Ben Affleck and Matt Damon have set their sights on another Boston-based story.
The pair are producing a movie, titled “The Shadows,” about America’s first police detectives, drawn from a story by Matthew Pearl that appeared in the Boston Globe Magazine in 2016. Pearl’s story, which was titled “Into the Shadows,” focused on a first-of-its-kind anti-crime task force created in Boston in the 19th century that wore plain clothes and went undercover — in other words, detectives.
Paramount is teaming to produce “The Shadows” with Pearl Street Films, Affleck and Damon’s production company with Jennifer Todd. Tapped to write the screenplay was Chris Bremner, who’s currently at work on a script for “Bad Boys 3” and co-writing director Dan Trachtenberg’s Harry Houdini biopic.
“Obviously, with Ben and Matt’s connection to Boston, their interest in the history, and their other projects set in and around Boston, they’re the ideal partner,” says Pearl.
This isn’t Pearl’s first Hollywood rodeo. A piece he wrote for Slate about the US Army’s K Troop, which was created to counter the rise of the KKK in the 1800s, is being produced for the big screen by Joseph Gordon-Levitt.