Written by: Matt Howe, Barbra Archives

Shortly after Funny Girl's 1968 theatrical release, Columbia Pictures cut the film shorter so it would play without an intermission. No major scenes were cut, just the overture, the intermission and the exit music. Also, most theater-goers in 1968 did not get to hear Funny Girl with its six-track stereo sound — only a handful of theaters in the U.S. presented it that way. All the 35mm stereo prints were configured with 4-track audio; most of the 35mm prints that 1968 audiences saw had mono tracks.

Grover Crisp, Vice President of Asset Management and Film Restoration at Sony Pictures, said the Funny Girl restoration was designed to “replicate the actual road show experience that Wyler envisioned when the film was released in 1968.” (Crisp participated in several interviews about the restoration, so he is quoted most often on this page).

The newly restored print of Funny Girl premiered December 2001 at Hollywood's Egyptian Theatre and returned to theaters in very limited release beginning August 31, 2001. Three cities — L.A. (Laemmle Royal), San Francisco (Castro), and NY (Clearview's Ziegfeld - view photo) — screened Funny Girl in the original roadshow presentation with overture, intermission, and exit music. Then, in September and October 2001, there were several more engagements added:

• September 7: Chicago (Century Centre), Berkeley (Shattuck), S.F. (Opera Plaza) 
• September 14: Washington, DC (Uptown), Baltimore (Senator), Encino 
• September 28: Dallas, San Diego, Las Vegas, Palm Springs 
• October 5: Boston (Coolidge Corner Theater)

Sony worked on the restoration of Funny Girl over a three year period. The spruced up Funny Girl film was distributed domestically by Sony Repertory on August 31, 2001 and grossed $223,306.

I lived in Washington, D.C. at the time and saw Funny Girl twice on the big screen at the wonderful Uptown Theater.  But for context, the movie came out three days after the attacks of September 11th.  Hardly anyone was out seeing movies at that time. 

2001 Restoration Notes

Cineric Inc., located in New York, did the majority of the work on the 2001 Funny Girl restoration, using computer technology and photochemical processes to preserve and restore the musical film.

“[Cineric] performed an internegative replacement,” Grover Crisp explained, “reinforcing splices, repairing negative elements, torn perforations, replacing approximately 20% of the original negative. The restoration wasn't terribly complicated in that sense, mainly because we were lucky that Sony provided excellent replacement elements for sections we needed to fix. The key to a good photo-chemical restoration is finding quality replacement elements in the vault.”

One major aspect of the restoration was the Technicolor Dye Transfer Process which Funny Girl was filmed with—a process which had been discontinued for over 20 years by the time Sony started working on restoring Streisand's 1968 musical. In a nutshell, Dye Transfer is a process which used stable acid dyes, imbibition printing, and yielded superior color printing. Technicolor shut down its dye transfer plant in 1975, so the process was extinct in 2001, as most films post-1975 used Eastman Kodak film stock.

Grover Crisp explained it simply: “The basic idea is that the process etches the image and color tones directly onto a special film print stock, creating more fully saturated color for the print. We chose the technique over a more conventional positive print process because it lends a more authentic look to the film, in terms of re-creating the original look.”

The restored Funny Girl is amazingly colorful and vibrant. Crisp says, “that shot when [Streisand] knocks on the door and it cuts to [Sharif] standing in this red velvet dining room... in theatres, that shot gets a gasp every single time. Followed by a little bit of laughter, a feeling that someone went overboard a bit in the art direction. But it's quite stunning.”

There were some original elements in Funny Girl that no restoration could address or correct. “There are a number of optically-created zoom shots throughout the film that were not well-made during post-production of the film,” Crisp explained. “Most viewers will probably think those areas are the ones that were damaged and replaced, but that is not the case. None of these shots looked good in 1968 and, unfortunately, they don't really look any better now.”

The shots he's referring to happen at Keeney's (Fanny skates into the orchestra pit) and during Fanny's audition for Ziegfeld (a slow zoom while she reads her sheet music). The zooms were created optically—after filming had occurred, rather than in-camera. Zooms were barely used during the rest of film, so these two really stand out.

Soundtrack & Sound

Barbra’s Participation

Since Funny Girl was a big-screen musical, its sound was always an important component since Streisand's voice, Jule Styne's music, and Walter Scharf's score were prominently featured.

“We did a fair amount of hiss reduction and improvement of the soundtrack,” Grover Crisp said. “The only digital part of this restoration was the soundtrack, and we did have this great six-channel format, which we replicated pretty much for the DVD. It's a pretty good representation of what you would have gotten in a theatre. But film noise and hiss was one of the biggest problems with that track, we had six channels of non-Dolby. And in addition to that we had pops and crackles, those usual kinds of artifacts... we did do that cleanup.”

James Young was the restoration and re-mastering engineer who digitally restored the film's soundtrack. He worked with the original, six-track, 70mm stereo mag soundtrack, which was provided by Sony's restoration team. Young actually created two new versions of the soundtrack — a 7.0 version for theatrical release, and a 5.0 version for theatrical and DVD release. 

