen gang members in Roxbury and Dorchester, the result of a very specific, targeted program that involved police, religious and neighborhood leaders and, yes, the gang members themselves.

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Alaskan residents get an annual stipend from the oil companies, due to the abundance and annoyance of oil in the state, and the screw job the oil companies perpetrate on them to siphon it out.

We ought be getting the same thing from Affleck and Damon. They've been doing the same thing to us for years.

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All those tourists pay sales and meals and hotel taxes.

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Sarcasm that incorporates poorly-written Hollywood promotional fluff into every paragraph, unfortunately legitimizes said fluff

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I can play -
- A divorced cop who's trying to quit the bottle and get back with his wife.
- A kindly priest who used to run with the bad kids himself long ago.
- A corrupt politician on the take for no discernible reason.
- An earnest newspaper reporter who longs for the truth to be told.
- Or a loser kid who just wants to see his buddy make it - for him.

Where do I sign up?

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Something big did happen with crime in Charlestown in the 1990s. The "code of silence" was broken. And here's the other thing, Boston did have an African American DA back in the 1990s, too.

So yes, the "Boston Miracle" is something very different than this, but the story line is not too far fetched.

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Exactly. I remember when the code broke in Charlestown. It was kind of a big thing around here.

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