John Waters may be the most colorful film director to spring from Baltimore in the last few decades, but Barry Levinson is inarguably the most commercially successful director to do so. With such films under his belt as Wag the Dog, Sleepers, Rain Man, and The Natural, and as the executive producer of the (now cancelled) television drama Homicide: Life on the Street, Levinson has come a long way from his humble beginnings as a writer for sketch comedy television shows in the early 1970s.
Biography
Barry Levinson was born on April 6, 1942 in Baltimore, Maryland. He spent his childhood and adolescence in Charm City until graduating from Forest Park High School in 1960. After attending American University in Washington, DC (though not graduating - Levinson would not earn a degree until 1999, when American gave him an honorary doctorate in communications), he moved out to Los Angeles to attempt to break into showbiz.
Levinson's first job was as a writer for The Carol Burnett Show, which won two Emmy Awards for Best Comedy Writing while Levinson was on staff. He became known in the industry as a talented comedy writer, going on to write for several other television shows before joining Mel Brooks' writing team (he helped to write Brooks' films Silent Movie and High Anxiety, and had a small acting role in History of the World Part I). In 1975, Levinson married actress Valerie Curtin, with whom he co-wrote several screenplays, including ...And Justice for All, which was nominated for Best Original Screenplay at the 1979 Academy Awards.
Barry Levinson's directorial debut came with 1982's Diner. He also wrote the screenplay, a loosely autobiographical tale set in 1950s Baltimore about a group of young men who hang out in a greasy spoon. Though the movie was nearly denied release (after watching the final cut, MGM executives thought that Diner was a dud), the film was greeted with critical acclaim and modest success at the box office. In addition to earning Levinson a second Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay, Diner launched the careers of actors Steve Guttenberg, Daniel Stern, Mickey Rourke, Kevin Bacon, Paul Reiser, and Ellen Barkin.
Diner was a low budget gamble for a Hollywood studio, starring a bunch of (then) nobodies and shot for less than $5 million. After Levinson had proved himself, he began to pull in bigger projects with more money and well-known actors, starting with The Natural in 1984, featuring Robert Redford as an over the hill baseball player who miraculously leads his team to victory. For a time, Levinson chugged along, directing movies that, while certainly not bad, were not remarkably good, either. Then, in 1987, he finally cemented his place in Hollywood with two films that made Barry Levinson a household name.
The first film was Tin Men, a comedy written and directed by Levinson about rival aluminum siding salesmen (played by Richard Dreyfuss and Danny DeVito) in Baltimore circa 1963. Though the film didn't win any awards, the critics lauded it as a brilliant character study that successfully maintained the balance between comedy and melancholy. The same year, Levinson directed Good Morning, Vietnam, starring Robin Williams as a DJ on Armed Forces Radio during the Vietnam War. The movie was a huge commercial success.
Riding the tide of the previous year, in 1988, Barry Levinson directed Rain Man, a dramatic film about a shady wheeler and dealer (Tom Cruise) who takes an impromptu road trip with his autistic brother (Dustin Hoffman). Finally, Levinson had created a film that was a smash hit in both the commercial and critical departments. Rain Man was the highest grossing film of the year (and indeed, remains in the top 50 highest grossing movies of all time). The film was nominated for eight Oscars and won four of them, including Best Director, Best Picture, Best Actor, and Best Original Screenplay.
The 1990s started out with a series of disappointments for Barry Levinson. In 1990, he wrote and directed Avalon, yet another movie set in historical Baltimore. Avalon is a fictionalized autobiography that traces Levinson's family roots starting with his grandfather, a Jewish immigrant who arrived in Baltimore at the turn of the century. The movie was well received by the critics and was nominated for four Oscars (including Best Original Screenplay, Levinson's third Oscar nod as a screenwriter), but it flopped at the box office. In 1992, he dusted off a script he had co-written with ex-wife Valerie Curtin (they divorced in 1982) back in the 1970s, leading to the film Toys starring Robin Williams as an eccentric toymaker. Toys was an abysmal failure no matter how you look at it - audiences and critics alike hated the film (perhaps the only redeeming feature of Toys is that it marked the soundtrack debut of fellow Maryland native Tori Amos with the song "The Happy Worker").
Having discovered that he is not infallible, a chastised Barry Levinson went on to direct and produce a string of films that deviated from his established formula of character studies that are alternately hilarious and poignant. These movies did well at the box office but faded quickly from public memory, including Disclosure (Demi Moore sexually harassing Michael Douglas), Sleepers (four former juvenile delinquents exact revenge on a prison guard who sexually abused them as children), and Sphere (a sci-fi flick based on a Michael Crichton novel that starts out as a riveting undersea thriller, but inexplicably falls apart 20 minutes before the end of the movie). Finally, in 1997, Levinson got back in stride with Wag the Dog, an oddly prophetic political satire that features Robert de Niro and Dustin Hoffman as a Washington spin doctor and a Hollywood producer who manufacture a televised war designed to eclipse an impending presidential sex scandal. The film earned two Oscar nominations and catapulted Barry Levinson back into critical favor.
