... Cheryl Gibbons

All Night Long was described by critic Pauline Kael as a “sophisticated slapstick romance.” Originally titled Night People, the film was the brainchild of Belgian-born director Jean-Claude Tramont, who envisioned a story about people in Los Angeles who work the night shift. At that time (June 1978) the movie was with Twentieth Century Fox, and that’s when W.D. Richter was hired to write the screenplay. When the film was put into turnaround at Fox, it was Tramont’s wife, Sue Mengers, who brought it to the producing team of Jerry Weintraub and Leonard Goldberg at Universal. All Night Long would be Tramont’s American directorial debut. At that time in Hollywood, Mengers was a very powerful Superagent who repped Gene Hackman, Ryan O’Neal, Candice Bergen, Faye Dunaway, Bob Fosse and just about any big name in L.A. at the time. Weintraub and Goldberg were television producers (Charlie’s Angeles, Fantasy Island) who were making traction in the movie industry producing modestly priced ($4 million-dollar budgeted) films. 

Then there was Gene Hackman, who was looking for a comeback movie. After filming back-to-back hits (The French Connection, its sequel, and two Superman movies), Hackman took two years off.  All Night Long would be his return to movie screens. “He’d been doing these harsh roles,” said Jean-Claude Tramont, “but he was so funny in that five-minute sequence in Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein, where he played a blind, somewhat fey, monk, I always wondered why nobody used him in comedy.”

Tramont, Mengers, and Hackman wanted Barbra Streisand to play Cheryl.  But Barbra was deeply involved in preproduction on Yentl and passed.  Tramont looked at another Menger’s client, Tuesday Weld, but she passed, too.  After considering Loni Anderson (who said she was “very sad” to lose the role), Tramont went with Lisa Eichhorn, who’d just had a hit with Yanks and Cutter’s Way.

With Eichhorn cast by Tramont and approved by Hackman, it appeared everyone was on the same page as All Night Long began filming April 14, 1980. “Something happened that I really can’t pretend to know what it was,” J.D. Richter said. “Whether it suddenly occurred to [Hackman] that he needed a more famous name opposite him for his comeback? If he came to that realization, he came to it during production.”

About three weeks into production, with only a handful of Eichhorn’s scenes filmed, she was fired. Richter said that Jean-Claude Tramont “was confronted with this horrible realization that Hackman was going to subvert the process because he so resented being opposite Lisa Eichhorn. He would be a pain in the ass to her, do weird little actorish things to her in her closeups, making it hard for her to be at her best. We could tell from the dailies it was not working. He was being cold to her in a weird, subtle way, and none of the Hackman charm was coming through.”

Tramont, unfortunately, told the press that Lisa Eichhorn was let go because “the part was too much of a stretch for Lisa. It’s no reflection on her acting ability.” (Even though that’s exactly what it sounds like.)

Eichhorn was shocked. “I could understand being replaced by Amy Irving or Sissy Spacek,” she confessed, “Or someone else of my own age and nature. But Barbra Streisand? I thought All Night Long was some of my best work.” To add insult to injury, Eichhorn had bleached her brown hair blond for the role because a wig was deemed too unnatural on screen. (Streisand wore a blond wig to play Cheryl). Universal did pay Eichhorn her entire salary of $250,000, however.

Leonard Goldberg, years later, confessed, “They worked well together, and I didn’t see any trouble between them.”

Hackman didn’t betray any of his bad feelings surrounding Eichhorn. “She’s got enough problems, and I’ve been fired myself. I know how it hurts,” said Hackman to columnist Marilyn Beck. 

During that period, Streisand was able to pull together her characterization of Cheryl — her way of talking, walking, and dressing. “The clothes are not expensive,” costume designer Albert Wolsky explained, “but Barbra doesn't care about that. If she loves it, she doesn't care if it costs $2 or $2,000. [Cheryl's] a woman with strawberry-blonde hair that's always too done, fingernails that are always a little too polished, clothes that are always a little too tight, a little too young.”

Streisand told Gene Shalit on The Today Show how she disguised herself to do research. “I went to a country-and-western bar to study the people in the Valley, in California. Put on a blonde wig and ridiculous clothes and many jewels and all this, you know? And, as soon as I walked in the door, I heard someone say, ‘Oh, hi, Barbra!’ I thought, ‘I don't believe this! Now they think I have this lousy taste!’”

Streisand began filming on June 4, 1980.

All Night Long shot in and around the Los Angeles area. Some of the locations were:

• L.A. City Fire Department at Sepulveda and Otsego, in Van Nuys (where Bobby works, and where Cheryl slides down the poll).
• The Ultra Save pharmacy is now a Bristol Farms grocery store in South Pasadena. The old store was gutted and looks nothing like the one that stands there now.
• Across the street is the diner where George and Cheryl first chat.  It’s still there — a place called Shakers.
• The Maryland Hotel that George moves into is still standing at the corner of East Wilson Avenue and North Maryland Avenue, Glendale.
• Bobby and Cheryl’s house (with a concrete wash in their backyard) was filmed in the neighborhood of Bouquet Canyon Road. The film crew added fake brick to the front of the house, then removed it when filming was completed.
• By using reference photographs, the moviemakers rebuilt the interior of the Valencia house at the Universal Studios — one-third larger to accommodate camera equipment. They even photographed the views from the real house and duplicated them large-scale as backdrops at the studio.

“I love Gene Hackman,” Streisand told writer Brian Kellow. “That’s one of the reasons I said yes. But Gene was very hard on Jean-Claude. And I was trying to protect Jean-Claude in a way, because I felt so bad for him. Jean-Claude couldn’t handle somebody like that, you know?”

