Robert De Niro and Robin Williams were mega-stars when "A League of Our Own" director Penny Marshall and Columbia Pictures brought them together for the 1990 medical drama "Awakenings." De Niro earned one of the film's three Oscar nominations as best actor that year, with the other two coming for best picture and best adapted screenplay. The film tells the story of Dr. Malcolm Sayer (Williams), who uses a drug used to treat Parkinson's disease, called levodopa (L-dopa), to bring patients out of catatonia.

The story is based on a program — developed by neurologist Dr. Oliver Sacks in the late '60s at Beth Abraham Hospital in the Bronx (now Beth Abraham Center) — to treat people who had been in various states of awareness since contracting encephalitis lethargica, also known as "the sleeping sickness," just after World War I. Sacks detailed his findings in a 1973 book, "Awakenings," which was turned into the Oscar-nominated screenplay by Steven Zaillian. Sacks earned a co-writing credit for the film.

Most of Sacks' 80 patients had steadily deteriorated over the decades from lack of activity and stimulation. Sacks suspected that the newly developed L-dopa worked on the same receptors that were affecting his encephalitis lethargica patients, but was cautious about trying the experimental treatment on older adults. He told ABC News in 2009, "I hesitated for two years. They'd been put away for 40 years, and I didn't know what coming back to a world that was not their own might mean to them. And finally, my hand was forced, because so many of the patients were terribly disabled ... some of them were dying."