Back in 2004, four students at Kentucky’s Transylvania University hatched a plan that would become one of the craziest art heists in American history. Funded in part by a fake ID business and inspired by repeated viewings of Guy Ritchie’s Snatch, the friends managed to pull off a messy robbery at their school’s rare book room, escaping with an original copy of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and other rare books worth around $10 million.
The four guys may have successfully made off with the rare books, but selling them was another story, and in the process of trying to get their score appraised by Christie’s, the FBI caught up to them and shipped the whole gang off to prison. The whole thing was, as Vanity Fair put it later, “one part Ocean’s 11, one part Harold & Kumar.”
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Now, 14 years later, the heist that was inspired by heist movies has become a heist movie itself.
American Animals, the new film from writer/director Bart Layton based on the bizarre saga of the Transy Book Heist, pulled in massive praise when it hit Sundance and SXSW earlier this year. Variety called the film “sensational” and Hollywood Reporter praised Layton’s first foray into narrative filmmaking as one of “the most accomplished and fully realized big-screen debuts of recent times.”
On Wednesday, the Orchard released the first trailer for the upcoming film, starring a murders’ row of young talent—from Dunkirk‘s Barry Keoghan to American Horror Story‘s Evan Peters to Blake Jenner of Everybody Wants Some!!—and the trailer does a fantastic job of capturing the sloppy and exhilarating feeling of the heist. What the trailer doesn’t show us, though, is way Layton periodically interrupts the film’s narration with first-hand (and sometimes contradictory) accounts of the saga from the kids who inspired the movie itself—one of the pieces that makes American Animals such a unique entry into the heist genre.
Their insane true story hits theaters on June 1. Until then, give the trailer a watch above.
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