Kevin Dobson, who was cast as Cheryl’s husband, was thrilled to play opposite Streisand in a few scenes. “I’d once worked 13 days as an extra in Funny Girl. I knew I’d work with her eventually. She’s wonderful to work with. We rehearsed our parts. I’ve had such rapport with her. She has a reputation, but I never saw anything but the utmost professionalism.”

On July 21, 1980, Tramont was forced to pause the filming of All Night Long when the actors’ strike happened. “We had one week left to shoot,” Kevin Dobson told writer Dick Kleiner, “when the strike shut us down. Just one week. I don't think there is any way they can make a finished picture out of what we've already shot—they need that last weeks’ worth of shooting.”

Returning to the L.A. City Fire Department location to wrap Streisand’s scenes, the film finished shooting after the strike was over late October 1980. Kevin Dobson had to regrow his mustached to finish up his scenes.

Even All Night Long’s music score had troubles. The French composer Georges Delerue was hired to score the picture, but Universal rejected his music. “The music was rather whimsical,” said the film’s editor, Marion Rothman. “It gave the film a certain light feeling, in the spirit of artistic rebellion.”  Ira Newborn and Richard Hazard are credited for the film’s soundtrack, with Dave Grusin getting a title card for writing “Cheryl’s Theme.” Curiously, Delerue is credited for conducing the orchestra (as “George” Delerue). Hazard most likely orchestrated the score.

When it came to the marketing of the film, Streisand wasn’t happy with the movie poster. “It was a dark comedy, strange – not ha-ha,” she said. The poster featured “me with my skirts hiked up going down a fire pole, which sold the movie completely wrong. It was really a little European kind of film. So I just felt totally betrayed.” 

Streisand felt “I had no control. They were paying me a lot of money. People always talk about, ‘Oh, she wants control.’ Yeah — you’re damned right I want control. I had no control over that film.”

After some previews, Tramont ended up cutting the film down to 87 minutes. Most of Tramont’s edits were trims — removing the beginning or ending of certain scenes to make the movie’s pace faster. Streisand lost a couple of her scenes at the tail-end of the movie.  In one, she tends to George’s wounds after the fight with the shoplifter.  The longest cut scene takes place in George’s loft, where Cheryl was now living after moving out of Bobby’s house.  George calls her on the phone from the Italian restaurant and says, “I love you.”  Cheryl replies, “Ditto.”

All Night Long hit theaters in March 1981 and was not a success.  Some moviegoers were disappointed that the film, sold on its poster as a zany Streisand comedy like For Pete’s Sake or What’s Up, Doc? was actually a Gene Hackman film, with Streisand in a supporting role … and it was an art movie at that. Reviews were mixed, and All Night Long grossed a little over $4 million on a $14 million budget. 

Screenwriter William Goldman summarized All Night Long in his book about Hollywood, Adventures in the Screen Trade: “So what the studio had done was to take a frail, three-million-dollar film and turn it into a fifteen-million-dollar film that was a total disaster and that, when you add in prints and advertising, probably lost them twenty million dollars. Because what they were doing, in essence, was to pay Barbra Streisand four and a half million dollars not to play Barbra Streisand.”

“‘All Night Long’ is one of the best, most unusual, comedies to come along in years. It has some of the same lyric buoyancy as the great romantic comedies of the ‘30’s: it also has a serious subtext—a melancholia—that’s more eloquent than many a more high-minded film ... After her bombastic, emptily narcissistic performances in movies like ‘A Star is Born’ and ‘The Main Event,’ this new, toned-down Streisand is a blessing. ” 

... Los Angeles Herald-Examiner review

Greg Gorman, now an iconic photographer, was just starting his career back in 1980.  He took some very attractive portraits of Streisand in her All Night Long look.

Gorman spoke to writer Roald Rynning about working with Streisand. “Before photographing Barbra the first time, I was a little nervous,” Gorman explained. “I'd heard she was demanding. I was hired only to take stills from [All Night Long], but I asked to do a special shoot with her. I remember her office called me, asking what other big female stars I had shot. I had to answer I had done none. Nevertheless, one day on the set, Barbra came over. ‘I hear you want to take some pictures of me’, she said. ‘What did you have in mind? What colors do you want to use?’ I answered her straight back. Asked her what colors she liked, and the interrogation was over.”

Gorman continued: “From then on she was terrific. For a photographer it's easy to work with her. She knows her face very well, the angles, the lot. She loves to see my Polaroids and analyze the results. I think a great deal of her success has come from asking questions and being a terrific observer.”

Home Video

When All Night Long aired on network TV in 1984, it is unclear whether CBS incorporated the cut scenes.  When the movie ran on the cable channel WE (Women’s Entertainment), about 10 minutes of the cut scenes were added back in.

Neither of the home video releases included cut scenes or the longer edit of the movie.

Universal released a DVD of All Night Long December 14, 2004. The DVD was an Anamorphic Widescreen 1.85:1 and Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono release running 1 hour and 28 minutes with no bonus materials.

In 2020, Kino Lorber released All Night Long as a dual-layered BD50 Blu-ray disc. Included as bonus items on this disc were:

• Video Interview with Screenwriter W.D. Richter
• 2 Radio Spots
• Optional English Subtitles
• Theatrical Trailer

SOURCES USED ON THIS PAGE:

• Fashion80: Listen. Compiled by members of the Fashion80 staff.  The Los Angeles Times, June 27, 1980.
• Kellow, B. (2016). Can I Go Now? The Life of Sue Mengers, Hollywood's First Superagent. United States: Penguin Publishing Group.
• “Lisa Eichhorn fighting bad luck” by Bob Thomas. Associated Press, November 16, 1980.
• “The House That Starred with Streisand” by Kerry Laufer.
• Today Show interview with Gene Shalit, aired December 5-9, 1983. Retrieved October 14, 2020. https://youtu.be/1UR0bRhb9dM