- published: 16 Jan 2016
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Awakenings is a 1990 American drama film based on Oliver Sacks's 1973 memoir Awakenings. It tells the true story of British neurologist Oliver Sacks, fictionalized as American Malcolm Sayer and portrayed by Robin Williams who, in 1969, discovers beneficial effects of the then-new drug L-Dopa. He administered it to catatonic patients who survived the 1917–28 epidemic of encephalitis lethargica. Leonard Lowe (played by Robert De Niro) and the rest of the patients were awakened after decades of catatonia and have to deal with a new life in a new time. The film was nominated for three Academy Awards.
Directed by Penny Marshall, the film was produced by Walter Parkes and Lawrence Lasker, who first encountered Sacks's book as undergraduates at Yale University and optioned it a few years later. Awakenings stars Robert De Niro, Robin Williams, Julie Kavner, Ruth Nelson, John Heard, Penelope Ann Miller, and Max Von Sydow. The film features a non-speaking cameo from jazz legend Dexter Gordon (who died before the film's release) who appears as a patient and then-unknowns Bradley Whitford, Peter Stormare, Vin Diesel, and Vincent Pastore play a doctor, neurochemist, hospital orderly and a psych-ward patient, respectively.
Needless to say, another day has passed away
Yet everything, and nothing, has changed
Awake I lie, my thoughts get lost up in the sky
Yet everything, and nothing, has changed...
Maybe a mystic - with fortunes to tell...
Surrender my coin at the old wishing well...
Maybe the stars will align in the night...
To show me the path that is right
'Would've been's and 'could've been's
they waste my days away
the colors of my life dissolve and fade to gray
So many paths of promise
Indecision poisons my mind
If only I had seen the signs - so blind
Yet I must journey on - on and on
A haunting vision torments me
It smothers and steals my dreams
I see an old man in the mirror
cold and bitter starring back at me
Here I am - at the crossing of life I stand
On my own - looking down the road
Hear my cry - answer me
Still I'm searching yet the truth is unknown - though the night is cold
I walk the road alone