Development & Script

“Ray Stark asked [Arthur Laurents] to write something for me,” Barbra Streisand said, explaining how The Way We Were was developed. 

Stark had made Funny Girl and The Owl and the Pussycat with Streisand, and Stark was anxious to begin a third film; she had signed a four-picture deal with him. The picture Stark wanted Laurents to write, however, was a weird hybrid of The Sound of Music and The Miracle Worker: Stark wanted Streisand to play a music teacher for handicapped children in Brooklyn Heights. “It wasn’t just a lousy idea, it was no idea,” Laurents said about his story treatment.

When he met with Streisand to discuss the movie, she reminded him of a “fiery campus radical” he’d once known at Cornell University: Fanny Price — ironic since Barbra made her success playing Fanny Brice. He knew she was a great model for his heroine, and Laurents began constructing a story around her character. “In the end, Fanny was indestructible, a phoenix, and her name wasn’t Fanny it was Katie.” Like Streisand, a self-identifying Jew, “Katie could only be a Jew because of her insistence on speaking out, her outrage at injustice, her passion, her values, and because I was a Jew,” Arthur wrote.

Arthur Laurents wrote three memoirs before he died, and it must be stressed that most of the story ideas in The Way We Were were inspired by his own life — Laurents was politicly active as a student at Cornell in the thirties; he wrote radio propaganda during World War II; and he was investigated and blacklisted for possibly being a Communist in the forties during the House Un-American Activities Committee. “I was backlisted,” he stated. “And when I decided to leave the country to seek work abroad, I was denied a passport even though I was willing to take an oath that I’d never been a Communist.”

“All of this is in The Way We Were,” he wrote, “which came directly out of my life at Cornell as well as in Hollywood.  Katie Morosky, the campus political progressive played by Barbra Streisand, is mainly me.”

This era is largely forgotten these days, but Laurents based several of the characters in The Way We Were on real Hollywood people.  Hubbell was an amalgamation of three men, all who served in World War II: 

• Peter Viertel, a screenwriter (The Sun Also Rises, The Old Man and the Sea). He was a Marine, and an athlete.
• Robert Parrish, a child actor, editor and director. Laurents wrote the screenplay for a film Parrish edited titled Caught. Laurents said the “blond and Aryan” part of Parrish became Hubbell.
• Bud Schulberg, another screenwriter (On the Waterfront), who was married to Virginia “Jigee” Lee Ray at the time.

The character of George Bissinger, a big film director, is based on John Huston (nowadays known as Angelica’s father). Huston fought hard against the House Committee on Un-American Activities and the Hollywood blacklist.

Rhea Edwards (played by Allyn Ann McLerie) was modeled after Meta Rosenberg, who was in the story department at Paramount. In the 1970s, she was also Robert Redford’s agent for a time. In the film, Rhea is an ambitious agent, trying to make Hubbell a rich Hollywood screenwriter.  In real life, Rosenberg named names to HUAC and was ostracized for years before she worked on The Rockford Files on T.V. with James Garner.  Dalton Trumbo, one of the writers who worked on The Way We Were script, told biographer Michael Feeney Callan: “[Rosenberg] behaved like most informers when called before HUAC: she gave the names of communists she probably did not like, and withheld the names of communists she probably did like.”

And Paula Reisner, played with such character by Viveca Lindfors, was inspired by Salka Viertel – Peter’s mother, who was a screenwriter and rumored lover of Greta Garbo.

The Cast

To photograph the movie, Stark hired Harry Stradling, Jr., the son of acclaimed director of photography, Harry Stradling Sr., who lensed Streisand’s first three films. “Hell,” Stradling, Jr. said, “I was very apprehensive. It was a big movie. Naturally I wanted to do good because my father had worked with [Barbra] so much and naturally I couldn’t help being a little apprehensive she might not like what I did.”

Stradling, Jr. told writer Jim Udel that while lighting Streisand on The Way We Were she said, “Your father never did it like that!” Harry Jr. calmly answered, “That’s because I never showed him how.”

“She only likes you to photograph the left side of her face. Always automatically, even when they start to rehearse a scene, when the director’s looking, she’ll get herself into a position where only the left side of her face is showing.”

Stradling also revealed his technique for filming Streisand outdoors, without the benefit of controlled studio lighting. “You have to build something over [her],” he explained. “Like if she’s coming in close you kind of build a house that she walks into and then you light it with a light.”

— New York Times

In his autobiography, assistant director Jerry Ziesmer described Pollack's way of directing the picture. “He began with a rehearsal period prior to the picture. Many of the rehearsals were nothing more than discussions with Barbra or Redford in Sydney's office. We also used an empty sound stage to tape out the floor plan of the [set].”

