17 North Beach Street
Nantucket, MA 02554
(508) 228-1515
STEALING THE SHOW
How The Barnicle Brothers Broke Into The Movie Business.
Colin and Nick Barnicle were raised on stories. As the sons of former Boston Globe columnist Mike Barnicle, the two brothers remember running around the streets of Boston as their father interviewed all walks of life, from detectives to bar owners to ballplayers to little old ladies. When it came to pursuing their own brand of storytelling, instead of newsprint, the brothers turned to film. What started out as playing around with a camcorder shooting funny skits with their younger brother ultimately turned into a New York City-based production house that’s now one of the hottest documentary outfits in the country. The Barnicle Brothers’ 2021 limited series on Netflix, This Is a Robbery, analyzing one of the most famous art heists in American history, was a binge-worthy national sensation. Now the brothers are returning to the Nantucket Film Festival this month with yet another hotly anticipated project centered on a robbery, a modern-day Bonnie and Clyde biopic titled Carol & Johnny.
Before This Is a Robbery had even debuted on Netflix, Colin and Nick had already switched gears to this new project. They were digging through old newspapers, searching for a possible sequel to This Is a Robbery, when they discovered a blurb in a Seattle newspaper from 1994 about a husband and wife named Carol and Johnny Williams who were in prison for committing a string of fifty-six consecutive bank robberies, the most in American history.
There wasn’t a lot of information available about the criminal couple, so Colin searched for John Williams in the U.S. Bureau of Prisons inmate database and found that he was serving a life sentence. The brothers wrote him a letter. They received a lengthy ten-page reply written on a yellow legal pad in perfect penmanship. “It was so interesting and engrossing that we started a correspondence with him in prison,” said Colin, who leads the creative arm of the Barnicle Brothers duo as director and chief filmmaker. “Then he got out of prison on compassion release, which was a surprise to us…and a surprise to him, too.”
Colin was the second person Williams called after he became a free man. Hearing his gravelly Midwestern drawl for the first time over the phone, the filmmaker knew instantly that he had a documentary on his hands. But he didn’t want to go about shooting it in the same way that he had with This Is a Robbery. Working during the pandemic, Colin decided to strip down his filmmaking process to the bare essentials. “With the exception of two days, Colin shot every single thing you will see in the film,” said Nick, who runs the production side of Barnicle Brothers. “He edited every single piece you will see in the film. He traveled to Seattle, Texas, New Mexico…as a one-man band.” The result was an intimate portrayal of the couple, following unexpected threads that Colin had to pull on.
What the brothers discovered after meeting with John and Carol was that their story wasn’t limited to their criminal past—a smash and-grab string of stickups during which John earned the nickname in the press as “The Shootist” for unloading his firearm into the air to scare bank tellers. As they developed a close rapport with the couple, the brothers realized that this was also a story about a husband and wife returning to life outside of the penitentiary. “As they explained their past to us, their future in the present situation literally changes,” Colin described. “They start thinking differently about things, they start to relate to each other in different ways. So the film is really about what you do when you’re seventy years old, an ex-bank robber and you get out prison. What kind of life can you build?”
Carol & Johnny was shot, edited and submitted to film festivals—debuting at the Tribeca Film Festival on June 8th— within a year, a breakneck pace compared to the seven-year saga that went into creating
This Is a Robbery. “We were probably the most unsuccessful people to have a movie on Netflix,” joked Colin. “Over the course of ten years, we probably went bankrupt five times.” Indeed, the ascension of the Barnicle Brothers as the new darlings of the film festival circuit has been more like a turbulent hot air balloon ride than a trip on a rocket ship, in which the brothers have sometimes had to heave deadweight over the side to stay afloat.
With no formal education in cinematography, both Colin and Nick earned their filmmaking chops on the job—some more successful than others. “We were really bad at working for other people,” Colin admitted. “I was actually an intern at Jimmy Fallon not getting paid and I still got fired. I was working forty hours a week for free and I was still so bad that they said, ‘No thank you.’” Nick was able to hold down a gig working with YouTube superstar Casey Neistat during his early days producing an HBO series with Neistat’s brother Van and Nantucket Nectars founder Tom Scott. The Barnicles eventually opened an office directly across the street from Neistat’s in New York City and began pulling together their own filmmaking outfit.
One of their first films was a short documentary on Boston Red Sox employees that ultimately led to them getting a regular assignment with Sunday Night Baseball. Despite spending their entire lives together, Colin and Nick struggled early on to carve out a productive working relationship. “It was like having a dance partner without any instructions; it was a lot of stepping on each other’s toes for ten years,” Colin described. “I think we literally got into a fist fight in the middle of the Cincinnati Reds ballpark…and we were old enough at that point that Nick threw out his back and I broke my glasses.”
Unlike other famous filmmaking brothers such as the Coens or Farrellys, Colin and Nick do not consider themselves to be two halves of the same brain. “We’re the complete opposite of that,” Nick said. “It’s more like steel sharpening steel.” By the time they started breaking ground on This Is a Robbery in 2015, Colin’s and Nick’s roles in the operation were well defined. While Colin helms much of the creative direction, cinematography and editing, Nick is the engine behind production—getting the film funded, ensuring the crew is on set, keeping the schedule—as well as working the phones to get the project picked up and distributed.
Despite their different personalities and responsibilities, both brothers have inherited helpful traits from their parents, Mike Barnicle, now a pundit on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, and Bank of America vice chair Anne Finucane. “I’d say that most of the attributes that are good were inherited from them, especially from my mother,” Nick laughed. Colin agreed, adding, “The storytelling comes from our dad, given what he did for a living, but in terms of the staying rock solid and making sure that your head is constantly above water, that comes from our mom—the great Anne Finucane!—who has ice water in her veins. We’re still trying to learn that one from her.”
Thanks to their parents, Colin and Nick grew up spending their summers on Nantucket. Right before the pandemic, Colin and his wife purchased a home in Sconset, which was where he first began writing the treatment for Carol & Johnny. With the story now returning to the island as part of the Nantucket Film Festival, the Barnicle Brothers will give even more insight on this bank-robbing couple. If anything, the Barnicle Brothers are proof that in some cases crime does indeed pay.
The Barnicle Brothers will be showing Carol & Johnny at the Dreamland as part of the Nantucket Film Festival. To listen to N Magazine’s podcast–Nantucket Sound–with Colin Barnicle, click here.
Latest Stories
