The one movie Barbra Streisand will always regret never making: “I was pushed out”
Barbra Streisand is by far one of the most famous actresses in the history of Hollywood, living a charmed life with few regrets, but she somehow has not quite earned enough respect for her merits as a filmmaker, which led to her missing out on making one of her dream projects.
The odds were certainly stacked against her; not only were female directors rare in the industry, but the notion of an actor becoming a director had just begun to take off after Robert Redford and Warren Beatty won Oscars for directing Ordinary People and Reds, respectively.
Streisand’s musical drama Yentl was a big enough hit that it took many by surprise that she did not end up earning a ‘Best Director’ nomination at the Academy Awards. Her talents as a filmmaker were further solidified when Prince of Tides became a critical darling and ‘Best Picture’ nominee, but it was during a roundtable interview that she revealed that her true dream project had managed to elude her.
“I was going to do The Normal Heart,” Streisand said, explaining, “I couldn’t raise the money. You know, people think it’s so easy for a so-called big star to raise money and get projects handed to them on a silver platter. It’s just not true. And every movie I’ve loved and been passionate about, like Yentl and The Prince of Tides, I had the worst time getting made. I had to give up a lot of my profits and so forth.”
Larry Kramer’s semi-autobiographical play The Normal Heart details the indignities and suffering inflicted on the LGBTQ+ community during the Aids crisis, and how they had to face government denialism and infrastructural bigotry to raise awareness about the dangers of the autoimmune epidemic.
Although the play had been a hit that helped open the nation’s eyes to the ongoing HIV crisis, a film would have certainly had a more significant impact by reaching larger audiences, and given that Streisand has always been a strong advocate for political and social issues, she made being part of The Normal Heart adaptation one of her biggest priorities. However, since she was unable to find the funds for it, she became attached to direct The Mirror Has Two Faces, a romantic film she co-starred in with Jeff Bridges.
Completing the film meant that Streisand wasn’t able to get further involved with The Normal Heart, despite promising Kramer that she would “oversee” the film to completion, and although she did manage to eventually stage a live reading of the play in 1993, the latter denied her the opportunity to be involved in the film.
“He decided that he didn’t want me to function as a producer,” Streisand said, “I was very hurt by that, by the way. I was kind of pushed out of a project that I worked on since 1985 for nothing”, and this ended up making The Mirror Had Two Faces the last film she would do before initiating an eight-year hiatus from film, which would only later see her return to co-star in the 2004 comedy sequel Meet the Fockers.
Thankfully, The Normal Heart eventually saw the light of day in the form of a 2014 HBO film directed by Ryan Murphy, a member of the LGBTQ+ community, and while Streisand may have had good intentions with her planned adaptation, the HBO version will stand the test of time as the definitive adaptation.