For two weeks in September 1972, the crew of The Way We Were filmed on location in upstate New York.  First, Union College in Schenectady was the screen version of Katie and Hubbell’s alma mater.  The original plan was to shoot at Massachusetts’ Williams College, but that location had to be scrapped when the script rewrites weren’t ready in time for filming. 

College students (who were willing to cut their 1970s long hair to appear as 1937-era kids) were recruited by talent scout Jack Saunders at $15 per day plus lunch.  About twelve local musicians were cast as the prom dance band.

“We spent 14 hours just on the rally,” explained Philip Macero, a student extra. “I was in a scene on the track wearing track shorts, and it was freezing – 45 degrees.”

Andrew Richman was a student at Union and recalled: “Robert Redford, as I remember, was very friendly and you could find him outside with the extras. The boy or male extras were mostly from Union and I remember him tossing a football around. Barbra Streisand for the most part would be in her trailer and would come out when she had to shoot. I was chosen as an extra and Sydney Pollack had everyone who wanted to be an extra meet at Memorial Chapel. As he walked down the rows of Memorial Chapel, I shouted out to him, ‘How about a part for a Jewish kid from Brooklyn.’ I knew that he was Jewish and had grown up in Brooklyn and he said to me ‘Go and get a costume.’ I was to be in the gym scene where a formal dance took place and fitting was for a tuxedo. I remember waiting for a scene to be shot and we were outside, and it was real hot and it took forever.”

Following the Schenectady scenes, Columbia Pictures’ crew moved to Ballston Spa, New York, where exterior scenes of the college town were lensed. The town’s Mayberry Hotel was renamed “Old Dutch” on screen, and it’s where Hubbell and Katie discuss the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. The Good-Whip Restaurant and Bakery at 18 Front Street, with its old-fashioned décor became the diner where Katie waits tables. “This is why the restaurant is being used,” Sydney Pollack told the local paper. “Since this street in Ballston Spa had the necessary look of the 1930s and was close to Union, we decided to film here.” What you don’t see in the final film was the three hundred Streisand and Redford fans who gathered off-camera to watch the filming each night.

BELOW: Photo gallery of behind-the-scenes shots of The Way We Were on location in New York. Click the photos to enlarge.

On Monday, September 25^th, Pollack and his crew relocated to Pittsfield, Massachusetts’s Lake Onota.  There at the Onota Lake boat basin, they captured the Williams College crew rowing on the lake, which were some of the scenes that opened the movie. (Union College did not have a crew squad.)



Next, filming shifted to Manhattan in October 1972, with one scene filmed at the historic Beekman Hotel at 49^thand 1st.  In its tower with gorgeous views of New York’s East Side skyline. Streisand and Redford actually walked down Beekman Place in the scene which precedes it.

Pollack said, “The period details were especially difficult. Every extra had to be scrutinized for proper hair styles and costumes. In the New York City shooting, we had to bring in our own trash buckets and even streetlamps, because so much has changed.”

In early November 1972, the company moved to Los Angeles’ Union Station to film scenes depicting the Hollywood Ten returning from Washington, D.C. where they gave testimony to the House Un-American Activities Committee. Pollack and director of photography Harry Stradling, Jr. utilized the brand new Panaflex camera developed by Panavision. The camera weighed a slight 25 pounds, hand-held – a huge improvement for speed in filming.  The scene at Union Station in which Streisand and Redford walk through an angry crowd was filmed by the camera operator sitting in a wheelchair, which was rolled along the floor to capture the action.  Normally, tracks would have to be set up and a heavier camera would be mounted on a dolly – taking hours of prep work. “I couldn’t believe it until I saw it,” Sydney Pollack said.

Interior scenes, like the Marx Brothers-themed party, were shot at the Burbank Studios. In early November 1972, Groucho Marx himself, age 82, joined the actors on set to observe the filming of the party scene. Photographers snapped shots of the cast and the real Groucho, but Bob Redford wasn’t happy.  “I told you, Ray, I don’t want any part of it,” he is reported saying to Ray Stark. To producer Howard Koch, Redford said, “Howard, why don’t you get it over with so we can go to lunch?” Pollack and Koch managed to wrangle cast and crew into filming five takes before breaking.  Meanwhile, Barbra, dressed as Groucho’s brother Harpo, kissed and hugged the real Marx Brother and posed for photographers.

