Cameras rolled on February 2, 1976 at the Handlebar in Pasadena. Streisand, Fields and King sang “Queen Bee” live for the cameras. Streisand recalled that “it was so freeing to sing live with a recording truck outside” which captured all of the live audio. “My first three musical films were done in the old-fashioned way … recording the music months in advance and lipsyncing. But I’m not very good at that and I wanted to be in the moment … so I sang live!”

Phil Ramone recalled that the “Queen Bee” scene was technically challenging. “All of the action — including a fight scene between John Norman Howard and a club patron — occurred in real time, meaning it wasn’t patched together from multiple takes,” he said. “Recording it live as it happened — Barbra singing while two men argued and fought in front of her — was surreal.”

Ramone confirmed, though, that “when the studio bosses saw the footage the next day, they applauded,” he said. “While they marveled at our success and approved the concept of recording live-to-film, they insisted that Barbra prerecord everything too – for insurance.”

Streisand’s A Star Is Born earned its 1970’s verisimilitude by filming most of its scenes on real-life locations around Los Angeles.

LOCATIONS:

• The exterior of Esther’s apartment was filmed at 6909 Bonita Terrace in Hollywood (North of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre).
• The Grammy Awards location was the Biltmore Hotel, Los Angeles.
• Western Recorders Studio – Where John meets Esther, who is recording a cat commercial.
• The Handlebar in Pasadena (Now T. Boyles Tavern) – Oreos opening scenes
• Arizona State University Grady Gammage Auditorium, Phoenix – Indian fundraiser concert and “With One More Look At You.”
• Sonoita, Arizona (also Empire Ranch) – Jon and Esther’s desert ranch home. Production designer Polly Platt tore down the ranch house already there (left over from the 1970 film, Monte Walsh) and built a new split-level adobe house with stained glass window at a cost to the production of $80,000.

The largest location for A Star Is Born was the daylong concert filmed in Arizona at Sun Devil Stadium.  Occurring on March 20, 1976, the concert was put together by rock impresario, Bill Graham. “At first,” Graham said, “they wanted a crowd of 35,000 to act like a rock-concert audience for six straight hours so they could shoot whenever they were ready. But we changed them around a bit – now we’ll start the music at 8 with one group playing about an hour. Then they can film crowd scenes, get their next sequences planned, and we’ll have the second band ready to play at 10.”

Nearly 50,000 people attended.  In a statement, Jon Peters explained: “Although this full day event is being arranged to draw crowds for the filming of our film, the musical end of it won’t be just a few songs by each group, but a complete concert headlining Peter Frampton, Santana, Montrose, Graham Central Station, the L.A. Jets and a lot of surprises. We’re charging a nominal $3.50 admission to offset part of the cost of the day but giving everybody attending an event worth two or three times that much.”

In between rock bands, Streisand, Kristofferson, and Frank Pierson filmed scenes for the movie. Streisand herself yelled out directions to the huge crowd so the cameras could film their reactions.  “In our movie, we talk dirty. We smoke grass,” Barbra told them. As a reward, Streisand sang some of her hits (to prerecorded tracks) and bewitched the audience.

38-year-old Kris Kristofferson drank heavily during the filming of the movie. He told Woman magazine, “I don’t know how I didn’t kill myself driving home everyday stone drunk. We started at 6 a.m. and I’d have a pint of tequila first. By the end of the day, I’d usually got through a bottle and a half and maybe a case or two of beer … and I thought I was doing fine.”

Kristofferson’s doctor confirmed his liver “was the size of a football and that if I didn’t quit, I was gonna kill myself.” On Geraldo Rivera’s interview show, Kristofferson admitted that when he saw the film, “I realized it was my life I was seeing on the screen, a rock ‘n roll star ruining himself drinking. I quit in September and I’ll never touch it again.”

Production wrapped in April 1976. Frank Pierson was permitted six weeks to finish his director’s cut, which was screened for producers Peters and Streisand. “She couldn’t wait until [Pierson] finished his six weeks,” said editor Peter Zinner.  Streisand, Peters and Zinner then retreated to an editing studio they had installed at their Malibu ranch.  Kristofferson was called in to film three more scenes that would round out his character’s story — and Streisand directed the scenes. “And I tell you she was terrific!” he said. “She really knows what she is doing.”

One Warner Bros. executive gave a quote to “Tower Ticker” columnist Aaron Gold about the editing. “What director Frank Pierson delivered to us six months ago was unreleasable,” he said anonymously. “Barbra worked 18 hours a day re-editing it and adding footage from a documentary crew that covered the big concert and press conference in Tempe. And she has done a brilliant job.”

