Ben Affleck Explains the Reason the Bruins Wouldn't Let Him Wear Their Gear in 'The Town' and It's Astonishingly Dumb
I'm a big proponent of the Ben Affleck Proximity Hypothesis, which states there's a direct correlation between the quality of his films and how close they are set to Boston. I considered "Argo" to be an exception to that rule. But the more I've read about the real story, how there was never a chase scene at the airport in Tehran and basically the operation was 95% Canadian and not the 5% it was made out to be, the more I think the hypothesis is confirmed.
Anyway, The Ringer just did a 10th year anniversary retrospective of one of his best movies, "The Town," in which Affleck explains why a movie set in Boston would have all sorts of mentions of the Red Sox and the climatic scene filmed directly inside and around Fenway Park, but why he was reduced to wearing this Family Dollar Store clearance rack knockoff:
... track suit instead of officially licensed Bruins gear.
[Titus] Welliver (who played Officer Dino Ciampa) : The character Dino was a cop who grew up in Charlestown. When we started, I said, “I need a driver who’s Charlestown born and bred.” Interestingly enough, my driver was a guy named John Fidler who was a major suspect in many bank robberies, and …[h]e goes, “Yeah, you know, I’ll tell you, Ty. Here’s how it works in fucking Charlestown: You’re born in Charlestown, you play fucking hockey and you rob.” And I went, “OK, that sums it up.”
Affleck: Hockey’s such a big thing in Charlestown.
Susan Matheson (costume designer): Ben at one point wears a zip-up track jacket that looks like a Bruins jacket. But it isn’t. We did not have legal clearance to use the logo.
Affleck: The Bruins have been extremely shortsighted and wrong with their policy, where if there’s swearing or violence, you can’t use their logo.
Matheson: I will never forget sitting there with some felt and scissors at 3 or 4 in the morning. I was cutting out pieces of felt while Gina [Rhodes] was stitching them—making, by hand, the fake Bruins logo. It had to feel like Bruins. But it couldn’t be Bruins.
Affleck: I’m like, “Why the fuck do you think people go to hockey games?” Swearing and fighting. It’s like 50 percent of why people buy tickets."
Stick tap to you, driver John Fidler. A post-series handshake to you, Affleck. And WTF Bruins?
Both of these guys are 1000% correct. How could Jeremy Jacobs think that having his team's officially licensed gear in a movie about mobsters, sports fans and heists that is set in his team's home city would somehow offend anyone? Much less his paying customers? I mean, where are these Bruins fans with such delicate sensibilities that some cartoonish fictional violence in a crime movie would turn them off to whatever logo they see in the film?
In what world do people exist who crave hockey with all its inherent blood letting and PG-13 language, but if they see the same logo in a violent R-rated movie they see on the ice they'll recoil in horror and never be able to support said team again?
On the contrary. Being associated with a critically acclaimed, Oscar nominated movie is the kind of thing you should go looking for. Paying for, if necessary. Affleck was offering it for free and the Bs turned him down. Apparently having learned nothing from legendary Hollywood blunders like M&Ms not letting Spielberg use their candy in a little known project called "ET," so Reeses Pieces slid in there instead and added billions to their stock price. Jacobs should've told Affleck he'd give him a million to move that final shootout scene from Fenway to the TD Garden. Made it the way they did the helicopter crash sequence in that other Oscar-worthy film, Jean Claude Van Damme's "Sudden Death." He'd have made that money back and more from tourists taking tours of the arena the way they do John Henry's ballpark.
This whole story is further proof that just because you can afford a professional franchise in one of the four majors, it doesn't mean you're good at business.