By Peter Tonguette
How appealing — and how naïve — it would be to imagine that when a talented group of filmmakers get together to make a movie, they manage to stay on the same page from the first day of pre-production until the red-carpet premiere. Egos and agenda are put aside; the screenwriter and the director work collaboratively; the actors come to work promptly and enthusiastically; the editor puts all the pieces together; and the producer or studio head oversees it all in a spirit of benign beneficence.
Over the course of Hollywood history, surely some movies have been made with such unanimity, but many more have sprung from an atmosphere of contention, disagreement, and dissent. “Movies were, are, and always will be a rather cutthroat business because you’re dealing with a lot of money and fame,” the director Peter Bogdanovich once told me, and it is doubtful he will ever be disproven.
Yet pitched battles between filmmakers can also result in good and memorable films. Such is the argument advanced in a fascinating, chatty, and wonderfully well-told new book about the making of Columbia Pictures’ 1973 release “The Way We Were,” a romantic drama set amid the World War II years. The film starred Barbra Streisand as Katie Morosky, a young Jewish woman unyielding in her liberal political principles, and Robert Redford as Hubbell Gardiner, a WASPy aspiring writer committed to little but himself and his own advancement, but for whom Katie carries a torch and in whom she invests many of her hopes and dreams. The characters marry and have a child, but their differences prove unbridgeable. Written by Arthur Laurents, produced by Ray Stark, and directed by Sydney Pollack, “The Way We Were” — whose title song, with music by Marvin Hamlisch and lyrics by Alan and Marilyn Bergman, won an Oscar — tapped into the same audience appetite for glamorous screen romance that propelled “Love Story,” with Ryan O’Neal and Ali MacGraw, to the box-office stratosphere.
Even so, the disparate makers of “The Way We Were” always had greater ambitions than to make just another big-screen soap opera — yet as recounted time and again in Robert Hofler’s book “The Way They Were,” those ambitions weren’t always shared. As the theater critic of The Wrap and a former editor and writer at publications including Life and Variety, Hofler is experienced enough (and well-connected enough) to have secured interviews with Streisand, Redford, and numerous others involved in the production. He also utilizes the archives of Pollack, who died in 2008, and Laurents, who died in 2011. The book is sure to be catnip for the many devotees of “The Way We Were,” but even non-fans of the movie — those simply interested in how numerous forceful personalities can somehow come together to make a successful movie — will be interested in the story told here.
As a veteran Hollywood journalist, Hofler is also attuned to the way legends, myths, and conflicting accounts adhere to famous movies — something evident in his very first pages. “Arthur remembers it being a hundred twenty-five pages,” Streisand said of the original treatment that formed the basis for what became “The Way We Were.” “I remember reading a fifty-page treatment.” No matter: the world-famous vocalist — already an A-list movie star on the strength of “Funny Girl” (1968) and “The Owl and the Pussycat” (1970), both Stark productions — was persuaded that the material had the makings of her next movie. “In the beginning, I only knew that Ray Stark hired Arthur Laurents to write a script for me, which I thought was a great idea,” Streisand said. “It was only later that I learned how personal it was for him. But it was also personal to me, because Arthur has said he used my own personality, as well as my own political activism, for Katie.”
Therein lies the source of much of the behind-the-scenes drama on “The Way We Were”: everyone involved had some personal investment in the story and thus his or her own take. Though conceived as a vehicle for Streisand, the project nonetheless was unabashedly autobiographical for Laurents, the noted screenwriter of Otto Preminger’s “Bonjour Tristesse” and Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rope” and the celebrated book-writer of the Broadway hits “West Side Story” and “Gypsy.” “Katie Morosky, the campus political progressive played by Barbra Streisand, is mainly me,” wrote Laurents, who, like Katie, was Jewish and devoted to liberal politics. Furthermore, there is much speculation here that Laurents’ conception of Hubbell Gardiner derived from his long-term relationship with a man named Tom Hatcher. “Arthur was always doing more to keep the relationship going, and [regarding] that dichotomy, Robert Redford is more like Tom, and Arthur is more like Barbra,” noted Laurents’ assistant Ashley Feinstein.
Alas, part of being a screenwriter is ceding creative control to collaborators, or at least sharing it. Although Laurents was steadfast in his belief that the story ought to be anchored by an examination of the politics of the time — namely, the blacklist — director Pollack fought for a film that concerned itself less with social commentary and focused more on the Katie-Hubbell relationship. “There was resistance from the studio, resistance from everybody to making a real commitment to deal head-on with this McCarthy issue,” Pollack said.
Then there was the matter of who would play Hubbell. Pollack relentlessly pursued Redford for the part, contending that Streisand “has a tendency to take over a picture, just by the size of her talent and larger-than-life presence.” She needed a mega-star opposite her, but Redford seems to have been largely unmoved by Laurents’ script: He judged the romantic elements “overly sentimental and drippy” and the blacklist scenes “bullshit knee-jerk liberalism — very arch.” For his part, Laurents, seeing the film as belonging to Katie, would have been content with Blister Ken Howard, best-known for the Revolutionary War-era musical “1776,” playing Hubbell.
Redford, owing to his loyalty to Pollack based on past films together, at last agreed to sign up. “My decision was based on our relationship and my trust in him,” Redford said. Meanwhile, Streisand — who received word on the casting coup in a telegram by her agent Sue Mengers that read as follows: “Barbra Redford?” — was over the moon. “I couldn’t imagine anyone else in the role, because I knew instinctively that the dynamic between us would make the picture work,” Streisand said. “I wanted the writers to do anything they could to make him happy — strengthen the character of Hubbell and give him more scenes.” (Hofler’s account of the protracted filming of Katie and Hubbell’s bedroom scene is one of the book’s most amusing: Hofler writes that Pollack, in talking with Stark about going oversched-ule on the picture, “diplomatically left out any mention of Streisand’s requests for take after take of Redford spread out on top of her as she whispered, ‘Hubbell. It’s Katie,’ over and over and over again.”)
