"A Star Is Born"
Reborn In TV Editing

(Ed's. Note: The following article contains a number of uses of strong language. Parental discretion advised.)

When the DGA won the right for the director of feature films sold to TV to consult on re-editing for TV, they won a mixed blessing.

The 1975 A Star Is Born, starring Barbra Streisand, began as a hard-edged look at the rock-and-roll scene of the time, written by John Gregory Dunne and his wife Joan Dideon. By the time it had sold to a studio (Warner Brothers, who had made the 1957 version with Judy Garland), it became a vehicle for Barbra, taking a sharp turn back to the 1936 romance made by George Cukor, written by William Wellman, Dorothy Parker and Alan Campbell.

But through all the subsequent rewrites and changes of directors on the 1975 version one thing was constant: a conviction on all our parts that contemporary (1970-80) audiences would only believe in the story if it remained authentic and faithful to the world in which it was played. That was the Dionysian rock-and-roll backstage full of open sex, foul language and drugs of the time.

The story followed the 1936 scenario fairly closely; the main difference being in the language and the mores: in 1975 we watched roadies spooning cocaine into a star's nostrils; grass was combed, rolled and smoked; beer and tequila flowed, to dialogue that was not so much punctuated as orchestrated in four-letter words, while the scenes played on as though none of this was happening. It was not a story about drug-and sex--obsessed people, it was just that as they went on with their troubled lives they happened to express themselves in foul language and drug themselves the way heroes and heroines quipped and wisecracked, smoked English ovals and drank very dry martinis in the romantic dramas of the thirties.

Whatever we have come to believe about the late sixties and early seventies drug scene now, we shouldn't forget that at the time there was that sort of innocence to it, and an unawareness of consequences.

The Star is Born story always seems to work, every time it's told, and our judgment about updating the tone seemed correct. The music was middle-of-the-road, and the biggest hit was Evergreen, a simple love song, full of romantic yearning. The stone rock-and-roll press was hard on Barbra Streisand singing soft rock, and m.o.r- presented as rock, but the young audience came, together with Barbra's audience, and they brought with them the rest. The movie was an immediate overnight commercial success. Even net profit participation paid checks within six weeks of the opening.

Three years later, when the movie was sold to ABC-TV for a record amount, I was asked by Barbra and Jon Peters to invoke my "right of consultation" as the director and see the movie through to a TV version. Absolutely.

The first thing that appeared from ABC Standards & Practices was a list of 522 cuts for foul language, obscenity, indecent exposure and various violations of network practices and policies. That was a lot of "fucks" and "shits"!

I called for a meeting with network Standards and Practices. One was convened. I walked into a room with ten people in it, all of the men wearing ties, and all the women wearing skirts. Not knowing who was who, I asked: "Maybe we could introduce ourselves, name and specialty. Who's in charge of shits and who's responsible for tits"? Nobody seemed to think that was going to cut any ice. Pretty soon I discovered it didn't.

The vast majority of the cuts being asked for were four-letter words that required only sound cuts, and were relatively easy to do, a trim of the word "God" from "God damn" here, or an offstage car honk there to cover the word "fuck". But by then the actors were scattered to the wind, and there was no way to call them back to dub a substitute word for "cocksucker".

I could tell you the thesaurus of alternatives we wound up composing for such situations, but I leave it to you to torture your nights with possible substitutes for common vulgar speech that crawled like maggots all through the body of our movie; even the word "butt" was unacceptable, as used in "That burns my butt." One suggestion, I have forgotten whether from a tie or a skirt, was "pratt", resulting in "That burns my pratt." I didn't use it; I guess we just cut the line. The main thing I couldn't understand was how we had come to use a word like "butt" in the first place, when "asshole" was the only thing to say.

The ABC people had hearing problems; they could hear a gnat sneeze in a hurricane. A high point in the movie was a rock concert I staged in the Phoenix Sun Bowl. Jon Peters promoted an all-day concert produced by the late Bill Graham, that sold 60,000 tickets, filling the stadium. Jon organized the Goodyear blimp to hover and maneuver over the crowd, and I had a couple of helicopters flying around most of the day. At intervals we rushed out on stage and shot scenes with Barbra and Kris Kristofferson playing against the background of this gigantic crowd, with music at rock-and-roll levels and the aircraft thundering in the sky.

Somewhere in this uproar, three old ladies in the ABC office in New York distinctly heard someone in the far background (about an eighth-of-a-mile away) scream "Fuck you, Barbra!"

We couldn't hear it. We took it to Todd-AO, the best dubbing room in town at the time, and played it at the fullest volume we could stand, rebalancing, trimming, every trick we could think of, and still could not hear it. They gave us frame numbers; we still couldn't hear it.

We tried an old trick: re-recording the crowd sound backward and dubbed it over the original, producing a completely garbled track that still sounds like a general roaring crowd. The ladies could still hear the offensive word.

Finally, I added an ear-splitting amplifier feed-back squeal over the offending frames. The answer came back: they could still hear it, but they guessed it was lost in all the confusion. They were kind enough to add that they really liked seeing the film all those times.

The hard part was cutting picture when we couldn't trick our way through the sound track. Sometimes it meant a painful loss of an elegant cut or cutting a meaningful moment, and it was then I began to think seriously about what we had done.

The fact of the matter is the movie was a romantic drama, not a documentary; it was not going to open people's eyes to the sins of a new world aborning in the late dawn of the age of Aquarius, it was a vehicle for a singing star and great romantic figure of our time to play her part, singing her kind of heartache and yearning and occasional thrilling triumph in the arena of love.

There was also the matter of the complicating mingling of the identity of men and women in love that has always held this story together -- the question of the extent to which women live their lives through a surrogate male or through their own accomplishments.

The kind of language they spoke, or the nature of the stimulants or tranquilizers they used was a trivial side issue. What connected and moved the audience was something far beyond that. And for an older and more conservative audience the words, the drugs, and what mild sex there was were barriers between them and the underlying story.

For the younger and hipper audience this was not important: the offensive words and activities were part of the ocean they swam in, like fish -- they simply didn't notice it. And I came to wonder, if they wouldn't notice it, whether it made any difference to them if it was there or not.

I came to wonder also, if a significant part of the audience, the older blue-rinsed ladies of Miami and the Sinatra crowd, the middle-of-the-road movie audience for which this movie was really made, weren't turned away unnecessarily by our insistence upon an appearance of reality to a world we really were not portraying. I wondered if maybe we didn't need the coke and the language at all, and if it might have reached an even bigger audience without it.

I began to wonder if maybe the ties and skirts were right. But then I thought -- Naaah!

On the other hand I got to add back twelve minutes of scenes I loved that we'd had to cut from the theatrical version. And trim out some junk I had come to hate. On balance, maybe the TV version is better. I wish we could show it in a theater.