Sleepers is a 1996 American legal crime drama film written, produced, and directed by Barry Levinson, and based on Lorenzo Carcaterra's 1995 book of the same name. The film stars Kevin Bacon, Jason Patric, Brad Pitt, Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman, Minnie Driver, Vittorio Gassman, Brad Renfro, Ron Eldard, Jeffrey Donovan, Terry Kinney, Joe Perrino, Geoffrey Wigdor, Jonathan Tucker, Bruno Kirby and Billy Crudup. The title is a slang term for juveniles who serve sentences longer than nine months. Sleepers was theatrically released in the United States on October 18, 1996 and was a box-office hit, grossing $165.6 million against a $44 million budget. Plot Lorenzo "Shakes" Carcaterra, Tommy Marcano, Michael Sullivan, and John Reilly are childhood friends living in Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s. Father "Bobby" Carillo, their parish priest and a youth offender himself in the past, tries to teach them right from wrong. They still play pranks and start running small errands for local gangster King Benny. In the summer of 1967, the four boys steal a hotdog cart, which they accidentally roll down the subway stairs, severely injuring an elderly man. They are all sentenced to serve time at Wilkinson Home for Boys in Upstate New York; Shakes is given 6 to 12 months, while the others are given 12 to 18 months. During their stay, they are constantly subjected to sexual abuse and torture by head guards Sean Nokes, Henry Addison, Ralph Ferguson and Adam Styler. While at the facility, they participate in Wilkinson's annual football game between the guards and inmates. Michael convinces inmate Rizzo Robinson to help win the game. Humiliated, the guards move the boys to solitary confinement for weeks, where they are systematically beaten. Rizzo does not survive and his family is told that he had died of pneumonia. In the spring of 1968, shortly before Shakes' release from Wilkinson, he suggests the boys publicly report the abuse. The others refuse, with Michael asserting that no one would believe them or care, and they vow never to speak of it again. The night before Shakes is released, Nokes and the other guards arrange a "farewell party" in which the four boys are again brutally abused to a higher extreme. In 1981, John and Tommy, now career criminals, unexpectedly encounter Sean Nokes in a Hell's Kitchen pub. Confronting him, he dismisses the abuse he put them through, and John and Tommy shoot