In 1973 Barbra Streisand was already one of the world's biggest stars, having conquered Broadway, the Billboard charts, television and movies in her illustrious career. However, Streisand had recently suffered a rare career misfire with the box office disappointment Up the Sandbox (1972). Columbia Pictures producer Ray Stark, who had a long professional relationship with Streisand that dated back to her 1964 Broadway triumph in Funny Girl, wanted a new project for her to star in, preferably a film musical. A new movie would be just the thing, he thought, to give her a career boost.

Stark approached veteran writer Arthur Laurents, who had also directed Streisand in her 1962 Broadway debut I Can Get It For You Wholesale, to come up with a story idea. Laurents immediately nixed the idea of writing a musical. He wanted instead to give his talented old friend Streisand a meaty dramatic role to show off her considerable acting chops.

Laurents began thinking about his old college years at Cornell during the 1930s. His senior year in 1937 was, according to his 2000 memoir Original Story By, "the year of campus peace strikes to end the Spanish Civil War and witch hunts to find undergraduate Reds." He remembered in particular a girl he had gone to school with named Fanny Price who had been a "fiery campus radical" and wondered what had become of her. Price, he said, was "a colorful beginning for the character of my heroine but little more than a beginning. What did she want beyond the overthrow of capitalism?"

Laurents also drew from his intense desire to be a writer during college to help shape the character of Katie Morosky vis-a-vis his old classmate Fanny Price. "Characters rather than plot drive the better stories," he said. "For the movie story I was developing, Fanny's passion to be a writer added a new dimension to her character. The rejection of her essay, contrasting sharply with her belligerence at the Peace Strike, followed by the scene where she's told she is a writer--all that was good, the story was slowly taking shape. Except it really wasn't. And couldn't because I couldn't believe Fanny was a writer. Passion, conviction, desire? Yes; brimming over; she had them all. Talent? No; not for one minute could I believe she had any. No reason, just instinct but I knew I was right. But recognizing what she lacked gave me something better, something basic to her character: resilience. The English instructor could destroy her only temporarily; she would never go under or give up. That rang true and that would shape her story. In the end, Fanny was indestructible, a phoenix, and her name wasn't Fanny it was Katie."

Laurents also made the conscious decision to make Katie Jewish. "She had to be a Jew," he said; "Barbra herself had arrived as one. Not flaunting, not defying, just simply declaring at Hollywood Customs: Here is a Jewish movie star. And Katie could only be a Jew because of her insistence on speaking out, her outrage at injustice, her passion, her values, and because I was a Jew. Besides, it was fresher and high time that the movies, the only industry founded by Jews, had a Jewish heroine."

Laurents mined more material from his early days in Hollywood during the 1940s when he and many of his friends and colleagues had been blacklisted as a result of the McCarthy-era Communist witch hunts. Hollywood films had dealt very little with this dark period in its history, and Laurents was passionate about making it a big part of The Way We Were's story. It became personal for him, especially since it was his first original screenplay. Up until then, his scripts had been adaptations of others' work. "But this was an original based on me, my life in college, during the war and during the Hollywood Witch Hunt," he said. "I had never seen a movie or a play set in that period in which those I knew either lived by fighting for the Ten or died by turning informer. There was no middle ground. I was blacklisted, I had my passport taken away. I believed it wasn't un-American to be a member of the Communist Party, it was un-American to be on the House Un-American Committee. I still believed that and I wanted to say it through a heroine who was a Jewish Communist. In a Hollywood movie."

When Laurents completed a long treatment of The Way We Were, he gave it to producer Ray Stark. "He read the treatment on a plane flying back to California," said Laurents. "The minute he landed, he grabbed a phone in the L.A. airport. He was ecstatic, he loved it. Barbra read it: she loved it. They wanted the screenplay yesterday. My Blackwing pencils couldn't write fast enough on the long yellow legal pads to keep up with the rush of words in my head."

It was Laurents who pushed for Sydney Pollack to be the director on The Way We Were. He had been impressed with Pollack's work on the period 1969 drama They Shoot Horses, Don't They? and lobbied Ray Stark to use him.

Pollack was an easy sell to Barbra Streisand. She particularly liked that Pollack was a trained actor who continued to teach acting as well. "That really got me," she said in a 1999 interview. "I thought that would be a good director to have."

Ray Stark, who had worked with Pollack before on This Property Is Condemned (1966) with Natalie Wood and Robert Redford, agreed to hire him. Pollack, in turn, was happy to comply. He loved the story and found it very touching. "I felt drawn to it," he said.

