The Way Things Were

Most of the book is about how the movie was made-the fights, egos, rewrites, scenes left on the cutting room floor-but what it also portrays is the way that Jews, and later gay people, came out to the American public. In Hofler's view, The Way We Were was not only about a Jewish activist (Barbr...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Gay & lesbian review worldwide 2023, Vol.30 (3), p.15-17
Main Author: Holleran, Andrew
Format: Review
Language:English
Subjects:
Brice, Fanny (Fannie Borach) (1891-1951)
Jewish people
LGBTQ people
Motion picture directors & producers
Motion pictures
Redford, Robert
Roth, Philip
Streisand, Barbra
Yiddish language
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Summary:Most of the book is about how the movie was made-the fights, egos, rewrites, scenes left on the cutting room floor-but what it also portrays is the way that Jews, and later gay people, came out to the American public. In Hofler's view, The Way We Were was not only about a Jewish activist (Barbra Streisand) falling in love with a blond gentile jock (Robert Redford), but also the fictionalized story of the relationship between the movie's screenwriter Arthur Laurents (both gay and Jewish) and a man named Tom Hatcher, the real-life shegetz in Laurents' life and the inspiration for the couple in the film. The 1960s may have been an era less sensitive to language than our own, but it's still a shock to read that a critic at the New York Journal-American compared Streisand's appearance to that of "an amiable ant-eater" or that Variety suggested "perhaps a little corrective schnoz job might be an element to be considered," or that Richard Nixon (on the White House tapes) opined: "That Barbra Streisand is so obnoxious. Even the film version of The Diary of Anne Frank cast the Irish American actress Millie Perkins as the lead, with her love interest being the perennial male ingénue Richard Beymer."
ISSN:1532-1118