Three teen-age boys sit in a red vinyl booth in the Hollywood Diner, slurping Cokes and chocolate milkshakes. They're talking about girls and cars and music. And an impending double date. Does Sylvia "put out"? Do you think she might put out? How about her friend?
After some more adolescent banter, Sylvia's date - an angelic-looking kid with soft brown curls and even softer green eyes - produces a quarter from his pocket and tosses it. The coin will decide which of his two friends will be the fourth at a James Brown concert, the adventure's sexual anticipation made even more tantalizing by the prospect of crossing the color line.
Green-eyes slaps the coin down on the tabletop with the thwack of a fate sealed.
Cut.
"Good. Let's keep it going."
It should come as no surprise that the man orchestrating this particular vignette is Barry Levinson. And it should be even less surprising that the Toscanini of adolescent male sexual angst is presiding over yet another symphony of testosterone, anxiety and bonding in the very diner that started his career as a film director.
Scrunched with 30-odd cast and crew members into the narrow Saratoga Street eatery on a chill November afternoon, Levinson has returned once again to the place in Baltimore with which he is most identified. The Hollywood Diner played the title character in the first movie Levinson ever directed, "Diner" (1982). Called the Fells Point Diner back then, it returned to the screen for a cameo in "Tin Men" (1987), where it again served as a male redoubt against the incursions of time, women and other abominations. It was absent but still felt in "Avalon," Levinson's 1991 film about Baltimore just after World War II.
And here it is again, this kitschy, chrome-plated phallic symbol, the perfect architectural trope for the Baltimore men whose tribal rituals Levinson has built so much of his career documenting.
Levinson has come back to film the fourth installment of his Baltimore cycle, a film called "Liberty Heights." And yes, it is sure to be another affectionate glance back to his hometown of yore. But there are signs that this new film will be a significant departure from its predecessors. From its emotionally charged genesis and socially charged themes of racism, anti-Semitism and segregation, to its bold visual style, "Liberty Heights" promises to be a slightly less honeyed vision of Charm City.
Baltimore's most benevolent cinematic Boswell - the earnest yin to John Waters' yang - has indeed returned to the town he loves. But this time, the love is going to be a little tougher.
Maybe the most surprising thing about "Liberty Heights" is that this 1950s coming-of-age tale emerged from the murky depths of Levinson's tepid science-fiction thriller, "Sphere." It was last February, when Levinson read a review of "Sphere" in Entertainment Weekly, that he started fuming - and pacing.
The film, which starred Dustin Hoffman, Sharon Stone and Samuel L. Jackson, was almost universally maligned. But it wasn't a poor review that brought Levinson to his feet. It was a passage in which the critic described Hoffman's character as "Norman, the empathetic Jewish psychologist," adding insult to indignity with terms like "noodge" and "menschlike."
Levinson was enraged, and becomes enraged again recalling the moment.
"The movie has nothing to do with religion!" he says, his color rising. "You know, whatever you think of the movie is whatever you want to think of it. But why would that be - I mean, you wouldn't say that Mel Gibson [in "Ransom"] is a Catholic businessman whose son is kidnapped."
For three days, Levinson paced around his Marin County, Calif., home, "driving my wife crazy," he says. "Then all of a sudden, it snapped."
Levinson did what he always does when an idea "snaps": He took a notepad and a pen in hand, ensconced himself in a room, switched the satellite music system to the sounds of the 1950s, and wrote. And wrote.
Three weeks later, he emerged with the script for "Liberty Heights," the story of Ben Kurtzman, a 17-year-old Jewish boy growing up in the northwest Baltimore neighborhood of Forest Park.
The year is 1954, when black and white students first begin attending school together. In one subplot, Ben makes tentative romantic advances to an African-American classmate named Sylvia. Ben's father, Nate - portrayed by Joe Mantegna in the film - is a devoted family man who owns a strip club on the Block called the Gaiety (the real-life Gayety was rechristened for better spelling). Nate is also a small-time numbers runner dealing with police crackdowns and the advent of state-sponsored lotteries. Ben's older brother, Van, a sensitive student at the University of Baltimore, is in hot pursuit of a gorgeous girl who happens to reside in one of Baltimore's most patrician WASP precincts.
