Barry Levinson picked up the 2010 Laurel Award from the Writers Guild of America West on Saturday evening last week. The award was to honor his lifetime of achievement in outstanding writing for motion pictures.

His resume boasts movies such as Avalon, Diner and Liberty Heights. He has worked with some of the preeminent movie stars of his generation and the generation that succeeded it. The man who was honored for his work was on hand to answer a few questions for the WGA on a quiet evening after a hectic writers weekend.

Levinson spoke about using his hometown of Baltimore as the setting for four of his features. And yet perhaps Mr. Levinsons most interesting talking point for Friday was his story telling--

In one hilarous anecdote Mr. Levinson speaks of the time when in Washingon to shoot Wag The Dog, a story about presidential infidelity and the attempted dissimulation and subversion of the worlds attention. Barry stated that Robert DeNiro, Dustin Hoffman and himself went to tour the White House. Once they were identified they were requested to meet with the sitting president. All three duly obliged-- Barry went on to say that they were warmly welcomed and congratulated by the forty second president-- before being struck silent when the libidinous President Clinton inquired as to the plot of their current project.

As with all great story tellers Mr. Levinson has an inate ability to caputure the imagination and fuse it with a current trends, themes or issues that entertain the social conscience. In the case of Liberty Heights he addressed the issue of racism. Motifs surrounding community, adolesence, autism have all be themes to his stories. But what makes them special is his story telling ability. His ear for dialogue is unsurpassed and as a show reel of his work flicked across the screens on Awards Night, it was as transparent as Tom Cruise' ambitions in Rain Main-- the dialogue is smooth, and naked with ambition and raw with emotion. The captions for the 1987 movie Tin Men was littered with the swift punchy dialogue that encapsulates strong dramatic movies. And rarely have his actors delivered below par performances. (As seen from the attitudinized performances seen here)

The writer of Man Of The Year, Sleepers, Avalon and Tin Men. His fertile imagination and seeds of success aside, Barry Levinson has an innate ability to produce characters in his stories that compel great and award winning performances.

Working with Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie, and the hugely thematic movie Diner. There are lesson in his movies. As the Guild highlighted at the Awards ceremony the past week. Movies such as Toys clearly foreshadowed the economics of war while highlighting the ambivalence of children to war-- especially when its just a game. You need only look around to see portable media devices and cell phones being the portals to this world that Levinson scribed for Toys.

The WGA Foundation are still running events through the months of March and April. To stay in tune with whats coming up visit the site here.

Story by: Terry Winders