Streisand: Her Life (93 page)
Read Streisand: Her Life Online
Authors: James Spada
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Patinkin has never spoken ill of Barbra, probably because of a clause in his contract that forbade it, but a source close to Barbra has confirmed that making
Yentl
was not a pleasant experience for the actor. David Watkin has offered a possible reason why. Although he wouldn’t name the actor in question, it seems clear that he was talking about Patinkin, since he is the only member of the cast about whom there has been even a hint of discord with Barbra: “Somebody wouldn’t take direction. And Barbra’s behavior, in regard to that person, was exemplary. She was patient. They wouldn’t do something she wanted them to do, and I can remember she said very sweetly, ‘Perhaps if we do enough takes, they’ll forget and do what I want.
’”
I
N JULY THE
Yentl
cast and crew packed themselves off to the tiny Czech town of Roztyly, two and a half hours outside Prague, for exterior work. Barbra’s mother had begged her not to go behind the Iron Curtain to make the movie. “There are wars there, and people throw bombs,” Diana pleaded. “And they don’t have any fresh vegetables!”
But nothing mattered for Barbra except the movie. When Jon Peters went over to pay her a visit, he was appalled by the smell of raw sewage in the town. “Barbra never noticed,” he said. “There were flies the size of beetles, but they never bothered her. She just swatted them.”
By this time Barbra was close to exhaustion. She would rise at six in the morning, be made up and costumed by ten, film from ten until seven, go back to her hotel, have a quick dinner, and then work on the next day’s lines and setups. According to David Watkin, “Barbra would frequently telephone the camera operator at three-thirty in the morning and talk for an hour about the next day’s work. He was awakened practically every night.... Barbra is a worrier, I suppose is the best way to describe it.”
Never was she more so. “I don’t know how I survived it,” she said as filming came to a close. “It was so overwhelming I was sick every morning on the way to work, just sick.” What did she worry about? Nearly everything. She fretted that the movie wouldn’t turn out well. “I would think, I’m going to be humiliated. They’ll call me a fool, and I’ll have to run away and live in China. It’s a terrible, terrible fear, the fear that you’re not good enough at what you do.” But, she said, “I knew I had to be strong. I couldn’t get sick, couldn’t be too tired.... I couldn’t crumble, or everything else around me would crumble.”
B
ARBRA COMPLETED PRINCIPAL
photography on
Yentl
in October 1982. The following
April
1, the
Los Angeles Times
ran a headline in its movie section: “Streisand Ousted as Producer.” The story revealed that a completion bond company that had insured the film for cost overruns had exercised its right to control the picture’s editing because Barbra had gone 11 percent over budget, even though that was not so unusual for a foreign-location shoot. The bond had been sprung on Barbra by the studio the day before filming began. “It was ridiculous,” she said, “because they paid the company $700,000, which I needed in the movie. They didn’t trust me—put it that way, I suppose.”
The bond company demanded that Barbra deliver the picture in its final form in six weeks or they would take it away from her and hire another filmmaker to finish it. Barbra begged them to give her ten weeks. “I’m going to die from the pressure,” she told them. They refused. Working day and night on the editing and scoring, she did it. “I did anything to get it done so that they could never take it away from me.”
The last hurdle Barbra faced with
Yentl
was the fact that UA had final cut approval. But “the studio didn’t touch my movie,” she said. “Not a frame.”
O
N NOVEMBER
16, 1983, the day
Yentl
opened in Hollywood, Barbra, trembling with anxiety, went to the theater to check the sound and the picture quality. “And then I went to the nearest candy store and bought all the candy I could find and all the cookies I could find and a ham-and-cheese croissant and everything fattening and stuffed my face. Just trying to feed that fear that nobody would show up.”
She needn’t have worried. The movie opened to tremendous fanfare amid a publicity blitz that put Streisand on the covers of half a dozen national magazines, and most of the reviews were rapturous. Of nine big-city newspapers and nine national magazines, fifteen gave the film strongly positive reviews, one review was mixed, and two, including
The New York Times
,
panned it. Even
Time
and
Newsweek
,
often antagonistic toward Barbra, raved about
Yentl
.
“It’s rare to see such a labor of love, such emotion in almost every frame of a film,” David Ansen said in
Newsweek
.
“
Yentl
means a great deal to Barbra Streisand, and she makes you feel this in a movie whose chief excellence is its passionate humanity. Director Streisand has given star Streisand her best vehicle since
Funny Girl
.”
“The first thing to say about her, now that she’s completely in control,” David Denby wrote in
New York
,
“is that the sweetness and even the delicacy of her finest moments as a young performer have returned, taken fresh root, and really flowered. The second thing to say is that Barbra Streisand is a good director.”
Pauline Kael felt that “Streisand has made a technical
ly a
dmirable movie, with lovely diffuse, poetic lighting and silky-smooth editing. And she brings out the performers’ most appealing qualities. It’s a movie full of likable people.”
Most exciting of all for Barbra were the film’s box-office grosses. The movie made $50 million in the United States—nearly as much as
The Way We Were
—and that much again overseas. The sound-track album sold three million copies worldwide and earned Barbra a huge two-dollar-per-album royalty.
Barbra had proven she could be a responsible producer and a visionary director. But characteristically she was far more hurt by the few potshots directed at the film than she was pleased by the praise. In February Isaac Singer published an “interview with himself” in which he lambasted Barbra and the movie, saying that his Yentl was never meant to be a feminist, that she didn’t sing, and that she wasn’t in every scene in his story. “I must say that Miss Streisand was exceedingly kind to herself [in the film
],” S
inger said. “The result is that Miss Streisand is always present, while poor Yentl is absent.”
As much as that hurt, Barbra’s worst reaction would come after a
Los Angeles Times
interview with her about the film. Barbra told the reporter an anecdote about showing Steven Spielberg the picture to seek any advice he might have. “Don’t change a frame,” he told her. When the piece ran, Spielberg’s reaction was omitted, making it appear that Barbra had needed help with the picture from one of Hollywood’s most successful directors. Barbra was devastated. “That’s like saying this woman, this actress, could not make the movie without the help of a man.... I showed the film to a lot of people.”
Barbra has said that this journalistic betrayal, whether inadvertent or intentional, was the reason she didn’t give another interview to the American press for eight years or direct another movie for nearly as long.
B
ARBRA JUST ABOUT
fell out of her chair at the Golden Globe Awards ceremony on January 28 when her name was announced as Best Director.
Yentl
had received five nominations in the Musical or Comedy category, including Best Picture, which it had won, and Best Actress, which Barbra had not. Most observers expected the award in the Best Director category, which includes just five directors from both the dramatic and musical or comedy genres, to go to James L. Brooks, who had directed the quirky Shirley MacLaine-Debra Winger hit
Terms of Endearment
.
That morning, Streisand learned she had been overlooked by the Directors Guild of America for their annual award, and thus she was truly stunned when she was named the first female to win a Golden Globe as Best Director.
“Directing for me was a total experience,” she told the crowd at the Beverly Hilton Hotel gala. “It calls upon everything you’ve ever seen or felt or known or heard. It was really the highlight of my life. My professional life. This award is very very meaningful to me and I’m very proud, because it also represents, I hope, new opportunities for so many talented women to try to make their dreams realities, as I did.”
