"For instance," Barbra Streisand explains on disc two of the Director's Extended Edition of Yentl, "the St. Charles Bridge in Prague has never been closed in centuries and the government allowed us to film on this bridge with our extras and we had 500 extras in period costumes. And it was Yentl's coming into the big city -- light bulbs, seeing so many people, carriages, fancy dresses. Imagine this day was raining. And I couldn't bear it. It was like, 'This can't be happening.' And I, as the director, was up on a high building just trying to get a picture of the carriage coming out with my understudy sitting in there. From above -- I was filming from above. And I prayed to God and to my father with every bit of might I had in my being that he or she stop this rain and all of the sudden -- and this is, I swear to God, true -- the sky opened up, the clouds disappeared and the sun came out."
25 years after the film was released, Barbra's put together a deluxe edition of the film which takes you into the rehearsal process, takes you into the director's head, offers you more than you'd ever expect. To promote the film, the first film she directed, Barbra was everywhere back in 1983 from Life magazine (invited into her home with cameras) to a sit down with Barbara Walters. The film premiered in Los Angeles November 16, 1983.
It had a long journey to the screen and Barbra explains some of that in the early minutes of the running commentary throughout the film, "It was very interesting to have a dream of making a movie since 1968 when I first read the short story we started filming in 1982 so it took fourteen years for it to come to the screen to become a reality."
She recalls how in 1968 David Begelman said she couldn't follow Funny Girl "with another Jewish girl . . . That can't be your next film." That was only the first of many, many hurdles Barbra faced. She became a partner in a founder in First Artists (along with Paul Newman and Sidney Poitier) back in 1969 thinking this would allow her to make Yentl. At that point the film wasn't a musical. As the seventies progressed, interest would float in and out on Yentl especially with regards to it being a musical. She had a deal set up with United Artist and then came the big bomb Heaven's Gate and UA was in retreat mode and put Yentl in turnaround.
It took a lot of strength and a lot of belief to steer Yentl to the screen. That's before you add directing into the mix. Jane Fonda, for example, steered The Dollmaker over nearly a decade (originally planned for the movies, it became a telefilm after she won her second Academy Award -- for Coming Home and Fonda would still have to steer it through multiple writers). Actresses doing production work was nothing new and they usually received no credit for it. Katharine Hepburn was the producer steering Woman of the Year and she received no screen credit for it. Jane Fonda would steer Coming Home for her own film company (IPC, later Fonda Films), On Golden Pond, Nine to Five, Rollover and, with Michael Douglas, The China Syndrome. She didn't take a production credit on any of those films.
Yentl would find Barbra earning a script writing credit (written with Jack Rosenthal). But the credit that made many leery was the directing credit. In 1966, Ida Lupino directed The Trouble With Angels. No woman would direct a full length feature film again for a studio until Elaine May. She would be the only woman directing for the studios in the 70s (A New Leaf, The Heartbreak Kid and Mikey and Nicky). Elaine did a wonderful job, ended up with two commercial hits and three critically acclaimed films.
A lot of little guttersnipe males like to claim Elaine 'set back the cause' which is a lie and only demonstrates how much a woman with any power is feared. If Elaine 'set back the cause' other women wouldn't have been offered the opportunity to direct -- after Elaine's three films and during.
Ellen Burstyn steered Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore. She made that film happen and she didn't take a production credit. She should have, as she herself admits, because she did the work and it would have meant residuals on the TV show Alice (based on her film). She didn't just not take a production credit, she turned down the opportunity to direct the film. That 1974 film won Ellen the Academy Award for Best Actress. It's an incredible performance and that's a testament to her and to Martin Scorsese who ended up directing the film. But there will always be a "what might have been different" lingering over the film.
No one offered Barbra the chance to direct. She had to believe in herself and fight for herself and the studio held her over a barrel with an insulting contract and insulting demands and always, even after the filming was completed and Barbra was editing, threatening to take the film away from her.
If Yentl ended up a bad film or even just an okay one, the story of its genesis would still be one worthy of several books because it is the story of an artists passion and a woman's refusal to give in to studios, friends or lovers who told her to forget it, who told her she couldn't do it, that she shouldn't do it.
She did it.
And, as Stan observed Friday, it truly is a classic film.
Yentl is the story of a young woman with a thirst for learning. She wants to study the Talmud but it's forbidden for women to study it. Her father would teach her but, when he dies, Yentl's path appears to be a hastily arranged marriage or working for a woman who has always scorned her and her hunger for knowledge. Yentl finds a third option: Cutting her hair and posing as a man.
The songs exist as interior monologues and can be dramatic or comic. The same can be said of the film and handling those kinds of transitions, keeping the tone even so that neither element appears forced, requires a very steady hand and the director, on her first film, was more than up to the challenge.
Two songs dropped from the film are included in the bonus features: "The Moon and I" (a ballad) and "Several Sins A Day" (an uptempo number). On both, you have Barbra's singing with a simple piano arrangement. In other words, what many fans of the singer would consider manna can be found in the Director's Extended Edition.
Deleted scenes are included as are outtakes. On the outtakes, the one most helped by them is Ian Sears who is memorable in his brief part at the beginning of the movie and watching various takes of his scene, you realize how much care was taken in shaping even the most minor characters in the film.
The film co-stars Amy Irving and Mandy Patinkin, both of whom give their strongest performances on film (Irving would earn a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award nomination for her performance). Barbra's performance is steady and sure and if it's less noted that's due to the fact that who can stop bragging over that directing.
"Even though this film is a fairy tale, there's a reality to the fairy tale quality," she states in the commentary and that really is true. The natural lighting she favored for the film helps there, the colors used onscreen does as well. The way the film is shot in these fluid takes (which are, as Barbra notes, melodic) adds in as do the visuals -- including the motif of bodies of water.
Yentl's a film directed by an artist and it is involving and touching and gripping and uplifting and, yes, it is a film classic.