Barry Levinson collaborated with singer-songwriter Sheryl Crow to create a musical stage version, which despite some setbacks, was still expected to debut on Broadway in 2013, as of this writing.

Writer Nick Hornby, whose novels Fever Pitch and High Fidelity, both about young men struggling with life, responsibilities, and relationships, have been made into movies, is such a big fan of the film that he recently cornered Kevin Bacon in a London nightclub and regaled him with lines he memorized from the movie. Hornby's books have some apparent connection to Diner, with main characters obsessed with sports (like Eddie in this movie) and pop music (like Shrevie).

Diner is considered a big influence on much pop culture since its 1982 release, including the styles of such TV shows as Seinfeld and movies like Pulp Fiction (1994), in which characters sit in diners and have meandering conversations about virtually nothing-certainly not always relevant to the plot, if there is any. In 2009, New Yorker TV critic Nancy Franklin, writing about the television series Men of a Certain Age, noted that "Levinson should get royalties any time two or more men sit together in a coffee shop."

John Wells, executive producer of the 1990s hospital TV series ER and former president of the Writers Guild of America, saw the movie 30 times when it came out, he estimates, drawn to Levinson's "tremendous empathy for those characters even when they were being idiots," according to an article on the movie's legacy in Vanity Fair in March 2012, the film's 30th anniversary. Wells said he still makes a point of watching Diner once a year.

Stephen Merchant, co-creator with Ricky Gervais of the British TV comedy The Office, acknowledged their debt to Diner in the same Vanity Fair article by S.L. Price. "Ricky and I often talked about how, in The Office, we featured life's boring bits-the bits other shows would cut out. That's something Diner taught me: that there is charm and interest and value in capturing the way real people behave. You don't have to have 90 minutes of shouting or fist-fights or blue aliens. Eavesdropping on the people who drink in your local bar can be just as interesting."

The article goes on to talk about the movie's influence on producer-director Judd Apatow, who sneaked in alone as a young teen to see the R-rated Diner in Huntington, Long Island, then pestered his mother to take him again. S.L. Price writes that ever since then, Apatow has been trying to emulate "the shaggy, improvised dialogue that Levinson encouraged during his tabletop scenes." Apatow says, "Anytime I have four or more people sitting around a table, I think about Diner. It's a different spin and more my experience, but the naturalness and the humor that he created-that's the bar I've always tried to reach. Whether it's in The 40 Year Old Virgin [2005], where everybody's sitting around talking about sex and you realize [Steve Carell] doesn't know what he's talking about, or 'You know how I know you're gay?,' or any of the scenes with Adam Sandler and Seth Rogen in Funny People [2009]-they're all at some level influenced by the dialogue style that Barry Levinson is the master at."

In addition to all the popular songs of the late 1950s featured on the soundtrack, the film makes references to popular movies of the times (The Seventh Seal, 1957; A Summer Place, 1959) and TV shows (GE College Bowl, Bonanza).

One minor character in the film is so obsessed with the movie Sweet Smell of Success (1957) that his only dialogue is exact quotes from the picture.

In 1983, Levinson created a pilot for a TV series based on the movie with Paul Reiser recreating his role as Modell, Michael Madsen as Boogie, and James Spader as Fenwick. The show, which was never picked up by any network, would have more prominently featured the wives of Eddie and Shrevie.

Levinson has likened his affinity for making pictures in his native Baltimore to an "obsession." His four most personal films have come to be called his Baltimore series: Diner, Tin Men (1987), Avalon (1990), and Liberty Heights (1999). Several of the characters in Diner are Jewish, like Levinson; he more fully explores his heritage in the later two movies.

As he was prepping the diner set, Levinson was explaining to the assistant director the way the real diner of his youth was laid out. "Over here are the older guys. A lot of tin men sit here," he said, referring to the salesmen of the then burgeoning aluminum siding industry. He suddenly realized he could make a movie about them, too, and did: Tin Men, starring Richard Dreyfuss and Danny DeVito.

by Rob Nixon