“A big part of the battle was the fact that the original stereo mag was in fairly good condition,” says Young. “The main thing we had to do was reduce the noise to reasonable levels without introducing new artifacts. Some clicks and pops — whether from wear-and-tear or the original production — were removed, and we also spent time digitally synching the original ADR [automated dialogue replacement] work with the actor's lips. In a computer work station, we can do more nuanced synching work in the digital domain than they were able to do in 1968 by splicing blocks of magnetic film.”

Since Funny Girl's director, William Wyler, and cinematographer Harry Stradling were no longer alive, the restoration team worked on its own. “The supervising editor, Robert Swink, was still around,” Grover Crisp relayed. “I talked to him a couple of times about some things. Barbra Streisand was never really involved, but she knew that we were working on it. You know, she's very technically astute. Of course, she is a filmmaker now, not just an actress, so she was aware of some of the things we were facing. At the end, when we did finally show her the restored print, she liked it quite a bit. She was quite complimentary, so that was nice.”

The nicest compliment Streisand gave was when she first saw the restored film. Barbra pointed to the screen and said, “Now, that is the way it should sound.”

BELOW: The film trailer for the 2001 theatrical re-release of Funny Girl.

2013 Restoration & Blu-Ray

In 2013, Sony took another look at its Funny Girl print and did more restorative work on it, which coincided with the movie's first release on Blu-ray Disc. The 2001 restoration was more of a photochemical job with the celluloid. However, Funny Girl's original negative “was full of scratches and torn in many places because they made a lot of prints off of it,” said Grover Crisp. Therefore, the restored film which was shown in theaters and also used for the DVD was actually comprised of second- and third-generation materials “which lessens the overall image quality," Crisp explained.

For the 2013 restoration, Sony went back to the original Funny Girl negative. Its colors had faded “but with the color correction system that we have we can pretty much dial that color back in it,” Crisp said.

The Blu-ray received high marks from cinema and home theater experts.

In 2020, Amazon Prime began streaming a 4K version of Funny Girl. For those with 4K television sets, the print looks gorgeous. 

2024 Criterion Restoration Notes

The Criterion Collection released a 4K Blu-ray of Funny Girl on November 19, 2024.  According to their liner notes, the film was restored in 4K by Sony Pictures from the 35 mm original camera negative and the 35 mm original six-track magnetic stereo soundtrack master.  Criterion's disc was presented in Dolby Vision HDR (high dynamic range) on the 4K Ultra HD disc and high definition SDR (standard dynamic range) on the Blu-ray.

Criterion's release included several bonus items, some previously included on past releases, and most of them new and unique to this release:

• New audio interview with star Barbra Streisand (great stills! I contributed some of this material, FYI, and my name appears in the credit!). WATCH AN EXCERPT VIDEO HERE
• New conversation between director William Wyler’s son David and author and Turner Classic Movies host Alicia Malone
• Directed by William Wyler (1986), a documentary on Wyler’s life and career
• Archival interview with actor Omar Sharif
• Deleted scene featuring Streisand and Sharif (the garden scene at their new home)
• Featurettes from the original theatrical release
• This is Streisand
• Barbra in Movieland
• The Look of Funny Girl
• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
• An essay by author and film critic Michael Koresky

“Funny Girl” On Home Video Over the Years

Funny Girl made it to home video in the mid-1980s on VHS tape. This 2-tape version was in the now defunct pan-and-scan format.  The manufacturers cropped the widescreen image to fit a square-sized television set, losing half of the picture.  Then, around 1992, Funny Girl was released on the laserdisc format via RCA/Columbia Pictures. This 3-disc set (laserdiscs were the size of vinyl LPs) had a letterbox format — the movie would play on our square television sets with black bars at the top and bottom of the screen, preserving the original widescreen format.

It wasn't until 2001 that Funny Girl was released in the DVD format, which followed its restoration by Sony Pictures.

“We take a look at the film,” Grover Crisp explained. “We improve the film as best we can. We do an all-new high-definition transfer, and that gets used as the source material for the DVD.”

In some respects, the DVD looked better than the restored film released to movie theaters in 2001. “For what we supplied for the high-definition [video] transfer, they were able to tweak it, color-correct it a little bit better than we could on film, which is always the case when you get into video,” said Crisp.

As for the sound, James Young's 5.0 Dolby Digital mix was used on the DVD. In the movie theaters, the sound emanated from speakers which were placed left, left-center, center, right-center, right and surround. “For the DVD,” Crisp said, “we just kind of moved that into left/center/right, then mono left and right surround. We had to collapse it a little bit, but it gives it a pretty good flavor of what it was.”

The 2001 Funny Girl DVD was planned as a more elaborate (possibly 2-disc) release. Cut scenes, including the complete Swan Lake ballet sequence would have been included, but were not. Only two featurettes and bonus trailers were included on the DVD.

Sources Used on This Page:

• Cineric web site (link)
• Re-Color Me Barbra: Restoring Funny Girl, by Dale Dobson. Digitally Obsessed web site (link)
• Funny Girl Gets A Makeover. DVDfile.com 2004 story.
• Funny Noises, by Michael Goldman. DigitalContentProducer.com, Film and Video Production in a Multi-Platform World. 2001.
• The FUNNY GIRL Restoration Project. A DVDAngle.com interview with Grover Crisp, by Chuck Pennington. (link)
• 'Funny Girl,' 'Big Parade' restorations at TCM Classic Film Fest by Susan King (link)

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