El Morocco nightclub was a set on Stage 16 at Burbank Studios. About two hundred extras from Central Casting were hired to portray dancers, servicemen, waiters, and couples on a date. The men playing servicemen were required to have their hair cut to reflect the style of 1945; the women had their hair styled. Dancing extras were rehearsed with a choreographer before reporting to the set for filming. 

In Hollywood, The Way We Were used Jack Warner’s old office on the Warner Brothers lot as the office of George Bissinger.

At the end of November 1972, the movie’s final scene was shot at New York’s Plaza Hotel on Fifth Avenue, which corresponded with NY’s spring fashion shows. “The scenes we shot today involved a quiet and intimate farewell and it’s hard to keep out extraneous noise,” Pollack said. “And even though actors are basically exhibitionists, they become shy and embarrassed with a sea of strange faces staring at them.”

Streisand came up with the business of brushing aside Hubbell's bangs. “I wanted to find some gesture that I could do that I could repeat at certain times of the film," she says. “That's why I did that in the first scene, because I thought I would recreate it later when it would have more meaning.” 

BELOW: Photo gallery of more behind-the-scenes shots of The Way We Were. Click the photos to enlarge.

Composer Marvin Hamlisch appears briefly in the film in a cameo role at the Hollywood screening party (pictured in the blue shirt)

SOURCES USED ON THESE “THE WAY WE WERE” PAGES:

• “A Camera Innovator With Cinematic Vision” by Wayne Warga. The Los Angeles Times, May 20, 1973.
• Barbra: A biography of Barbra Streisand by Donald Zec and Anthony Fowles. St. Martin’s Press, 1981.
• Barbra News Talks To Sally Kirkland by Craig Hall. June 26, 2002. Retrieved September 17, 2020. http://www.barbranews.com/sallykirkland.htm
• Dorothy Manners’ Hollywood. The Tribune, July 25, 1972.
• “Exhibitors to See ‘The Way We Were’.” The Los Angeles Times, September 18, 1973.
• “Footnotes – Harry Stradling, Jr.” by Jim Udel. Btlnews.com, December 7, 2007. Retrieved September 7, 2020. http://www.btlnews.com/community/footnotes-harry-stradling-jr/
• “Goodbye Extravagance, Hello Practicality” (interview with Adolfo) by Marian Christy. San Mateo Times, September 22, 1972.
• Hamlisch interview by David Budge. Cash Box, March 23, 1974.
• James Woods — Idol Chatter by Brantley Bardin. Premiere Magazine. Retrieved September 17, 2020. http://brantleybardin.com/_articles/idol_james_woods.html
• Joyce Haber column “With the Stars.” Los Angeles Times Service. (Groucho Party). November 7, 1972.
• “Ken [Howard]’s Motto: Right Company Means Work” by Barbara L. Wilson. The Philadelphia Inquirer, April 16, 1972.
• Lang, R., Bogdanovich, P., Hall, B. (2019). Letters from Hollywood: Inside the Private World of Classic American Moviemaking. United States: ABRAMS. 
• Laurents, A. (2001). Original Story by: A Memoir of Broadway and Hollywood. United Kingdom: Applause.
• Laurents, A. (2012). The Rest of the Story: A Life Completed. United States: Applause Theatre & Cinema Books.
• “Local Student Extra in Film” by Pat Childs. The Post Star, September 26, 1972.
• “Looking Back” featurette. The Way We Were Blu-ray, Twilight Time, 2013.
• “Movie Director Tals Shop With Editors” by Sandy Wells. Sunday Gazette Mail, December 10, 1972.
• “Moviemakers Shoot Scenes in Area” by Wayne Bailey. The Times Record, September 30, 1972.
• Ready When You Are, Mr. Coppola, Mr. Spielberg, Mr. Crowe by Jerry Ziesmer. Scarecrow Press, 2000.
• Recollections from Union alumni about The Way We Were. January 31, 2013. Retrieved September 16, 2020. http://www.concordy.com/article/807-u/january-31-2013/recollections-from-union-alumni/5820/ Go
• Take 22: moviemakers on moviemaking by Judith Crist, 1984
• Way I Was, The by Marvin Hamlisch, Gerald Gardiner. C. Scribner’s Sons, 1992.
• “The Way We Were. . .” and Wish We Weren't: A Hollywood Memoir of Blacklisting in America by Marilyn J. Matelski. Studies in Popular Culture, Vol. 24, No. 2 (October 2001), pp. 79-98. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41970383. Accessed 25 Sept. 2020.
• “Will College Boys Cut Hair At $15 Daily From Pic?” Variety, September 6, 1972.

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