10 Movies ONLY MADE In Response To Film Critics
8. Barry Levinson Made A Jewish Drama After Downplaying Judaism - Liberty Heights
Barry Levinson's 1999 coming-of-age dramedy Liberty Heights is a semi-autobiographical account of Levinson's own early life growing up in Baltimore, Maryland in the 1950s.
Though the film was acclaimed by critics, it came about following the response to Levinson's sci-fi thriller released just the year prior, Sphere.
The film was a critical and commercial failure, though one review in particular really got the director's goat, enough that it inspired him to write and direct Liberty Heights.
Entertainment Weekly critic Lisa Schwarzbaum's review of Sphere implied that Levinson had intentionally downplayed the "Jewishness" of Dustin Hoffman's psychologist Dr. Norman Goodman.
This bothered Levin, himself a Jew, enough that it gave him the creative spark to make the outwardly Jewish Liberty Heights. He said:
"I never had any plans to write Liberty Heights; it wasn't even a notion until I read a review for Sphere, of all things...For days it troubled me. Negative reviews are part of filmmaking, but what did this comment mean? Suddenly, I remembered my childhood impression that everyone in the world was Jewish, and the subsequent realization: Not only wasn't the world Jewish, but 99 percent of the world wasn't! And that led to memories of a time when Jews were denied access to a swim club, and not allowed to live in certain parts of Baltimore, just as blacks were excluded.
School integration didn't happen until 1954. Finally, there was a reason to revisit Baltimore once again, not to indulge nostalgia, but to examine race, religion and class distinction. With the story of the friendship between a Jewish boy and a black girl who find themselves classmates in a newly integrated high school, I wanted to examine not the anger among Baltimore's different populations but the lack of understanding -- because with misunderstanding comes humor, humor from character.