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A lot anticipated for Barbra Streisand was her past love scene with Robert Redford within the movie TheMeans We Had been. “Streisand was a star who reportedly had had affairs with lots of her main males,” mentioned one member of the manufacturing group.
A notable besides was Walter Matthau on the set of Howdy, Dolly! The 2 stars famously loathed one another from virtually the primary day of manufacturing on that film musical. In contrast to Elliott Gould in I Can Get It for You Wholesale, or Sydney Chaplin within the Humorous Woman stage musical, or Omar Sharif within the film model, or Ryan O’Neal in What’s Up Doc?, Redford was a fortunately married household man with 4 kids when he signed to do The Means We Had been in June 1972. Initially, he even refused his new main girl’s request for the customary first assembly earlier than manufacturing started. Streisand had requested and she or he requested, and at last, Streisand requested the movie’s director, Sydney Pollack, “Why can’t I sit and speak with Bob Redford? I’m going to behave with him within the film.” Pollack needed to inform Streisand that her new costar most popular the spontaneity of not rehearsing, of not assembly her beforehand. The information didn't set effectively with the notoriously punctilious performer.
“Lastly, it began to get damaging,” mentioned Pollack, and he had no selection however to inform Redford, a detailed pal, “You’ve bought to go, as a result of she’s beginning to take it personally.”
The long-delayed assembly was set on Streisand’s turf, at her Holmby Hills property. Redford left his spouse, Lola, at house in Utah however insisted that Pollack accompany him to the dinner. He needed to maintain this strictly skilled. Pollack understood Redford’s methodology past the mere truth of his not desirous to sleep along with his subsequent main girl.
“He believes very strongly that the strangeness contributes to the chemistry in a film,” mentioned Pollack. “Strangeness” precisely describes the primary scenes in The Means We Had been taking pictures schedule, the place Streisand performs a school pupil 5 years youthful than herself, and Redford is an efficient decade older than his character. It's that stage within the relationship between Katie Morosky, the Jewish communist, and Hubbell Gardiner, the beautiful Gentile jock, “when she was imagined to be awkward with him,” mentioned Pollack.
In keeping with the director, Streisand turned infatuated with Redford at that dinner. “Barbra was delighted as a result of she had a crush on him, even earlier than we began,” he revealed. “It was onerous for girls to not have a fixation, as a result of he was in all places, like Elvis. He was the golden boy lengthy earlier than Hubbell got here alongside.”
For maybe the one time, Arthur Laurents agreed with Pollack, who had already fired the screenwriter relating to wanted modifications within the authentic script. “She was merely mesmerized by him as a result of she discovered him so lovely,” mentioned Laurents. “She was infatuated with Robert Redford, who dealt with it effectively, neither encouraging her nor utilizing her crush to his benefit.”
When it got here to their past love scene within the film, Redford protected himself in additional methods than one. He wore two athletic supporters, whereas Streisand selected to don a bikini.
“It was a reasonably G-rated scene,” the movie’s second assistant director Michael Britton recalled.
Certainly, producer Ray Stark had already cautioned that he didn’t need even “a closely shadowed nude scene.” The Means We Had been was going to be PG rated, simply because it was going to be two hours lengthy and never a minute extra. Stark had already deleted a “fuck” within the script for a similar cause: He needed the biggest viewers doable, and a dreaded R score wouldn’t give him that.
Whereas Pollack known as for a closed set, with solely him and the cinematographer current, Britton, a particular assistant to each the director and the main man, managed to be current for the two-day shoot in Katie’s condominium, constructed on Stage 21 at Warner Bros. in Burbank, California. The scene required Redford to behave like he both was very drunk or was sleeping or each. It required Streisand to behave each nervous and thrilled as she slowly undresses to slide bare below the bedcover subsequent to her costar. From there, Hubbell rouses himself sufficient to maneuver on high of Katie.
Within the completed movie, it’s not clear whether or not he truly inserts himself, and most positively, neither character achieves orgasm. In Laurents’ novel, The Means We Had been, printed in 1972, a 12 months earlier than the movie’s launch, there isn't any doubt. Laurents wrote, “[T]hen he threw again the coverlet and rolled on high of her, after which he was inside her.” The passage goes on to disclose that the intercourse may be very fast: he climaxes, and she or he doesn't, and the one kiss she receives from him is on her neck. In each the novel and the film, when it’s clear that Hubbell has fallen asleep on high of her—within the film, his sudden narcolepsy is cued by a minor key shift within the music—Katie says, “Hubbell. Hubbell. It’s Katie. You do understand it’s Katie?”
