The way we were song1/9/2024 ![]() Screenwriter Arthur Laurents, who had written the book for Broadway hits West Side Story and Gypsy, was fired after refusing to make script changes. Streisand may also have hoped for a real-life romance and Pollack confirmed: “She had a crush on him”. Streisand enjoyed top billing but Redford had the bigger salary: $1.2million to her $1million. But browbeaten by Pollack, who promised major rewrites, he finally gave in, admitting: “I just took the part on faith.” Redford considered his role of Hubbell “a weak, spineless male sex object”. Indeed, Redford branded the original screenplay a “piece of junk”.Īs the film’s long-suffering director Sydney Pollack recalled, Redford “didn’t like the script, he didn’t like the character, he didn’t like the concept of the film, he didn’t think the politics and love story would mix. He felt it was a Barbra Streisand vehicle and his character was just a ‘Ken Doll’, a pretty face with no substance.” “He turned it down repeatedly for eight straight months. “Robert Redford really didn’t want to make this film,” says Robert Hofler, whose own book, The Way They Were, is published on January 26. “For all the times a composer is turned down by a singer, for all the times a composer doesn’t get his first choice of vocalist, for all the frustrations-this high made up for all of them.They meet at university in 1937, reunite and fall in love in 1944, divorce in the 1950s amid the Communist Red Scare witch-hunts, and when they finally meet again in the 1960s are poignantly reminded of the way they were and the love they lost. For Hamlisch, who died in 2012, it remained his personal favorite, as much for the song as the struggle to get it heard. And within minutes, there wasn’t a dry eye left. Hamlisch said, “I heard a woman start to cry. ![]() With the song in the final scene, the film was tested again. “Believe me, it wasn’t mere pocket change,” Hamlisch said. They relented, on condition that he pay for the recording session. Hamlisch begged Columbia to let him rescore the scene, with the song. Hamlisch recalls a test screening in which the audience was unmoved by the final scene where Streisand and Redford realize they have no future together. “I hate ‘My Funny Valentine,” Streisand snapped.Īfter all the drama, the song was omitted from the original cut of the film. “So is ‘My Funny Valentine,’” Hamlisch countered. Some reports say that Streisand was the lone vote against having a song in the scene.Īccording to Anne Edwards’ biography on Streisand, she told Hamlisch the song was too sentimental. A vote was taken by director Sydney Pollack, the film’s stars and Columbia executives. There was absolutely no way to rethink it.”īut rethink it they did, creating a second version that was “more complex, and less sentimental.” Streisand recorded both and they were auditioned in the picture. “I had poured my heart into what I had written and just didn’t think I had a better ‘The Way We Were’ in me. “It came as a shock, when on the way home, Alan suggested that maybe we could do even better,” he recalled. So I wrote a major key melody that was sad but also had a great deal of hope in it.” Hamlisch said he finally wrote a melody “that just got to me.” He added, “I’d been trying minor key melodies, but thought they might’ve told you too much in advance that Streisand and Redford were never going to get together. At night, my dreams were accompanied by a soundtrack, and it was always Streisand’s voice doing the singing.” ![]() I’d work for three hours then leave the piano, and try again the next day. To be honest, my first attempts were in that direction. I was determined not to write something drippingly sentimental. “No matter what I was doing, I could hear Barbra’s voice in my head and recall how wonderful she sounds when she holds certain notes. ![]() Knowing the song was for Streisand made him initially cautious. “I wanted to reflect all of the sorrow and despondency and pain of the relationship, the star-crossed nature of it.” Hamlisch aimed to capture the entire script in a song. Then the capper-the picture starred Robert Redford and Barbra Streisand. The basic set-up: A serious Jewish girl falls for the Wasp-y hunk on campus, beginning a decade-long, stormy affair. Ten years and a few movie soundtracks later, Hamlisch got a phone call from his friend Ray Stark about writing a song on spec for a film. Though he’d penned “Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows,” a minor hit for Lesley Gore, his credentials were hardly enough to turn the head of the diva-to-be. At the time of this prayer, in 1964, Hamlisch was a rehearsal pianist for Streisand’s Broadway debut Funny Girl.
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