How to Rob a Bank, (2024), Netflix documentary, written by Maxim Gertler-Jaffe, Max Peltz, Stephen Robert Morse, Seth Porges, Directors Stephen Robert Morse, Seth Porges.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Rob_a_Bank_%282024_film%29?utm_source=chatgpt.com

https://www.netflix.com/title/81254312

My eldest brother Stephen (SEV to his mates) was a bank robber. No, he wasn’t really. But he got arrested for attempting to rob the two banks in Clydebank Shopping Centre about 40 years ago. The police forensics swabbed his hair and declared there were traces of it in the backseat stockings. That showed that he’d pulled it over his head as a try-out. They did the same to his two accomplices. Both are still about. So I’ll not name them. But the bank wasn’t their target. And no charges were made.

I reimagined something similar in Beastie which involved multiple bank robberies and timelines. Good to see I used my family connections. https://bit.ly/bannkie

How to Rob a Bank is given the Hollywood treatment as a Netflix documentary. True Crime stories are big business now. The main character, or bank robber, Scott Scurlock was christened Hollywood by law-enforcement agencies in Seattle. The premise (or logline) is quite simple. The Hollywood Bandit had 19 confirmed heists between 1992 and 1996.  

Their largest take was in 1996 before they were caught and was worth over $1 million. Not a bad day’s work.

  Scott Scurlock had already made a killing by making and selling crystal meth making over $1 million after he’d been busted at college and asked to leave without graduating. He made the drugs in a homemade lab. A partner sold it, mainly to biker gangs. When his partner was killed, Scurlock decided to try something else less stressful. Robbing banks.

He’d invested much of his money in buying land in which he’d constructed with his friends elaborate tree houses, with all the mod cons (no pun intended) in which he was king of his jungle.

 His accomplices Steve Meyers and Mark Biggins had done their time and were able to fill in the backstory and suggest ways in which they went wrong and might have done things differently. A major selling point was their sophisticated latex disguises inspired by Hollywood films like Point Break.

This was juxtaposed with Detective Larry Campbell, FBI Agent Rick Michaud, Detective Harry Fain, accomplices and associates, law enforcement officials, journalists all who were keen to pull the mask off Hollywood’s face and like Scooby Doo, waited to later claim the credit for saying, I told you so.

Home videos let the production team put a face and moving images of an ever-young Scott Scurlock in a way I never could with my brother. There were few cameras then, a handful of photographs and no moving images. He died penniless. Scurlock died with bags of money. As Steve Myers came to realise that stuff they tried to steal didn’t really matter.  What mattered was living a life worth living.