While his career behind the silver screen was foundering a bit, Levinson turned his attention back to his roots in television. In 1992, after reading the nonfiction bestseller Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets by David Simon, he wrote and directed the pilot episode of the cop drama Homicide: Life on the Street, which revolved around a group of Baltimore homicide detectives and their daily struggles on the job. The pilot prompted NBC to pick up the series as a complement to their new hit drama Law & Order. Homicide enjoyed a six year run and won an impressive number of awards, including an Emmy for Best Individual Director of a Drama Series for Levinson.
Nowadays, Barry Levinson, though still active as a film director, devotes much of his energy to his production companies Baltimore/Spring Creek Pictures and The Levinson/Fontana Company. He divides his time between his homes in California and Annapolis, Maryland, and continues to write screenplays set in his hometown of Baltimore, the most recent being 1999's Liberty Heights. At the moment, Levinson is busy filming the comedy Envy, starring Ben Stiller, Jack Black, and Christopher Walken, and slated for release in 2003.
Interesting Tidbits
Barry Levinson has earned a reputation for loyalty to actors with whom he was worked in the past. Dustin Hoffman, Robert de Niro, Robin Williams, Kevin Bacon, and Denis Leary have all appeared in multiple Levinson films. However, the record for the most appearances goes to little known character actor Ralph Tabakin (yet another Marylander), who had a small role in every movie Barry Levinson directed prior to Tabakin's death in May 2001. Levinson called Tabakin his "good luck charm."
Levinson bemoans the state of Hollywood today, saying, "It gets harder and harder to make movies about human beings. These movies are like an endangered species. Everything is 'simplify, simplify' now ... It is really about a piece of merchandise." However, complaints or no, Levinson has yet to enter the arena of independent film (though he has not one, but two production companies, most of the movies he produces have been joint ventures with bigger studios). Apparently his big budget paycheck (he now pulls down around $10 million a movie) is enough to keep him churning out big budget Hollywood films.
One of Barry Levinson's classmates at Forest Park High School was Mama Cass of The Mamas and the Papas. Though Cass was only a year ahead of Levinson, he says that he doesn't remember seeing her before she dropped out of high school at the age of 17. In another remarkable coincidence, Richard Nixon's vice president Spiro Agnew also graduated from Forest Park, although much earlier than Levinson.
Filmography
Movies
- Envy (2003 - producer, director)
- Analyze That (2002 - executive producer)
- Possession (2002 - producer)
- Shot in the Heart (2001 - executive producer)
- Bandits (2001 - producer, director)
- An Everlasting Piece (2000 - producer, director)
- American Tragedy (2000 - executive producer)
- The Perfect Storm (2000 - executive producer)
- Homicide: The Movie (2000 - executive producer)
- The 20th Century: Yesterday's Tomorrows (1999 - executive producer, director)
- Original Diner Guys (1999 - producer, director)
- Liberty Heights (1999 - producer, director, screenwriter)
- Home Fries (1998 - producer)
- Sphere (1998 - producer, director)
- Wag the Dog (1997 - producer, director)
- The Second Civil War (1997 - executive producer)
- Donnie Brasco (1997 - producer)
- Sleepers (1996 - producer, director, screenwriter)
- Disclosure (1994 - producer, director)
- Quiz Show (1994 - producer)
- Jimmy Hollywood (1994 - producer, director)
- Toys (1992 - producer, director, screenwriter)
- Bugsy (1991 - producer, director)
- Kafka (1991 - executive producer)
- Avalon (1990 - producer, director, screenwriter)
- Rain Main (1988 - director)
- Good Morning, Vietnam (1987 - director)
- Tin Men (1987 - director, screenwriter)
- Young Sherlock Holmes (1985 - director)
- D.P. (1985 - producer)
- The Natural (1984 - director)
- Unfaithfully Yours (1984 - screenwriter)
- Diner (1982 - director, screenwriter)
- Best Friends (1982 - screenwriter)
- Tootsie (1982 - screenwriter)
- Inside Moves (1982 - screenwriter)
- ...And Justice for All (1979 - screenwriter)
- High Anxiety (1979 - screenwriter)
- Silent Movie (1976 - screenwriter)
Television
Sources:
http://www.levinson.com
http://us.imdb.com/Name?Levinson,+Barry
http://www.hollywood.com/celebs/bio/celeb/346533
http://www.the-movie-times.com/thrsdir/top100world.html
|