The next order of business was to find the right actor to play Hubbell opposite Streisand. "Originally we had assumed [Ryan] O'Neal would play Hubbell," said Arthur Laurents, "but by the time the picture was ready to go into production, his affair with Barbra was over, the movie they made together (What's Up, Doc?, 1972) was over, their chemistry was over. Ray wanted a new blond for Barbra: Robert Redford. Sydney Pollack was the key to Redford; they were like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid."

Everyone agreed that Redford would make the perfect Hubbell. There was just one small problem: Redford wanted nothing to do with The Way We Were. "Ray Stark was the man behind it," explained Redford according to Michael Feeney Callan's 2011 biography Robert Redford, "and I told [Pollack] it sounded to me like another Ray Stark ego trip. I didn't even want to read it."

Word was that when Pollack eventually got Redford to read the script, Redford thought it was great--for Barbra Streisand, but not for him. "His reluctance was really because when he initially read it," explained Pollack, "he felt it was a rather weak role. That the guy was essentially a guy with no spine, that he was pretty, and talented but spineless, didn't stand up for anything and was kind of the pin-up girl in reverse. He was the sex object this time and she was the really committed lady."

Pollack began an aggressive campaign to get his friend Redford to agree to do the film. "I spent more time trying to convince Redford to do the picture," said Pollack, "than I've ever spent in my life on anything because I think he was a vital, vital element in this."

The back and forth with Robert Redford went on so long that Ray Stark was beginning to lose patience. He eventually threatened to hire Ryan O'Neal if Redford didn't make up his mind and commit to the picture immediately. At the eleventh hour, with Sydney Pollack's assurance that Hubbell's character would be strengthened, Redford relented and agreed to do The Way We Were.

During the rewrite process on the screenplay, Arthur Laurents often found himself at odds with Pollack, Stark and Redford. Laurents resisted changing how Hubbell was written and wanted to keep the political storyline front and center. Pollack, Stark and Redford, however, wanted to cut some of the politics, beef up the love story and make Hubbell a much stronger presence. Frustrations were running high on both sides. It also didn't help that Laurents felt that Pollack and Redford were an exclusive club that he perceived to be actively shutting him out. Soon Laurents got the news from Pollack that he was fired.

"The hurt was unexpected," said Laurents. "It was very painful, I was surprised how painful. It was only a movie, for God's sake. But of course, it wasn't only a movie. The story was mine; it came from me, the characters came from me, there was some of me in all the people and what happened to them. It hurt and what made it hurt more was why I was fired. Robert Redford was dissatisfied with his part. That much, Sydney told me; why he was dissatisfied he never told me."

One explanation that Pollack later offered regarding Laurents' dismissal had to do with his inability to resolve the political storyline. "It was about a relationship complicated by HUAC, but those vivid subtexts were lost. It's not that he didn't understand HUAC, but he didn't contextualize it properly. There had to be a kind of education curve for the audience, and Arthur was bad at that...I did not alter Laurents' story line 'manipulatively,' as Arthur accused. I did it because I had a hunch Bob and Barbra would be magical together, and I knew I had to engage Bob's intelligence."

Following Laurents' unceremonious departure, Sydney Pollack brought in a total of eleven different writers--among them Alvin Sargent and Dalton Trumbo--to work on getting the screenplay where he and Redford wanted it. The constant stream of rewrites caused production to be delayed time and again, much to everyone's dismay. In the end, having too many cooks in the proverbial kitchen created more problems than it solved. "They hadn't kept track of the rewrites of the rewrites," noted Arthur Laurents. "There were holes in scenes, the story was garbled, Barbra was unhappy, Redford wasn't any happier..."

Eventually, with a heaping dose of swallowed crow, Pollack called Laurents and asked him to come back. "They wanted me to repair the damage, cover it and make sure that what remained to be shot was kept on track," said Laurents. "I was past hurt and anger; I had no feeling of vindication or victory, pyrrhic or otherwise. I cared to the extent that I had pride in my work. I'd take a crack at salvaging and protecting it as much as I could but I would not let myself be hurt again. I would keep reminding myself it was only a movie and movies were not really for writers. I asked for an exorbitant amount of money which I knew I would get; they will always pay during what they won't pay before. I told Ray I would say what I thought and would write what I wanted. If Sydney and Co. wanted something else, I would take the first plane home."

Finally after the rewrites, Robert Redford became much happier with his character. "I give full credit to Sydney," said Redford. "And he did honorably respond to my script concerns...Hubbell isn't a victim anymore. He's his own man. And that strength gave him a weight in the romance that made the final split with Katie dramatic."

by Andrea Passafiume