Barry Levinson

DIRECTOR BARRY Levinson's movie "Liberty Heights" opens nationwide tomorrow, giving the world a slice of Baltimore, circa 1954. The movie looks at race, class and religion through the eyes of a Jewish family.Mr. Levinson incorporated stories from across Northwest Baltimore for this nostalgic look at his hometown during a time of rapid social change.We asked some people who used to live there and some who live there now to reflect on life along the Liberty Heights Avenue corridor.Linda Becker Michel, lived at 2534 White Chapel Road in Ashburton.

"Liberty Heights," Barry Levinson's new movie that was filmed in Baltimore last year, will have its premiere Sunday night at the Senator Theatre. The coming-of-age film, which portrays a young man grappling with race and religion in 1954 Baltimore, opens in theaters Nov. 19.Levinson, as well as members of the movie's cast, will be in attendance at the premiere, which will benefit Dr. John Mann of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the Jewish Musuem of Maryland. Dr. Mann will donate his share of the benefit's proceedings to the Osler Scholars Endowment of Johns Hopkins.

Barry Levinson makes a vivid, deeply layered addition to his cycle of Baltimore films with "Liberty Heights," in which the director once again returns to his hometown during the 1950s.But unlike "Diner," "Tin Men" and "Avalon," "Liberty Heights" deals with far more than one of the city's tightly woven clans coping with encroaching change. In this movie, Levinson has widened his lens, taking a newly expansive view of Baltimore's ethnic, religious and class differences on the cusp of profound social transformations.

Orlando Jones walked onto the set knowing he was blazing something of a trail. Until he was cast as would-be numbers magnate Little Melvin in "Liberty Heights," the roster of African-American actors in Barry Levinson's Baltimore films was thin to the point of being practically nonexistent.Jones was glad to change all that."I very much entered into this film knowing that was the case," the 31-year-old actor says over a vegetarian lunch back in Charm City, where he's just finished filming "The Replacements," his second shoot here in just over a year.

The kid is nervous. He's totally lost, his mind full of "what ifs?" and "what abouts?"He's never been to a movie premiere, never had to hold the door for the Hollywood crowd, never had to find his place among doctors, lawyers and society insiders milling around inside the Senator Theatre lobby.He's just an usher. It's an anonymous kind of job, low-key and low-stress. Somehow he ended up at the door for last night's world premiere of "Liberty Heights." Somehow he got picked to wear the oversized burgundy doorman's jacket, complete with matching hat, white shirt and black bow-tie.

Listen up, hon. The Baltimore of the 1950s lives, and here's how you can find it.Today at the Senator Theatre (which harks back to 1930s Baltimore -- talk about nostalgia!), native son Barry Levinson's latest cinematic love letter to Charm City, "Liberty Heights," opens. Set in 1954 and influenced by his own experiences growing up, Levinson's latest recalls a gentler time, when Pennsylvania Avenue was the center of black culture, when The Block was still The Block, and when, for a Jewish kid from Northwest Baltimore, everything east of Falls Road was uncharted territory.

At a housing department news conference yesterday, Baltimore City officials announced that the cast and crew of "Homicide: Life on the Street" may be returning to Baltimore to make a two-hour series finale movie.But don't stop the wake.Barry Levinson and Tom Fontana, the producers who own the rights to the recently canceled TV drama and whose involvement is crucial for any such film to be made, said they had not heard anything about it."There is no `Homicide' film. Barry Levinson knows nothing about it," Simon Hall, Levinson's spokesman in California, said yesterday.

It's a cold, bleak mid-December in Northern Ireland, and after repeated 12-hour days on the set, Barry Levinson is a tad weary. The man who turned wannabes like Kevin Bacon into stars, who coaxes turns from DeNiro and Sharon Stone, may not hanker for cell-phone chit-chat on his bumpy ride back to the hotel, but the chortling director is eager to talk about the one and only actor who has appeared in every single one of his 15 films."

Around this time last year, director Barry Levinson was still filming "Liberty Heights," the fourth installment in a cycle of films inspired by his early life in Baltimore. Throughout the fall, Levinson, his cast and crew had been filming in and around the city, transforming The Block, Pennsylvania Avenue and Park Heights into 1950s versions of themselves.Like "Diner," "Tin Men" and "Avalon" before it, "Liberty Heights" had all the earmarks of a typical Levinson Baltimore movie. But an early reading of the script and conversations with Levinson's colleagues suggested that there was something different about this one.For one thing, its subject matter -- race, religion and class and how they interplayed during the era of Brown vs. Board of Education -- was far more pointed than in Levinson's past films, where Jewish culture might have been suggested but was never the subject at hand.

