[5][6][7][8] After growing up in Forest Park, Baltimore and graduating from Forest Park Senior High School in 1960, Levinson attended Baltimore City Community College and American University in Washington, D.C. at the American University School of Communication, where he studied broadcast journalism.

Levinson at one time shared an apartment with would-be drug smuggler (and subject of the movie Blow) George Jung.

He moved on to success as a film screenwriter – notably the Mel Brooks comedies Silent Movie (1976) and High Anxiety (1977) (in which he played a bellboy) and the Oscar-nominated script (co-written by then-wife Valerie Curtin), and ...And Justice for All (1979).

Levinson began his career as a film director with Diner (1982), for which he also wrote the script, earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay.

The other three were Tin Men (1987), a story of aluminum-siding salesmen in the 1960s starring Richard Dreyfuss and Danny DeVito; the immigrant family saga Avalon (1990) featuring Elijah Wood in one of his earliest screen appearances; and Liberty Heights (1999).

Levinson also directed the critically acclaimed historical crime drama Bugsy (1991), which starred Warren Beatty and which was nominated for ten Academy Awards.

He directed Dustin Hoffman again in Wag the Dog (1997), a political satire co-starring Robert De Niro about a Presidential election swayed by a phony war staged on a film studio.

Levinson directed a documentary PoliWood about the 2008 Democratic and Republican National Conventions: the documentary—produced by Tim Daly, Robin Bronk and Robert E. Baruc—had its premiere at the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival.

[15] The resulting film, Black Mass (script by Jim Sheridan, Jez Butterworth, and Russell Gewirtz), is based on the book by Dick Lehr and Gerard O'Neill, and it is said to be the "true story of Billy Bulger, Whitey Bulger, FBI agent John Connelly and the FBI's witness protection program created by J. Edgar Hoover.