The "Liberty Heights" script is redolent with romantic Levinsonia - hair tonic, the perfume of an unattainable shiksa princess, the interior of a brand new Cadillac. But more, it is a tale of how race, religion, class and the territoriality that is unique to Baltimore came together in the 1950s in a clash that, at least in Levinson's cinematic retelling, resulted in shared understanding as often as violence.
"Diner," "Tin Men" and "Avalon" all had their share of tense moments. But "Liberty Heights" is by far the most confrontational film of Levinson's Baltimore cycle. An early image is of a sign hung outside the fictional Turkey Point Country Club: "No Jews, Dogs or Coloreds Allowed." Fights ensue when Van and his friends dare to cross Falls Road; during an argument between Nate and his friends with a black hustler named Little Melvin, nearly every racist and anti-Semitic epithet on record is hurled until Nate calls a halt. "We've all come too far to stoop to this," he says.
Throughout "Liberty Heights," the dynamics of race form and re-form in a complex matrix. Exclusion turns into an opportunity for political solidarity; segregation has the oddly beneficent consequence of cultural preservation. Levinson was determined, while writing "Liberty Heights," to represent the complexities surrounding ethnicity in the Baltimore of his youth.
"I think both exist," he says of hatred and solidarity, the twin effects of discrimination. "It's not all that simplistic."
The man of a thousand stories, who honed his timing doing stand-up comedy, writing "The Carol Burnett Show" and collaborating with Mel Brooks, is at a loss for words.
On a lunch break during filming in Canton, Levinson pensively sips pea soup as he contemplates a visitor's question: Have you identified strongly as a Jew throughout your life?
"I identified less in terms of its religious aspects as opposed to the people and the culture," he says finally. "We were not particularly religious, although we did go to a Orthodox synagogue. But we didn't keep kosher in the house."
The Levinson timing kicks in. "Like, my grandmother wouldn't eat steamed crabs, but she would eat crab cakes."
Barry Levinson grew up on Springdale Avenue in the Jewish neighborhood of Forest Park. In fact, the house that serves as the Kurtzman home in "Liberty Heights" is just around the corner from his own childhood home.
After attending Garrison Junior High and Forest Park High, Levinson went to Baltimore Junior College before enrolling at American University in Washington to major in broadcast journalism. It was in Washington, working for a local television station as a floor director, assistant director and hand puppeteer (that was Levinson behind Oswald Rabbit and Doctor Fox) that he learned the rudiments of show business. After graduating, Levinson moved to Los Angeles, where he performed comedy with his friend Craig T. Nelson and went on to write for "The Tim Conway Show" and "The Carol Burnett Show." In 1976, he co-wrote "High Anxiety" with Mel Brooks, and his feature film career was officially on track.
Levinson, who at 56 radiates trim good health (the chocolate cookies he nibbles after lunch are low-fat), his gray hair just grazing his collar, is a storyteller par excellence, regaling his cast and crew with anecdotes and trenchant observations throughout the day. Many of the set-pieces of his movies have been inspired by real-life stories, and "Liberty Heights" is no exception. The director really did have a cousin who, like Ben, dressed as Hitler one Halloween and was surprised at his parents' outraged reaction; like Ben, Levinson "really thought the bread was raw" when he was served a sandwich on untoasted bread at a Gentile friend's home.
The character of Nate is based on real-life friends of Levinson's father, who ran an appliance warehouse store. Like Nate, Levinson's father used to sneak out of synagogue on Rosh Hashana to ogle the Cadillac dealership's new models. And Little Melvin is the personification of several Baltimore legends, black men who, while conducting less-than-legal business, became respected leaders in their communities.
But for all his glibness in telling the stories that have become his stock in trade, Levinson is oddly tongue-tied when it comes to talking about his own inner life. Ask him about his feelings, his reflections, his deeper interpretations of the stories he tells, and he almost visibly squirms in discomfort.
It's no surprise when Levinson hesitates when he is asked how anti-Semitism affected him during his youth.
