The film also firmly established Redford—whose career
had been inexorably building momentum for a decade—as the male romantic
idol of his generation—ironically, for a role that, in its initial incarnation,
he saw as such a “Ken doll” that he had rejected it.
More than a few fans of this classic might be
surprised to learn that its heterosexual couple were a projection of the
relationship between screenwriter Arthur Laurents and his lover of the
late Forties and early Fifties, actor Farley Granger.
In both cases, a Jewish screenwriter with outspoken
leftist sympathies (Laurents in real life, Streisand as the film’s Katie Morosky)
falls in love with a WASP of startling good looks (Granger, and Redford’s
Hubbell Gardiner), only to see the relationship founder.
Streisand, committed to the project from the start,
recognized that the film needed a male co-star of unusual magnetism. She thought
she saw it in Redford, “an intellectual cowboy…a charismatic star who is also
one of the finest actors of his generation.”
“What intrigued me most about Bob was his complexity,”
Streisand recalls in her upcoming memoir, My Name Is Barbra (excerpted
in the November issue of Vanity Fair). “You never quite know what
he’s thinking, and that makes him fascinating to watch onscreen. Like the
greatest movie stars, Bob understands the power of restraint. You’re never
going to get it all…and that’s the mystery…that’s what makes you want to keep
looking at him.”
To Streisand’s disappointment, Redford initially
rejected the role as being little more than a love object. But she wouldn’t take
no for an answer, beginning a process where as many as 10 screenwriters were enlisted
(most crucially, Alvin Sargent, David Rayfiel, and even Paddy Chayefsky and Francis
Ford Coppola) to make Katie more appealing and, more important, Hubbell a
figure of substance and complexity.
With every rewrite, Laurents saw less of his original,
and it infuriated him, particularly on what he saw as the softened subplot involving the Hollywood blacklist. Streisand and, to a lesser extent, Redford also objected to the
de-emphasis on politics.
But director Sydney Pollack, already under
enormous pressure from balancing the contrasting acting styles of his stars
(Streisand loved constant rehearsals and additional takes; Redford felt he grew
more stale the longer it lasted), battling with producer Ray Stark, and making
sense of all the different scripts, was also getting static from Columbia Pictures,
which desperately needed a hit to stave off bankruptcy.
It all come to a head after a disastrous Friday night
preview. Frustrated by his inability to integrate the passion and the politics,
Pollack decided to cut five scenes—all with political overtones.
Nearly a decade later, Pollack would engage in another
clash about the meaning of a movie with a significant figure: Dustin Hoffman,
who saw Tootsie as being about what an actor would go through for his
craft while the director conceived it as how a male could become a better man.
Both movies became enormous hits, but The Way We
Were left a far more bitter residue. The outspoken Laurents remained bitter
to the end of his life about the violence Pollack did to his script. For his
part, the director felt that at the end of the day, the movie was a love story.
For all the battle over the movie’s words, a crucial
contributor to its eventual success—in a way that audiences may not fully
appreciate—is its theme music. I’m not talking simply about the fact that the
song, with its nostalgia-tinged lyrics by Alan and Marilyn Bergman, won an
Oscar for Best Original Song as well as the Grammy for Song of the Year.
No, I’m also referring to how it opened up audience
tear ducts during the film’s ending. Composer Marvin Hamlisch, thinking the
audience would grow tired of his theme after two hours, had used different music
for the goodbye scene between Katie and Hubbell. At first, he couldn’t understand
why audiences didn’t react the way he wanted.
When he realized the problem—they needed to hear that theme
music again!—Columbia Pictures wouldn’t come up with the $15,000 cost of
redoing the scene. So Hamlisch took it out of his own paycheck.
Did the studio suits ever recompense him? You got me.
Maybe they thought that Oscar and Grammy were all the rewards he needed. In any
case, that soaring ballad got a lot of people’s minds off a script that had
given countless people agita.
(See Sarah Jae Leiber's interesting discussion on the Jewish Women's Archive about how The Way We Were concludes that "civility alone cannot sustain loving relationships where core principles are misaligned.")
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