Liberty Heights," the fourth in Barry Levinson's cycle of films set in his hometown of Baltimore, hews closely to the director's signature style of character-driven drama infused with enough observant humor regarding human foibles to qualify also as a comedy. Set in 1954 Baltimore, when schools were just beginning to integrate, the film deals with race, class and anti-Semitism through the eyes of two young men who are tentatively exploring a world outside their own Jewish neighborhood.In true Levinsonian manner, their discoveries result in comic misunderstandings as tougher-edged drama.

Barry Levinson's best documentary to date receives its American premiere today at the perfect Baltimore venue: M&T Bank Stadium. "The Band That Wouldn't Die" is his funny, stirring account of how the Baltimore Colts Marching Band kept marching after the Colts moved to Indianapolis. The Colts band kept promoting the idea that Baltimore could once again be an ideal football city. Its members kept dreaming that impossible dream until it came true - and they triumphantly transfigured into the Marching Ravens.

"The Band That Wouldn't Die," Barry Levinson's documentary on his native city's astonishingly resilient Colts-cum- Ravens marching band, will get its U.S. premiere Oct. 6 at M&T Bank Stadium. "We were very touched and honored that world-famous producer and director Barry Levinson would produce something like this about the Marching Ravens," said band president John Ziemann. "It not only represents Baltimore and Maryland, but it represents every person who is a professional football fan in this city and state."

Finally, somebody in Baltimore starts snitching. Ron Lipscomb seems to have flipped on girlfriend and bread man alike. In a plea bargain this week, Lipscomb admitted to violating campaign finance laws and agreed to help state prosecutors in their corruption case against Mayor Sheila Dixon, an old flame who showered the developer with favors (municipal and otherwise). Lipscomb turned on someone else he's been in bed with: John Paterakis, the baking-and-development magnate who made his fortune baking McDonald's buns.

NBC is heavily promoting its new Sunday night drama, Kings, as a modern-day version of David vs. Goliath. Actually, it is far more Fisher King Myth and Hero Quest than Old Testament. But, hey, you don't need to be a mythologist to know this is a series without a heart, soul or hardly any entertainment value. Outside of the always-intriguing Ian McShane, of Deadwood fame, there is not an actor to be found in the four hours made available for preview who will make you believe for two seconds in the reality of their characters.

Washington - "She's not what you expect as the lead in Twilight," says Kristen Stewart, of, really, herself, playing Bella Swan, the high school girl who falls in love with a vampire, Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), in the movie adaptation of Stephenie Meyer's best-selling novel (opening Friday nationwide). "She's not your typical damsel in distress. She really is a woman." Sitting in an interview suite at the downtown Ritz-Carlton in Washington, this slender, intense actress, 18 and a mere slip of a thing, comes off as girl and woman.

B arry Levinson has come a long way from the knotty pine club room and marble front stoop. All the way, in fact, to "10,000 sf on 2 level acres, pool, guest quarters, separate studio, 7BR, 8 full & 3 half baths," just over the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. The filmmaker moved from that spread seven years ago to a place in West Redding, Conn. But to Sotheby's International Realty, the California property will always be Levinson's home. "The Barry Levinson Estate," as it's called on the Sotheby's Web site, is listed at $17.5 million.

He now lives in Connecticut with his wife, Diana, but writer-director-producer Barry Levinson is Baltimore's native son and, in the 25 years since Diner, he's been one of Hollywood's finest. That's why insiders and movie-lovers alike are gleefully anticipating his new independent comedy-drama, What Just Happened?, a "sometimes painfully funny" movie about a Hollywood filmmaker juggling ex-wives and volatile projects. The film features his Wag the Dog star Robert De Niro in the lead role.

f you want to know how far today's producers will go for a financial break, consider this: The current Kevin Costner thriller Mr. Brooks, a story set in Portland, Ore., was shot in and around Shreveport, La. "It used to be that movies went on location to make use of that location," Mr. Brooks' cinematographer, John Lindley, told American Cinematographer magazine, "but today the choice of location is more about tax incentives." Maryland's failure to stay competitive with other states in providing incentive plans for filmmakers has been put into stunning relief by Louisiana's recent success.

MARYLAND A boon to watermen Maryland set up the Oyster Recovery Partnership more than a decade ago to revive the bay's dwindling oyster population, which had been ravaged by disease and overfishing. But the aim of the program has shifted to creating income for watermen instead of bringing back the oysters. pg 1a Schools target gang violence City school officials have drafted a safety plan to address the upswing in student gang violence. Interim city schools chief Charlene Cooper Boston has earmarked an extra $1 million for more police and $1.8 million for hall monitors in her budget, which was recently approved by the city school board.

Heard back from Frank Deford the other day, responding to my column about his Smithsonian magazine piece on Charm City. You may recall that Deford had lamented the lack of white luminaries in the Baltimore of his youth: "It is both ironic and instructive that in the first half of the 20th century, the two most illustrious Americans to come from Baltimore were Thurgood Marshall and Billie Holiday - African-Americans who rose up out of a segregated society;...