"It's the neighborhood," Levinson says simply. Anyone from Baltimore will know what he means - that pride and chauvinism peculiar to a city where schools, basketball courts and corner stores carry a meaning much deeper than mere geography. "The good and the bad in it. The good is the sense of inner community. The bad is that it doesn't know necessarily what's going on outside the neighborhood."
Like Ben Kurtzman, Barry Levinson grew up thinking that the entire world was Jewish, an outlook born of living in one of Baltimore's ethnic enclaves. "The Polish, the Italian, the Jewish, they were all very isolated from one another," he recalls. "And everybody stayed in their own area. If you wandered into another area, you were already a stranger."
So the odd fight or violent outburst, he says, "wasn't necessarily out of [anti-Semitism], although sometimes it would come up. But I don't think in the sense of really hating Jews as much as, 'Wait a minute. You're here and you don't belong here, you belong there.'
"Everybody belonged in their own place. The idea of crossing Falls Road, to a Jewish person, was a big deal. It was like, 'Oh, wait a minute. You're going to Canada.'"
At the end of a pier at the old docks in Canton a decrepit grain silo hunkers down against a morning wind. It's a magnificent hulk; the soft gray light that filters through its soaring interior lends it the hushed grandeur of a cathedral.
Inside, Levinson, dressed in a "Homicide" baseball cap, gray sweat shirt and leather jacket, discusses the blocking for a coming scene with his director of photography, Christopher Doyle. Like most of the rest of the crew, Levinson wears a face mask to protect his lungs from the grain dust that wafts invisibly through the air.
Eventually, Levinson gets behind the video monitor and calls "Action." A Steadicam operator, who carries a carefully balanced camera in a harness strapped around his waist, begins his cat-like surveillance of the actors with his roving mechanical eye.
In current cinema, the presence of a Steadicam - the use of which allows for long, fluid, unobstructed camera movements - has become something of a cliche, imparting an imprimatur of hip, contemporary, of-the-momentness. Steadicams are Martin Scorsese, Madison Avenue, MTV. Steadicams are most definitely not 1954.
Levinson has never been partial to Steadicams, although he used one in the opening shot of "Diner." And "Homicide," the TV series Levinson produces in which he shows America just how seamy modern-day Baltimore can be, certainly has used its share of the seasickness-inducing camera.
But Steadicam shots will be very much a staple of "Liberty Heights," as will a distinctive look that may best be described as (you should pardon the expression) edgy. Mark Johnson, who produced "Diner," "Tin Men" and "Avalon," predicts that "Liberty Heights" "will have an immediacy and an energy you don't really associate with period movies ... and it's an immediacy and energy that is thematically required."
With 14 movies under his belt - including the hits "Good Morning, Vietnam," the Oscar-winning "Rain Man," and the wildly prescient political satire "Wag the Dog," as well as such misses ++ as "Toys" and "Jimmy Hollywood" - Levinson says he wanted to explore new visual territory with "Liberty Heights."
"I [want] to express certain things in the movie without being head-on to them," he explains.
For a scene of a police raid on Nate's burlesque house, for example, Levinson photographed police cars in reflection rather than straight-on. "It's all done in complete abstract fashion," he says. "It's all done through the reflections of the clubs on the street. ... Even the strippers in the burlesque [are] no longer just straight ahead, the way they were [in 'Diner']. They're treated differently, sometimes with changes in speed, sometimes by shooting in a slightly different fashion from the stage, rather than towards the stage. So it becomes slightly more odd, in a way."
The man most responsible for giving Levinson the new look he requires is Doyle, until now best known for his spontaneous, neon-infused photographic style on such films as "Chungking Express," "Happy Together" and "Fallen Angels," all filmed in Hong Kong. The two met while Doyle was filming Gus Van Sant's reprise of Alfred Hitchcock's classic "Psycho."
The Australian-born Doyle admits he was probably a counterintuitive hire. "I think it's a good decision for a filmmaker at this period of his career to say [forget] the precedent, let's go for something edgy, let's throw a spanner in the works," he says. "Barry has such a well-oiled system now in terms of what he wants to do with this kind of film, which is about his own recollections. He realizes that to energize it, he has to twist it in some way."
