The Creator

By CATHY BOOTH

Liberty Heights is the fourth in Barry Levinson's "trilogy" about his hometown of Baltimore, Md. After Diner (1982), Tin Men (1987) and Avalon (1990), he felt he had finished with tales about growing up in the city's Jewish neighborhood in the 1950s. But then an ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY review of his 1998 movie, Sphere, referred to Dustin Hoffman as a "noodgey and menschlike" Jewish psychologist. The racial stereotyping annoyed Levinson ("Nobody would say Mel Gibson was playing a Catholic industrialist in Ransom"), but it also got him thinking about his youth again. Rather than fume, he sat down and wrote for three straight weeks, imagining characters from his past talking about race, religion and class. "It wasn't writing," he says. "It was dictation."

Like the film's Ben Kurtzman, the young Barry Levinson thought the white bread he ate at a Gentile home was raw. ("Ours was always toasted!") Like Ben's father, his dad sneaked out of the temple on Rosh Hashanah to check out the new Cadillacs. But Levinson, 57, believes his film is more than simple nostalgia. "We have all these hate crimes today--the gay slaying in Wyoming, the man dragged to death in Texas, the shootings at schools." So, he says, what happened in Baltimore in 1954 is still sadly pertinent today.

--By Cathy Booth