Barry Levinson

Washington -- Barry Levinson looks like a Grateful Dead disciple lost in the fancy of the Four Seasons Hotel on the edge of Georgetown. His gray hair backs up to a near-ponytail, and he's laid back enough that you want to plug him into an electrical outlet. Get some juice flowing through him.He's gracious and probably bored. He wants hot tea, please. And you know, the air in hotels doesn't seem quite right for some reason.This just isn't his scene.To plug his latest movie, Mr. Levinson has to talk about the exact thing he does not like talking about.

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.

When Barry Levinson plays host for On the Waterfront at the Senator Theatre Thursday night -- the opening attraction for this year's Maryland Film Festival -- he hopes audiences will feel the same thrill he experienced as a 12-year-old seeing it in 1954 at the Ambassador Theatre, at Liberty Heights and Gwynn Oak avenues. As he says over the phone from his headquarters in Connecticut, where he's finishing a comic fable about envy called Envy (with Ben Stiller, Jack Black, Rachel Weisz and Christopher Walken)

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.

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.

Life imitates art just as art imitates life. But what happens when each mimics the other? Baltimore writing fans might well find out when native son Barry Levinson, director of such films as Diner, Rain Man and Liberty Heights, reads from his new - and first-ever - novel, Sixty-Six to open the eighth annual Baltimore Book Festival at Mount Vernon Place on Saturday. Sixty-Six (Broadway Books, $24), in stores today, sets a crew of young adults against a backdrop of change. Ben and Turko, Iggy and Neil - witty, angst-ridden teens in 1960s Baltimore - hash out life events large and small at the local diner on Reisterstown Road.

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."

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.

You've lived in Baltimore three weeks. A real-estate scam has schnookered you; lawsuits might loom. A fun-loving local, no doubt in a state of religious rapture, has bashed in your car windows to steal two Gregorian-chant CDs (and you left them under the seat). You've been kicked out of your lodgings, you've stored your worldly goods in Linthicum, you've put two angry cats in a kennel and you've lived out of a Glad bag for 10 days."Baltimore has its charms," a new colleague said before you moved here from Missouri.