A Star is Born (1976)

A Star is Born , the soundtrack album to Barbra’s 1976 film, was also her third number one album (after People and The Way We Were ), with monumental sales. The album was certified Platinum (with over one million records sold) by the RIAA merely two months after it was released to stores. Streisand was the darling of Top 40 Pop radio, with her  song “Evergreen” selling millions, too. To date, the album has sold over four million copies and is considered the first “mega-soundtrack album,” predating Grease and Saturday Night Fever a few years later. 

Streisand’s big remake of A Star is Born was set to hit theaters around Christmas 1976. Jon Peters, the film’s producer and Barbra’s beau, designed a brilliant publicity campaign in which audiences would see Scavullo’s iconic photography on the film’s posters and advertising, hear “Evergreen” on the radio, buy a paperback novelization of the film, and …. purchase the movie’s soundtrack album, which was released nearly a month before the movie hit theaters by Columbia Records. According toVariety , “the campaign had Columbia concentrate its $400,000 budget over a two-week period with Warners-controlled ads that also plugged the paperback and film.”

The soundtrack to A Star is Born featured the film’s stars Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson singing the tunes of a variety of amazing songwriters: Rupert Holmes, Paul Williams, Kenny Ascher, Kenny Loggins, the Bergmans, and Donna Weiss. 

To help promote the movie even more, Barbra’s big single from the album was clumsily (but cannily) titled not just “Evergreen” but “Love Theme from ‘A Star is Born’ (Evergreen).” Streisand wrote the melody for the song on guitar, and Paul Williams provided the lyrics; both won Grammy and Oscar awards for the song. “She sat down and played on a guitar, the melody for ‘Evergreen’ that she’d written,” Williams told writer Carl Wiser. “It was just such a beautiful melody. I said, ‘There’s your love song. There’s the big love song.’ I asked her for the melody. She put it on tape for me, and I took it home. I actually wrote that as the last thing, which I think bothered her. But all the Kris Kristofferson stuff was the first thing up on the shoot schedule. So I wrote the songs for Kris first.”

Not only was the Warner Brothers film a huge hit for Streisand and Peters, the soundtrack was a hot seller, too, even at Columbia’s $8.98 list price – a new high for a single LP.