Barbra Streisand and Jon Peters were able to ‘sneak preview’ the movie several times to gauge audience reaction. In Burbank, then twice in Phoenix, audience reaction was extremely positive.  Frank Pierson and Warner executives traveled to Phoenix to see Streisand’s cut of the film and Army Archerd reported he liked what Streisand had put together.

“‘A Star Is Born’ was difficult; it was physically and emotionally exhausting; it took three years of my life; but it was worth it. The reward was the work: making it, editing, dubbing, scoring. It was something I had to prove.”

.... Barbra Streisand

Live Sound on the Set & Dolby

A Star Is Born was also the first movie released to theaters with a Dolby Stereo soundtrack. MixOnline summarized the technical achievement: “The format used phase matrixing to store four channels (left/right/center/surround) onto a 2-channel format, which, in this case, was two closely spaced optical tracks on a standard 35mm film.”  The format also worked in theaters with mono projectors, too (no need to ship a mono film).  Also, the studio did not see a major increase in the cost of the film prints. When 1977 arrived, Dolby Stereo became a selling point for big movies like Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Ioan Allen (Vice President of Dolby Laboratories) stated: “We had a couple of meetings with [Streisand] in Hollywood. She would only do it, or her people would only do it, if there was a surround channel on it, because they thought the surround and crowd noise were really important.”

Phil Ramone stated, “One of the things I’m most proud of is that A Star Is Born was the first magnetic Dolby surround sound film, and that it premiered in true surround sound in fifteen theaters. The late dialogue mixer Buzz Knudson and I personally tested the print and equalized the first five theaters so they would sound like the mixing theater at Todd-AO.

Pierson’s Betrayal

Star’s director, Frank Pierson, wrote a damning article about the film in which he trashed Streisand and Peters.  “My Battles with Barbra and Jon” was released in two magazines (New York and New West) one month before the film came out! The article was a character assassination of Streisand and Peters, and Pierson definitely talked “out of school” — revealing private information about the couple and the disagreements on set for everyone to read.  To this day, the article disturbs and hurts Streisand.

“Pierson crucified an unfinished film,” Streisand told Playboy. “Before the article came out, I said to him, ‘Don’t hurt this film, Frank. We’ve all worked too hard on it. Let it live on its own, let it be born. Give it a fair chance.”

In truth, the article did poison many of the reviews of A Star Is Born. Instead of criticizing the actual film, critics took pot shots at Streisand’s appearance and made jokes about Jon Peters being a “former hairdresser.”

Streisand found out about the article when a friend sent her the copy Pierson was pitching to magazines. “I confronted him with it, and he denied it, saying he only intended it for his friends to read,” Streisand said. “I can’t imagine how anyone could be so destructive to a film as well as to himself. He broke the confidentiality of the relationship between a director and an actor, which is a very intimate, private relationship that has a great deal of honor attached to it. I was deeply hurt. He tried to make me look ridiculous and unprofessional.”

Pauline Kael, reviewing the film for The New Yorker, astutely wrote: “[Pierson] rigged things both ways for himself: if the picture we got to see was anything less than great, it would be because Streisand and Peters had wrecked it in the final cut, while if it was great, we had him to congratulate.”  She pointed out that Pierson’s only other directing credit, The Looking Glass War, had “no controlling dramatic intelligence at work—and it didn’t involve the audience. Neither does A Star Is Born, and its faults can’t all be laid to Streisand’s interference or to her and Peters’ editing.”

Why didn’t Streisand — the film’s executive producer — fire Frank Pierson?  The answer has layers of sexism that still echo today. “I have been accused of being ruthless,” Streisand stated. “And, in fact, it’s my problem that I’m not ruthless enough. I should have fired him.”

One interesting point that should be brought up is the Directors Guild of America’s “Eastwood Rule,” which was established in 1976 when Clint Eastwood was filming The Outlaw Josey Wales with director Philip Kaufman (the same year of A Star Is Born, by the way). Eastwood was unhappy with Kaufman’s slow setups and conspired with his producer to fire Kaufman; then Eastwood took over directing duties.  So, the DGA created a union law to protect its film directors that stipulated that no actor, producer or other person engaged in a film may fire the film’s director and assume his duties and title.  This, of course, begs the question why Streisand has a reputation as a diva and perfectionist, and Eastwood’s onset behavior is barely acknowledged?

Streisand didn’t hold back when Geraldo Rivera interviewed her on ABC: “[Pierson’s] article was so immoral, so unethical, so unprofessional, so undignified, with no integrity, totally dishonest, injurious. If anyone believes it, without examining who that person is, that could write such a thing to try to put a black cloud over a piece of work before it’s even released: that’s most important indication of who that person was that wrote that article.”

The truth is that even though the critics were mostly harsh with Streisand’s A Star Is Born, the moviegoing public loved it — it’s Streisand’s highest grossing film (not counting the ensemble Fockers movie).

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