By all accounts Doyle has made a significant contribution to the look of "Liberty Heights," on Levinson's orders that the movie not be too reverential to the period. In addition to the Steadicam, Doyle is using a lot of hand-held camera work, and his colors will be bolder than the more monochromatic palettes of "Diner" and "Avalon."
"I wanted," Doyle explains, "to make the period look like how I would make it look now. Basically it's very saturated and very strong and very textured. It's more like muslin than silk."
If hiring Doyle was counterintuitive, then Levinson's choice for production designer was downright subversive: none other than Vincent Peranio, who began his career decking out (then burning down) a drag queen's trailer for John Waters' "Pink Flamingos" and has designed all of Waters' movies since.
Needless to say, Peranio's vision of Baltimore - where he grew up on the south side - will be slightly more bent than is usually associated with a Levinson madeleine. "I love this city, but I love all the aspects of it," says Peranio.
"I love the nitty-gritty as much as the pretty. I'm into a much more realistic look than 'Avalon,' which was a gorgeous film, but was a very nostalgic one. What we don't want on this film is nostalgia."
Doyle sees the aesthetic and thematic departures Levinson is taking with "Liberty Heights" as nothing short of a renegotiation of the filmmaker's relationship with his hometown, a place at once his muse and potential rut, his benefactor and his beneficiary.
"Barry is such an institution in Baltimore. He's the Johns Hopkins of filmmaking," Doyle says. "And that must be a wonderful thing to carry with you, but it's also a stone around your neck. How ... do you move on? One way you can energize a place is with new ideas, and I think he's also trying to give Baltimoreans a different view of themselves."
For his part, Levinson sees the new "look" simply as an effect of his growth as a director. "You know, it's been nine years since the last [Baltimore movie]," he explains a bit impatiently. "As you continue to evolve, there are different visual things that enter into the picture. Each [film] speaks its own visual language. I think this one will differ more than any of them, which is what I wanted to go for."
But Doyle insists there's more at work. "I think he's changed a lot over the past month," he says of Levinson. "I think he's opened up and I think this movie is a big turning point for him."
Adrien Brody, 26, who will soon be seen in Terrence Malick's "The Thin Red Line" and Spike Lee's "Summer of Sam," is currently being touted as the star of tomorrow. Tall and affable, he's very of-the-moment. But at this particular moment, he's just another poor guy in love.
"I can't get her off my mind," Brody is saying. "She had me all flummoxed. I was under her spell."
Brody, like all good Barry Levinson players, is doing his time at the diner. In this scene, his character, Van, is mooning over a girl he just met at a party. As he swoons, his friend Yussel (played by David Krumholtz) is nursing a black eye and a grudge. Back at the party, he had gotten into a fight when someone asked if he was Jewish.
"When's the last time you wanted to know if someone was Catholic?" Yussel asks excitedly. "Or Episcopalian, Methodist, Protestant? Who gives a s --?"
"What's the difference between all those groups? They all pray to Christ," says a third character, Alan.
"It's OK to have a Jew on the wall, just don't have one come through the door," says Yussel.
"A dead Jew is OK," says Alan. "I think that's the operative word here."
If "Liberty Heights" has a thesis scene, a central piece of dialogue, this is it.
The exchange "is directly from [reading] that review," Levinson says during a break. "This is the thing in 'Liberty Heights' that probably hits specifically to that line about Hoffman being Jewish. I remember that's what I was saying to my wife - like, you know, when's the last time you wanted to know if someone was Protestant?"
The scene ends with Van dreamily asking his friends how he's going to find his new love, as Yussel bitterly advises him to "pray to a Gentile God." It seems to be the perfect metaphor for the evolved Barry Levinson - still enraptured with the first flutterings of love and lust, but sobered by a sense of the forces that can quash even the purest of passions.
Only when it reaches movie screens late next year will filmgoers know for sure whether "Liberty Heights" will mark a real turning point in Levinson's career. But as he settles in behind the monitor for one more take, the man known for his roseate portraits of the city seems poised to take a closer, more clear-eyed look.
Pub Date: 11/22/98