'Have to have it': Filming to start on Provincetown movie about Gardner museum art heist

PROVINCETOWN — Some patrons at Arthur Egeli’s gallery in recent months were startled to find what looked like a famous Vermeer painting right in the middle of Provincetown. Probably every fifth or sixth visitor, Egeli said, recognized that the Vermeer really shouldn’t be there at all because it had disappeared without a trace more than 20 years ago.

The painting in the gallery was a replica — and clearly a convincing one — painted by Provincetown artist Steve Toomey to add authenticity to Egeli’s fifth movie. The plot: What might have happened before and after the notorious 1990 unsolved art heist at Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

Egeli plans to film his movie “Art Thief” completely in Provincetown over four weeks starting March 23. He will use an apartment for interior scenes, but is also plotting a scene of a prison-inmate clean-up at Herring Cove Beach. Some scenes will be shot in the museum portion of the Pilgrim Monument and Provincetown Museum and inside Provincetown Town Hall, he said, with King Hiram's Masonic Lodge standing in for the interior of the Gardner museum and the Provincetown Public Library for part of its exterior.

One night of filming is expected to be of the Gardner museum thieves, pretending to be police officers, entering a back door at Town Hall and then hustling the 13 stolen museum pieces — including Vermeer’s “The Concert” and Rembrandt’s “A Lady and Gentleman in Black” — back out to waiting vehicles.

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“I’m sitting in my studio right now looking at Rembrandt’s ‘Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee’ and it looks just like the real one. … My studio right now is full of (Gardner) paintings,” Egeli said with a laugh in a phone interview, marveling at what Toomey was able to paint as a sort of pandemic project. “And the thing is, when you do a film about a robbery, you can’t just have the paintings that were stolen, but the ones that were adjacent to the paintings that were stolen, that were in the room.”

Starring in “Art Thief” will be four Hollywood-known union actors, as well as some local performers. Egeli is looking for people to play extras in crowd scenes, including at an auction, and for 1980s-era cars to be donated to add authenticity for the 1990 setting as well as sponsors. (Interested? https://www.facebook.com/filmsbyarthur.)

Actors in 'Art Thief'

Max Deacon — whose credits include “Into the Storm” and the TV series “The Collection” and “Hatfields & McCoys” — will play Kevin Deeley, a Dorchester orphan who becomes an artist and then a thief who transforms himself into a respected art collector accepted in Boston’s upper social circles.

Jacqueline Emerson, who played “Foxface” in the movie “The Hunger Games,” will play an art conservator. Boston actor/comedian Lenny Clarke — seen in “Fever Pitch” and TV shows “Rescue Me” and “The John Larroquette Show” — will play art collector and a Boston crime figure. Keith Szarabajka (best known for “Transformers: Dark of the Moon,” “Argo” and “The Dark Knight”) also recently joined the cast to play a character called Pepitone.

A dialogue coach, Egeli said, has been working with some of the actors on Boston accents. Local talent in the 25-person cast will include musician Johnny Bisone (playing a museum guard who had used the museum basement as a music-rehearsal studio), Nicholas Dorr (playing a man who runs an auction house) and Jody O’Neil, all of whom Egeli has previously worked with.

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Egeli’s own previous credits include “The Black Emperor of Broadway,” about actor Charles S. Gilpin in playwright Eugene O’Neill’s groundbreaking “Emperor Jones,” that is now available for streaming on Amazon Prime, and “Murder on the Cape,” about the Christa Worthington murder. Egeli co-wrote “Art Thief” over the past few years with wife Heather and Ian Bowater; producer is Judith Richland.

Where the story idea came from

It was Heather who suggested the idea for the movie, he said, urging her husband to listen to the 2018 WBUR podcast “Last Seen” about the Gardner museum heist. Egeli said he became convinced that investigators had not properly considered obsessed collectors as the reason behind the crime. That’s the premise of his “Art Thief.”

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“Once a collector becomes enamored with a canvas, they must possess it at all costs, and this alone was the ultimate motivation behind the daring operation on St. Patrick’s Day, 1990,” he said in a written description of the film. “The work was too recognizable to sell on any market.”

That realization came to Egeli after listening to the podcast, he said in the phone interview. “I kind of felt like why had the crime not been solved? Because I live in this world of art and galleries and paintings and I don't think they took into account the one factor … that there are certain people among us that, not only do they love art, but have to have it. And that ‘have to have it’ thing wasn't in their investigation. It was more than just somebody trying to make money. There was somebody who loved and wanted the paintings.”

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Egeli said he has seen that obsession firsthand. “I have those customers come into my gallery and they’ll put a painting on two credit cards, you know? Because they have to have it. So, to me, that was what was missing from the coverage and that we tried to put into our movie.”

The theft itself took just a few hours in the middle of the night, and Egeli plans to re-create what happened. Then the script, in the works for three years, spins a fictional story around that.

“In a story, you want to know who they (the thieves) were before this and how did they get the idea and who planned it and then what happened to them afterwards and why should we care about them?” he said. “We tell everything exactly how it happened that night and what they stole, but before and after, it’s fiction, something we invented.”

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The timing for the Provincetown filming in late March and early April was set in part because of the better temperature for equipment and the amount of light in the day. It’s also “the sweet spot before it gets too busy and you can’t afford rentals,” Egeli said, though he said the lack of people in Provincetown has made it harder to find crew members.

He expects post-production on “Art Thief” will take about a year, and said he hopes to enter the movie into 2023 film festivals. Each of his previous movies has found a distributor, he noted, and he considers this story of the Gardner museum heist to be his most commercially appealing topic yet.

Contact Kathi Scrizzi Driscoll at kdriscoll@capecodonline.com. Follow on Twitter: @KathiSDCCT.

This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: Gardner museum art heist focus of movie to be filmed in Provincetown