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As mentioned last week, I continue reading Barbra Streisand‘s memoir My Name is Barbra. To be honest, I’m skimming a lot of the book; while Streisand is a fascinating person, the book is 950+ pages. I do enjoy learning more about her intuitive approach to music and film-making. For example, when rehearsing for the 1962 Broadway production I Can Get It for You Wholesale, Streisand put herself in the mind of her character, the receptionist Miss Marmelstein. Streisand wanted to perform Miss Marmelstein’s big musical number seated in her office chair, using her feet to move around the stage. It made sense to her that this is how the character would behave. The director, Arthur Laurents, was dead-set against Streisand’s plan. When the song continued to fall flat during dress rehearsals, Streisand was finally given approval to use her own approach. “On opening night I did it my way,” she writes, “and thank God the song stopped the show.” Rather than complimenting his cast member, Laurents became even more hostile toward Streisand, even telling her before the play opened in New York City, “You’re never going to make it, you know.”

Thank heavens he was wrong.

Streisand’s struggles in the completion of A Star is Born (1976) and Yentl (1983) are equally fascinating and fully explain her desire for creative control over her projects and why she decided to direct Yentl herself.

I also watched Woody Allen‘s Rifkin’s Festival (2020) this week and…yikes. (I understand Allen is a problematic figure. Claire Dederer‘s book Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma explores this subject a lot more effectively than I can.) The film seemed promising at first. Gina Gershon and Wallace Shawn play the lead roles, a press agent (Gershon) and film-critic-aspiring-novelist (Shawn) at a crossroads in their careers and marriage. Shawn’s character finds himself at odds with with one of his wife’s clients, a young whipper-snapper director with delusions of grandeur. Sadly, the movie soon descends into a silly plot of Shawn’s character hitting on a young female physician because she is in an unhappy marriage and need’s the older man’s guidance; this premise was old decades ago, it certainly doesn’t work now. So skip Rifkin’s Festival and use that extra time to read My Name is Barbra.