Streisand’s casual use of the plural “the writers” — “I wanted the writers to do anything they could to make him happy” — is revealing: In time, Pollack recruited the services of additional screenwriters, including David Rayfiel and Alvin Sargent, to bring out this or that quality in the script. To Laurents’ chagrin, the changes were always in one direction. “I thought that it wasn’t the romance it could be,” said Judith Rascoe, a script consultant for Stark. “Laurents was more concerned with the political story.” Pollack said: “We were rewriting all the time. While we were shooting, we were rewriting.” These alterations, however, pleased the male lead. “What emerged out of the rewrites were glimpses of the dark side of this golden boy character — what his fears were about himself,” Redford said.
Not that authenticity was the top priority once filming began. “Despite playing a communist waitress, Streisand refused to cut her long nails, and Redford, despite playing a navy officer, refused to get a butch haircut,” writes Hofler, who makes note of other quirks of its stars, including Streisand’s propensity for late-night confabs with her director. One scene slated to shoot during an evening had “one big benefit” for Pollack: “It meant that Streisand would not be phoning him at eleven o’clock to discuss everything that had happened that day and what would be taking place tomorrow.” We are told that Streisand and Redford were each thought to prefer to be photographed from their left sides. “Always automatically, even when they start to rehearse a scene, when the director’s looking, she’ll get herself into a position where only the left side of her face is showing,” cinematographer Harry Stradling Jr. said.
Hofler writes of a rather tumultuous shoot — of pressure coming from the then-flailing Columbia Pictures that led to a reduction of shooting days and of expensive scenes shot and then scrapped, including a musical number meant to be from a movie version of one of Hubbell’s novels. (“It was amazing to spend all that money and then toss it out,” Rascoe said. “You would have to be Ray Stark to do that.”) Two picture editors — the regular Stark collaborator John F. Burnett, ACE, and the legendary Margaret Booth, ACE — worked to make some sense of the footage in rough cuts. As Hofler describes it, the production was in a constant state of uncertainty about what sort of movie they were even making. “We didn’t know how to mix the politics and the love story and make it work,” said Pollack, who, at another point, was asked by Stark what the movie was even about. “I think it is the story of a girl who thinks she isn’t pretty, and a guy who is afraid that he is only pretty.” Well, that’s a start.
Laurents was never satisfied with the final balance, but Pollack became more resolute in his instincts once Burnett prepared a finer cut. “I was pretty quick in putting movies together,” said Burnett, a former Guild president who also collaborated with such leading directors as George Cukor, Blake Edwards, and Norman Jewison (who is one of this book’s best and most candid sources). “With ‘The Way We Were,’ [my editing] wasn’t a whole new construction where you tear it all apart. I’ve never done that in my whole career.” Instead, it was a matter of shaping and honing. “You put the movie together and it’s not exactly what the director for a year or two has had in his head,” Burnett said. “What he had in his head is not shot. The first screening is a shock, even though [the director] may like it. After they’ve run the film two or three times, now they’re ready to talk about the movie.”
Burnett and Pollack agreed that the blacklist material had to be further reduced and made less narrowly specific. “The important thing was that Katie had to have a cause, whether it was Franco or the blacklist or the bomb, or handing out flyers,” Burnett said. This was further affirmed when a preview audience became restive at a screening of a cut that still included several more overtly political scenes as well as those that simply didn’t work. After Burnett eliminated 11 minutes, a second preview proved to be a resounding success. “Never in my career have I seen such a reversal of fortunes, from having a near-disaster one night to a big success the following night with those cuts,” Pollack said. In the end, despite all the angst and agonizing that went into its making, “The Way We Were” was a huge hit with ticket buyers. Even the imperious, unforgiving New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael was not immune to its appeal: “It stays afloat because of the chemistry of Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford.”
Streisand perhaps put it even better: “For me, the attraction of opposites — the yin and the yang — was very real. Their physical passion as well as their emotional bond was so strong, and that’s what makes you root for them as a couple.” The wisdom of Samuel Goldwyn was again affirmed — this time, anyway: “If you want to send a message, call Western Union.”
For her part, Streisand was sufficiently disappointed in several deletions to arrange for the cut scenes to be stored in “a temperature-controlled vault that was also home to outtakes from her recordings, TV shows, and other films,” Hofler writes. “And I’ve been trying since 1973 to restore some of the most crucial scenes back into the film,” she said. (Pollack once told Hofler he had no interest in a director’s cut.) Ideas for a sequel circulated, including one in which Katie and Hubbell are brought back together by their now-grown daughter, “a Berkeley hippie with a drug problem,” Pollack told gossip columnist Marilyn Beck in 1980. Pollack also talked about integrating the cut scenes as flashbacks into a possible new film. But, even here, there was dissension in the ranks. “I never believed in or supported a sequel,” Redford said. “Stark and Laurents were willing to do anything to keep the project alive. To me, it was a one-off, left to the assumptions and imagination of the audience.”
Hofler’s endlessly entertaining book reminds the reader that even really good movies can rise out of challenging production circumstances and often fail to please all of their participants.
The Way They Were: How Epic Battles and Bruised Egos Brought a Classic Hollywood Love Story to the Screen
By Robert Hofler
Citadel, 2023
Hardcover, 304 pages
$28
