When Maplewood director/producer Marc Levin got word that his friend Forest Whitaker was interested in coproducing the documentary Brick City, which begins airing September 21 on the Sundance Channel, he had one question: Why would the Oscar-winning Whitaker, a native of South Central Los Angeles, want to do a film about Newark? more

Half a century ago, Newark’s Weequahic High School was an academically distinguished, mostly Jewish enclave that graduated the novelist Philip Roth and a steady stream of future PhDs. Starting in the 1960s, however, the city’s race riots, white flight, and the rise of drug-dealing gangs transformed the school into just another urban battleground with low morale and a high dropout rate. more

A film tries to draw the line between North and South Jersey. more