Kelly Reichardt’s ‘The Mastermind’ taps Worcester Art heist

Among the most successful of American independent filmmakers, writer-director Kelly Reichardt’s unexpected and often comical heist film “The Mastermind” opens Friday.

With this, her ninth picture, Reichardt takes her life-long fascination with large scale thievery and unreels a museum robbery that ranks as amazingly inept.

As the so-called brains, James Blaine Mooney, aka J.B. (played by Josh O’Connor), is surprised at how unlike the reality was from his fantasy scenario. But Reichardt, 61, was inspired by a real museum heist.

“I look around sometimes, just for art heist stories which are now on the World Wide Web and I came upon one for the 50th anniversary of the 1972 Worcester Art Museum heist.

“My film,” she noted in a Zoom interview, “is set in 1970, but the story was about three teenage girls that were at the Worcester Art Museum doing a homework assignment. And they got caught up in this heist that was going on, like a ‘snatch and grab.’

“I thought that was really great little tidbit and so I started there.”

For Reichardt, 1970 worked not just because so much was going on with the protests against the Vietnam war and the Nixon presidency.

“Well, first of all, the kind of robbery that they’re doing” – walking in, wearing nylon stocking masks, grabbing paintings off the wall – “only goes up to a certain point in time. Because then, security happens. After the Gardner Museum (robbery), that kind of thing can’t really be pulled off. Museums get rid of their circular drives. They start hiring real security people. Eventually, cameras come into play.

“So it has to be set in a certain period. I set it in 1970 because I wanted it to be in the sort of pre-70s, but post-60s moment in the haze of the 60s. At a time where the country’s really polarized. The National Guard’s going on to college campuses and we’re expanding the war into Cambodia. 1970, the year it’s set in, works for my character because it puts him there when the draft is fully happening in 1970. He’s a little on the safety side of it. It’s not breathing down his back. But it is other people’s. So, that seemed important.

“And I was trying to make a film about a guy who’s pretty insular and secure about his safety in the world. Just without even really thinking about it — because he’s like a middle-class, white, handsome man with some talent. His parents  (Bill Camp and Hope Davis) are educated, and they have some influence. Someone like that could skate through it all.”

“The Mastermind” is in theaters Friday