The Way We Made The Way We Were

It was the producer Ray Stark who initially asked Arthur Laurents to write something for me. Arthur told me that Ray was impressed with the huge success of The Sound of Music and The Miracle Worker and thought, Why not combine the two and have me teaching handicapped children in Brooklyn to sing?

- By Barbra Streisand

Arthur wasn’t enthusiastic about that idea, to say the least, but he came over to discuss it with me. I liked it even less, but as we were talking, the subject turned to politics. Arthur knew I was politically active, and as I was ranting about the state of the world, suddenly he was reminded of a very smart girl he knew in college who came from a lower-middle-class family and was president of the Young Communist League. Her name was Fanny Price… funny coincidence, or was it a sign? He said, “She was intense, passionate, and Jewish, like you.”

Arthur went home and wrote a treatment, and as soon as I read it, I thought, Holy mackerel! This is fantastic. I absolutely fell in love with the story. This girl, Katie Morosky, touched me profoundly. She was passionate about life and concerned about the world. I understood her completely. I knew why she fell in love with Hubbell Gardiner, the good-looking jock who was also a gifted writer.

I read somewhere that David Lean said if you had five great scenes in a script, it could make a great movie. Well, there were definitely five in The Way We Were, so I called Ray, very excited, and said, “I love it!”

I think Arthur was the one who suggested Sydney Pollack to direct. He told me that Sydney was an actor himself and had taught acting in New York at the Neighborhood Playhouse. I thought, Great…he’ll be sensitive to the actor’s process. I had seen his movies The Slender Thread and They Shoot Horses, Don’t

They?, which showed he could handle serious issues. So I encouraged Ray to hire him.

And I had a particular actor in mind for Hubbell…Robert Redford…who happened to be good friends with Sydney, so everything seemed to be falling into place.