It was a easy scene. However “[t]right here had been numerous takes,” Britton recalled. Lastly, Redford eyed Pollack, giving him a glance that mentioned he’d had sufficient. Redford tended to do his greatest within the first take, possibly the second, hardly ever the third, by no means the fourth. From there, he tended to lose vitality and focus. Since this scene required little from him besides the again of his head, Redford misplaced persistence and Pollack had no selection however to tell his feminine star, “I feel we’ve bought it.” Even editor John Burnett was amazed at how a lot footage he needed to work with to place collectively the straightforward lovemaking scene.
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Rumors circled that Streisand was not at her most relaxed for the two-day shoot. Pollack defended her remedy of the minuscule crew that day. “If Streisand has been in make-up since 6 a.m. and she or he walks on to a set at 8 a.m. and is requested to take her garments off, get below the covers, and do a love scene, and she or he’s shivering and self-conscious and she or he will get below the covers, and her thoughts is on the scene, and a few man comes over and shoves a lightweight meter in her face, she is liable to say, ‘Get the hell out of right here!’”
In Pollack’s opinion, that sort of verbal explosion didn't make Streisand “unattainable.” He added, “She’s certain to explode. You then hear individuals saying, ‘Gee, what a bitch she is.’”
For his half, Redford preferred to joke concerning the love scene. He paraphrased what Marilyn Monroe had mentioned again in 1953, when her nude calendar surfaced within the first problem of Playboy. “I had nothing on however the radio,” she teased reporters.
To the query about what he wore in mattress subsequent to Streisand, Redford informed a Newsweek reporter, “Aramis.”
Someday between the primary love scene and the second love scene with Redford, Streisand made a fast journey as much as San Francisco to attend the primary preview for her new movie. The viewers there appeared mystified by Up the Sandbox, which featured scenes that had been a “fantasy inside a fantasy inside a fantasy,” based on its director. Put up-preview, he and his star, who was additionally the movie’s producer, whacked out about twenty minutes of celluloid, trimming particularly all these costly fantasies shot in Africa. They each hoped for the perfect. Up the Sandbox would open earlier than Christmas however after The Means We Had been wrapped—or was imagined to have wrapped, on November 30, 1972.
When she returned to the Warner Bros. lot on Monday, Streisand fed Redford grape after grape in entrance of a crackling hearth on Stage 21. It was the movie’s second love scene, and it follows the second when, on the road in entrance of Katie’s brownstone, he delights her along with his “What sort of pie?” query after she frantically invitations him to dinner after their first evening of disappointing lovemaking.
Redford recited the “What sort of pie?” line in New York Metropolis in early October. It was now late October, and the issue of continuity arose. When the couple enters Katie’s New York condominium on Stage 21, every little thing has to match what came about on the road again in the true metropolis on the East 50s. The script supervisor informed Redford, “You will have the [grocery] packages in your left arm and hand. Your jacket is buttoned, however your tie is undone.”
Redford didn’t keep in mind it that method. “Left arm? No… I had them in my proper,” he insisted.
Did he not keep in mind? Or was it one other Redford joke?
“Numerous actors have to eliminate their anxiousness indirectly,” mentioned Britton. “Just a few actors scream and yell. Bob performs jokes.”
One other factor Robert loved doing on the set was asking how lengthy a setup would take after which asking, “When will I be wanted?”
“In half an hour,” he’d be informed.
“No, I don’t have to be again for 3 hours. Give me half an hour.”
And so it might go.
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In that second love scene, Hubbell tells Katie about his “drawing her face within the sand” on the seaside someday after school commencement. He additionally muses about imagining himself a high-flying “American eagle.” Laurents wrote neither of these speeches—not the face within the sand, not the American eagle. They got here courtesy of writers Alvin Sargent and David Rayfiel who had been employed to beef up the Hubbell function when Redford initially rejected Laurents’ authentic script, calling the character a “Ken doll.” He went on to complain, “And all I'm imagined to be is that this blond, blue-eyed hunk of romance that each one the women go loopy over, and I've completely nothing else to do within the image.”
A lot to Laurents’ reduction, whereas the scene was shot, the traces about “her face within the sand” and Hubbell being an “American eagle” had been reduce even earlier than the film was previewed for audiences in San Francisco in September 1973.
A lot to Laurents’ dismay, a major line that he had put in each his novel and his screenplay was by no means spoken, and it was a line that he needed to cap the scene: Hubbell appears into Katie’s eyes after their orgy of grapes and tells her, “It’ll be higher this time.”
