The Way They Were by Robert Hofler

Author:Robert Hofler [Hofler, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Citadel Press
Published: 2022-10-24T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 12

The Outcast and the Songwriters

Ray Stark, for his part, continued to fret about the Katie character’s arc in the film. He worried so much that he did the unthinkable. He brought back Arthur Laurents to the production. No one had been a greater defender of Katie. No one understood the character better. Maybe Stark knew that Laurents was Katie. Certainly, the script repairs that Stark wanted from the suddenly former outcast had little or nothing to do with Hubbell.

Back on board in early November, Laurents delivered a rewrite of a scene for Viveca Lindfors and Barbra Streisand, one in which the Paula Reisner character reveals she has been blacklisted. He also delivered new lines for Streisand and others in the projection room scene when Hubbell’s movie receives lukewarm reviews from the assembled players. “So true to life,” says Reisner, paying a backhanded compliment. Hubbell later calls her a “dyke,” a bigoted nod to the real-life Salka Viertel. Laurents also wrote two new scenes at the beach, ones where Katie, Paula, and others complain about HUAC in between games of volleyball. The new beach scenes were shot, but only one ended up in the finished film.

Stark remained torn. He didn’t “understand” the Katie character, so he kept asking for new scenes that would explain her. Then again, Columbia Pictures was a movie studio on the edge of bankruptcy, and its president, Stanley Schneider, had already gotten into screaming matches with Stark about The Way We Were turning into a bloated mess.

“Columbia was going under at the time,” Pollack recalled. “They hadn’t had a big hit in years, and [our] picture was going over budget.”

Stark wanted new scenes, which cost money, took time and, ultimately, did nothing to help explain Katie—or, at least, they did not explain Katie to Stark’s satisfaction. In a flurry of memos, the producer defended himself by explaining to Schneider that, while he had made Columbia his home base, starting with Funny Girl, he had delivered all those films “on budget.” He also stressed that none of those films harbored “the problems” of The Way We Were, and he placed blame on Redford’s “personal reasons” (the rabies shots) and “bad weather” for pushing back production, which lost them Williams College and El Morocco nightclub. Somehow the producer had mixed up “bad weather” with script problems.

In his fights with the Columbia president, Stark purposefully did not blame Pollack. He saved those brutal attacks for Pollack himself. Among the director’s greatest crimes, in Stark’s opinion, was his coddling of the movie’s male star.

Pollack refused to take the Redford bait; instead, he pointed to a more basic problem for the film’s difficulties. He had originally agreed to shoot the movie in fifty-eight days, but even before the cameras rolled, Stark cut out six of those days. Pollack called it a “bullshit practice” to deceive people like Schneider and other executives at Columbia into thinking they were making a far less complicated movie, hence, a far less expensive movie. Even on

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