Hollywood discovers Boston

It’s a scene that gives the phrase “getting shelled at Fenway” a whole new meaning.

In the crime thriller “The Town,” a local heist crew attempts one of the riskiest jobs in recent memory: taking down the cash room at Fenway Park, home of Boston’s beloved Red Sox baseball team. After FBI agents are tipped off to the caper, automatic weapons bark as violence spills from the stadium’s bowels out onto the city’s historic streets.

The action sequence’s well-known location certainly heightens the stakes of the heist (isn’t it a cardinal sin to loot the Cathedral of Boston?). But more than just a crackling climax for an ambitious genre film, the Fenway shootout can be seen as the capstone for a series of recent films verging on its own sub-genre: the Boston-set crime drama.

“There’s something about that city,” says Basil Iwanyk, producer of “The Town.” “People are interested in exploring it right now.”

Boston has taken on different incarnations in America’s pop-culture psyche, with its Revolutionary War history, Ivy League reputation and blue-blood heritage. But when it comes to crime dramas, the city remains pure working-class. But though many of Boston’s fictionalized denizens may seem desperate, belligerent or simply marginalized, the same can’t be said for the movies about them. Over the last few years, Boston crime dramas have not only found critical and commercial success, they’ve also benefited from an extraordinary amount of Oscar attention.

Clint Eastwood’s “Mystic River,” adapted from a novel by Boston’s poet laureate of crime fiction, Dennis Lehane, earned six nominations in 2004 and won acting Oscars for Sean Penn and Tim Robbins. Three years later, Martin Scorsese’s “The Departed” received five nominations and won Academy Awards in four key categories: best picture, writing, directing and film editing.

In 2008, “Gone Baby Gone” (also from a Lehane book), the directorial debut from Boston native Ben Affleck, earned Amy Ryan a surprise nomination in the supporting actress category. And now “The Town,” which Affleck co-wrote, directed and stars in, and the upcoming Bay State-set “The Fighter,” which stars Mark Wahlberg as real-life boxer “Irish” Micky Ward, are enjoying a considerable amount of award-season buzz.

“Boston is a little mysterious,” Affleck says. “It’s a little parochial. It’s a little clannish. But it’s a good venue for storytelling simply because it’s unique.”

Although Boston certainly has its own cultural identity, Hollywood has never been afraid of burnishing clichés and passing them off as new, and some critics suggest that the recent portrayals of the city’s Irish roots have been exactly that.

But those tropes exist for a reason, Affleck says. “Irish immigrants have really colored the city and put their mark on Boston. They have been superseded by so many waves of other immigrants, but, still, Boston feels like an Irish town, and the Irish, for whatever reason, feel tough.”

That tough, hard-drinking Irish American archetype (or subverted versions of it) has played a major role in almost every recent film set in the city, even though Boston “is a very diverse city,” says Wahlberg, whose performance as a hard-charging cop in “The Departed” earned him an Oscar nomination. “I grew up in Dorchester, which is actually a very mixed neighborhood, one of the poorest, along with Roxbury, which was all black. South Boston was all white, Irish Catholic. You had East Boston, which was all Italian. Then you had all these surrounding towns that were rich white people. It’s a fascinating world.”

Yet the same could be said for many other American cities. So why has Boston been such a successful backdrop for the recent blood operas about loyalty, betrayal, love and relative morality? One explanation, Iwanyk suggests, has to do with what Boston isn’t — namely, New York or Los Angeles, where crime films have been dominated by some of the industry’s greatest directors, including Scorsese, Sidney Lumet, Francis Ford Coppola and Michael Mann.

“How do you make a better crime drama than ‘Heat’ or any of the New York films [from the ‘70s]?” Iwanyk asks. “Boston is the next round,” he says.

Next round or not, Boston, with its broad-A accents, history of class and racial tensions, pugnacious bar culture and chipped-tooth swagger, has long fascinated Hollywood. Well before Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio squared off in “The Departed,” Robert Mitchum made the memorable “The Friends of Eddie Coyle,” about an aging, down-on-his-luck gun dealer, which hit theaters back in 1973. More recently, Mel Gibson shot his police procedural “Edge of Darkness” there.

“Cities are becoming increasingly homogenous, with the same Banana Republics and fast-food chains,” Affleck says. “But Boston definitely has its own feel and flavor, and that distinctness makes a story more interesting when you feel a specificity of place.”

Few filmmakers have spent more time putting Beantown on the big-screen than Affleck, who was born in Berkeley, Calif., but raised in Cambridge, Mass. Though he doesn’t claim to be a spokesman for the city, he makes no secret about his affection for the area, which, quite literally, has been his muse for three films: “Good Will Hunting” (for which he won a screenwriting Oscar with Damon), “Gone Baby Gone” and “The Town.”

The films deal with divergent subject matter, but all three employ issues of American classism as a subtext (as do “Mystic River” and “The Departed”), whether it’s Will Hunting’s ascendance through education out of his Southie neighborhood, the plight of Amy Ryan’s tragically deficient single mother in “Gone” or the tension between “Townies” and “Toonies” in “The Town.”

“We expect white rural poverty and black urban poverty because that’s what we usually see,” Affleck says. “But that’s another reason that makes Boston so unique, because it’s turned that upside down and forces us to reexamine preconceived ideas.”

But not everyone has been pleased with the recent trend of Boston crime flicks. When “The Town” was released, locals took umbrage with a placard at the beginning of the film that stated that the Charlestown neighborhood is home to more armored car and bank robberies than anywhere else in America.

“I know there was some rumbling,” Affleck says. “Some people liked the movie and some people said, ‘Why are we always being represented as criminals?’ But the stuff I did was very much based in reality. I’m not the one who came up with the reputation that Charlestown has produced a lot of bank robbers. Boston is certainly a place where people are outspoken, opinionated and are ready to jump into it.”

Envelope writer Randee Dawn contributed to this report.

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