Solely, Redford refused to say the road. He even made certain to have it crossed out within the working script.
His refusal right here replicated what had occurred on his earlier movie. In The Candidate, when his politician character, Invoice McKay, tries to woo some voters, he makes the embarrassing fake pas of donning an indigenous individuals’s ceremonial headdress. The movie’s screenwriter, Jeremy Larner, tried to elucidate that each one these feathers on high of his head would present how low a politician would stoop so as to win just a few votes, and so he “loses his integrity right here.”
Regardless of Larner’s clarification, Redford refused to put on the headdress. He didn’t care what the colourful however ridiculous plumage mentioned concerning the character. He thought it would offend his buddies within the Native American group, with whom he had bonded on a number of environmental points.
It was the identical factor relating to the road “It’ll be higher this time.” Redford was by no means unhealthy in mattress. So how might Hubbell be?
Stark exploded when he noticed the rushes for the 2 love scenes. Within the first scene, he strenuously objected to a teakettle shrieking within the kitchen. He known as it “shtik” and needed it taken out. It was not taken out. Pollack defended it, saying it added “humor” to a scene badly in want of it.
Stark authorized of just one factor: he preferred that Streisand didn't seem nude. Pollack had adopted his directions there. However he discovered that the 2 stars’ lovemaking lacked emotion. One way or the other he discovered the outline within the script of Katie discovering Hubbell bare in mattress, “half-covered” solely by a sheet and loud night breathing, way more thrilling than “something” he noticed within the rushes. All through the manufacturing course of, the producer appeared to not have a transparent understanding of the film he was making. He particularly needed Streisand to point out extra “humor” in her efficiency, someway unaware that her taking part in a dedicated communist dominated out such irony. He additionally didn’t perceive that Hubbell’s lackluster efficiency in mattress is a part of what makes the second so poignant for Katie.
Way more disappointing for Stark was the second love scene. He needed to know, The place was the road “It’ll be higher this time”?
Within the novel The Means They Had been, the second love scene begins with Hubbell telling Katie that she doesn't put on the fitting garments. “Don’t you’re lovely?” he asks her.
She replies, “You might be.”
The film stored the “lovely” trade however overlooked any point out that Hubbell could be a closet subscriber to Vogue journal.
Laurents delivered his most graphic second within the novel for the second love scene: “He ran his arms flippantly over her physique, then ran his lips over her, then stood up and shortly shucked off his garments, and as he slowly got here right down to her, he whispered, ‘It’ll be higher this time.’”
Stark and Laurents felt the road “It’ll be higher this time” established the truth that the couple had truly made love the primary time round, and that Hubbell is now exhibiting some humanity and possibly even some remorse for the way in which he handled Katie in his earlier drunken state of lovemaking. The producer believed the road was by no means an indictment that Hubbell, i.e., Robert Redford, was ever unhealthy in mattress. It confirmed an consciousness of their first time. It confirmed that he remembered. It confirmed that he was sorry. Stark went on to name it not solely romantic but additionally “chivalrous” of Hubbell to say the primary time. Stark admitted to Pollack that he had truly cried when he first learn the road, and he went on to disclose that others who’d learn the script informed him the identical factor. It had made them cry.
The road become an albatross for each Stark and Pollack. The producer would go on to reference it no less than a dozen instances in as many memos. Particularly upsetting to Stark was that Pollack had strongly agreed with him concerning the significance of the road—till Pollack realized that Redford wouldn’t say it, at which level the director thought of it “superfluous.” Stark resented that Pollack known as him “cussed” on the topic, since his place, in contrast to the director’s, by no means modified. Abruptly, Stark didn’t care concerning the cash. He needed the scene reshot whatever the value.
Redford cooing to Streisand “It’ll be higher this time” was by no means shot.
“It’ll be higher this time” was not the final time that Redford omitted a line within the taking pictures script. Within the movie’s last scene, shot in entrance of the Plaza Lodge when Katie and Hubbell meet years later, in 1952, Streisand’s lengthy fingernails brushed apart the bangs on Redford’s brow for the fourth and last time. As she did so, the script signifies a verbal response from Hubbell. The character was imagined to say, “Grey.”
However Redford by no means mentioned the phrase. If he was by no means unhealthy in mattress, he additionally was by no means going to go grey.
Excerpted from the forthcoming e-bookThe Means They Had been: How Epic Battles and Bruised Egos Introduced a Traditional Hollywood Love Story to the Display screen, printed by Citadel Press. c 2023.