Shooting and firing

HOLLYWOOD is abuzz with horror stories from the set of the new Barbra Streisand movie, The Mirror Has Two Faces, produced and directed by Streisand, who also takes the leading role. Entertainment Weekly (EW) reports that some of the production staff have mounted a "wall of crosses" in the film's Manhattan offices - "a place the director producer star rarely visited", it notes.

The crosses bear the names of the 15 people who either quit or were fired from the production before it finally finished shooting on March 27th. Dudley Moore was the first to go, back in early November when Streisand sacked him "after he failed to deliver his lines with Arthur-esque bounce". Moore was replaced by George Segal.

"But," says EW, "that was just a warm up to the full scale house cleaning in December", when the film's highly experienced director of photography, Dante Spinotti (who lit Heat and Interview With the Vampire) got the push, along with film editor Alan Heim, several members of Spinotti's crew and a few lighting technicians and production assistants.

The film took all of five months to shoot although TriStar Films, the studio behind the movie, blames the delays on the record snowfall in New York in January. Richard LaGravenese, who wrote the screenplay, says that speed was not of the utmost importance to Streisand, that she had a billion details inside her head.

Among the things she fretted over, according to EW, were the nuances of her underwear and "whether the trees would have falling leaves". Former TriStar chairman Mike Medavoy, who has a financial interest in the film, believes that a stress free shoot is what you give up to work with Streisand, and Pierce Brosnan, one of her co stars in the film defends her. "I've seen male directors throw tantrums and nobody says a peep," he said. "If this picture makes big bucks, no one's going to give a flying whatever about how it got made."

Meanwhile, playwright Larry Kramer has been complaining that he has been waiting for a decade for Streisand to film his play, The Normal Heart, to which she owns the film rights. "This woman has had this play since 1986 and my health is deteriorating, and I would very much like to see the movie made while I'm alive," he told Variety this week. "She was all set to make Normal Heart, about a worldwide plague, and at the last minute she switches to a film about a woman who gets a face lift."