Boston on Screen: Cinematic Challenges and Cultural Reflections

This episode is a first for Decoder Ring: a live show, recorded at the WBUR Festival in Boston, Massachusetts. Given the setting, we decided to take on a Boston-based cultural mystery: namely, the “Boston movie.” Beginning in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Hollywood has churned out a whole cycle of films drenched in Beantown’s particularities, crimes, crops, class conflicts, and accents, from The Departed to The Town. Why does a city smaller than El Paso or Jacksonville loom so large in the cinematic imagination? Why does Boston have a movie subgenre all its own? What makes a Boston movie a Boston movie?

With the help of three guests—film critic Ty Burr; Lisa Simmons, founder of the Roxbury International Film Festival; and Boston University linguist Danny Erker—we look closely at the history and heyday of the Boston movie: how The Friends of Eddie Coyle set the template, Good Will Hunting shoved the door wide open, and Mystic River ushered in an imperial phase. We discuss the importance of race and class to the Boston movie and the city itself, the role of homegrown movie stars like Ben Affleck and Mark Wahlberg, and, of course, the best and worst of Boston accents on film.

This episode of Decoder Ring was produced by Willa Paskin and Max Freedman. Our team also includes Katie Shepherd and supervising producer Evan Chung. Merritt Jacob is Slate’s Technical Director. 

If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, please email us at DecoderRing@slate.com, or leave a message on our hotline at 347-460-7281.

Films referenced in this episode:

• The Thomas Crown Affair (1968)

• Love Story (1970)

• The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973)

• The Brink’s Job (1978)

• The Verdict (1982)

• Quiz Show (1994)

• Good Will Hunting (1997)

• Squeeze (1997)

• Monument Ave. (1998)

• The Boondock Saints (1999)

• Southie (1999)

• Lift (2001)

• Blue Hill Avenue (2001)

• Mystic River (2003)

• Fever Pitch (2005)

• The Departed (2006)

• Gone Baby Gone (2007)

• The Fighter (2010)

• The Town (2010)

• Ted (2012)

• Ted 2 (2015)

• Black Mass (2015)

• Spotlight (2015)

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