Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [117]
Redford had one unavoidable obligation: to attend the Cannes screening of Jeremiah Johnson with Pollack. Disappointed with the fate of this movie in America and the implications of Warners’ commitment for the upcoming Candidate release, he was buoyed by the European enthusiasm. “I went for a vacation, but suddenly Sydney was waylaying me with a new script called The Way We Were.”
Redford told Pollack no. “Ray Stark was the man behind it, and I told him it sounded to me like another Ray Stark ego trip. I didn’t even want to read it.”
“I would not let him off the hook,” said Pollack. “I said, ’You’ve got it wrong. This isn’t a fuzzy piece for Barbra Streisand. This is substantial, and—what do you know—it’s political. I pressured and pressured him all summer as soon as we got back from Cannes.” Getting nowhere, Pollack decided to camp out in the foyer of Wildwood in New York. “It was the process of attrition,” said Pollack. “He did it with me on Jeremiah. It was payback time.”
The Way We Were began with Stark, who was looking for a Sound of Music–type vehicle for Streisand. His association with her dated back to Broadway in the early sixties, when he had cast her as Fanny Brice in Funny Girl. In 1968 he produced the movie version, which won Streisand an Academy Award. Stark had, said Pollack, “an ownership thing” about Streisand and, accordingly, envisioned another huge musical film, which he felt she owed him.
Stark commissioned an original script from Arthur Laurents, whose career spanned Lux Radio Theater and work with Hitchcock on Rope. But Laurents objected to the “absurd” notion of another musical and came up with the alternative of a romantic parable based on the lives of some of his personal friends caught up in the HUAC-era blacklisting, particularly Frances Price and Jigee Viertel. Laurents subsequently wrote a 125-page essay featuring Katie Morosky, a Marxist agitator at Cornell in the thirties who falls in love with an apolitical novelist, Hubbell Gardner. Stark liked the idea but hated Laurents’s suggestion for Sydney Pollack as director. Laurents, impressed by They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, persisted and won the support of Streisand, who tried to sway Stark.
“I was under no illusions,” said Pollack. “Barbra was smart. She liked my Sandy Meisner connections because she was ambitious, as an actress, to learn. Same with Jane Fonda on They Shoot Horses. Jane said, ‘Thank you, Sydney, because no one ever treats me as an artist. I am never requested to act. Just to “star in.” ’ Barbra wanted to push out, and she saw with They Shoot Horses that I could handle social issues, that I would give weight to it.” Pollack found it hard to contain his enthusiasm for the story concept. “I called Arthur right at the start and said, ‘You know what you’re proposing here? This is dynamite. This will be the first-ever blacklist movie, the first one to show how it was.’ ”
Pollack’s role was still up in the air when the script was handed to Streisand and her lover, Ryan O’Neal, who was offered the role of Hubbell. Around that time, What’s Up, Doc?, a Streisand-O’Neal comedy, opened and failed and, says Laurents, ended the romance between the stars. Stark and Streisand now began talking about Redford as Hubbell.
Redford, unsurprisingly, supported Pollack. “The truth is,” says Redford, “Stark had no affection for This Property Is Condemned, which he sold to Warners as part of his portfolio, and really dumped. To him, Sydney did not smell good. I pushed. I said, ‘If you want to even consider me for The Way We Were, it has to be Sydney