With Streisand attached to the film, Mark Rydell asked writer Darryl Ponicsan (Taps, Vision Quest) to take a go at the script.  At the same time (and unbeknownst to Ponicsan), Rydell engaged his friend Alvin Sargent (Ordinary People, Paper Moon) to write it, too.

Darryl Ponicsan continues the story: “I met with Barbra Streisand and fell in love, though I was expecting to hate her, by reputation. The entire situation on Nuts was just that – nuts – and it was unique. I remember having lunch with [Sydney] Pollack at his office on the lot. He made us salads in his little kitchen, and I told him I was going to go do Nuts. He casually warned me. He said, ‘be careful.’ I had no clue what he meant, nor did I press him. But it turns out that Alvin Sargent and I had both been commissioned to write competing drafts of the same script, something that’s a big no-no with the [Screen Writers Guild]. I’m friends with Alvin, and neither of us had any clue. When we found this out, naturally, we were very upset. And we wanted off the project.”

Streisand explained that “I suggested that they work together on the script because they both have very different qualities. Alvin is very gentle and can explore his feminine side even though he’s very masculine. And Darryl is a tougher guy, a tough-talking, tough guy. A wonderful guy. He wrote the movie Cinderella Liberty. They were both great guys. I had a vision of it in my head to use these flashbacks, to try to explain some of her life to the audience.” Streisand enjoyed the writing process. “I had the most creative time I’ve ever had working with writers [on Nuts],” Barbra stated. “We delivered the script in seven days because we had great food. We sat around my dining room table for one week and delivered the script to Warner Brothers, so I was very pleased with that process.”

Ponicsan agreed. “Barbra requested that both Alvin and I spend a week alone with her in her Beverly Hills home, without Rydell, who, naturally, was very upset about being excluded. Streisand has a nun-like devotion to whatever she undertakes. Works like a mule. Good sense of humor and feeds you well. I remember having some very intense conversations with her about the prices she’d be charging for her sexual favors in the film, as she played a prostitute. She really got into it.”

Streisand was attracted to several of the themes in Nuts. “I had a miserable relationship with my stepfather. That's another thing that drew me to this project. I was abused as well — not sexually but emotionally. I don't think I had a conversation with that man.”

Nuts — once a small-budgeted film starring Debra Winger — was now a major studio film with a budget a little over $20 million (with Streisand receiving $5 million to star and $50,000 as a producer’s fee). 

Next, Warner Brothers let Mark Rydell go, paying him his entire salary. “She tried to become the mediator between Mark and Warner Bros.,” said Marty Erlichman, Barbra’s manager. “When Barbra found that there was no way she was going to convince Warners to take him back … she said she would like an actor’s director. And they selected Marty Ritt.”

Streisand considered directing the movie herself, but not for long.  “I always wanted to work with Marty, and asked him if he’d like to direct it,” she said in an interview with Gene Shalit. “He read the script and he liked it, and he came to see me, came over for lunch, and he said to me, ‘I’d like to do this movie. There’s only one thing. I don’t know if you could play the part.’ And I said, ‘What?’ And I thought, He said the right thing. He got my hair up, you know, my challenging bones ready, and I said, ‘Good. You’re the one. It’s a match.’”

Director Martin Ritt (Norma Rae, The Great White Hope) joined the film around April 1986.



Rydell, who sounds a tad bitter about his time on Nuts (and possibly constrained by a non-disclosure), stated, “Debra, with whom I worked on the material, was absolutely spectacular,” he said.  “[Streisand] is a very strong-willed, extremely gifted woman,” said Rydell, “whose career has been characterized by a kind of monomania and self-absorption.”

Casting Levinsky

With Martin Ritt attached as director, and a screenplay that the studio, Streisand, and Ritt agreed upon (featuring flashbacks about Claudia's early life), they proceeded to cast the film.

Richard Dreyfuss was the frontrunner for the role of Aaron Levinsky. Streisand had seen Dreyfuss in The Normal Heart at Las Palmas Theatre in Hollywood and was very impressed with his performance.  Those negotiations were stymied, however, when Dreyfuss opted out of Nuts to make Tin Men with Barry Levinson. 

Enter Dustin Hoffman.

Martin Ritt told columnist Marilyn Beck that Dustin Hoffman was “absolutely interested,” Ritt said. “Warner’s is very interested in him.” Streisand and Dustin Hoffman were spotted eating dinner in New York at Wilkinson’s, discussing his role in Nuts. Ultimately, Hoffman declined the role, some say because Warner’s wasn’t willing to pay his fee

.

Martin Ritt and Streisand decided to delay production of Nuts until October 1986 to allow Dreyfuss to complete filming Tin Men. “Richard Dreyfuss is a wonderful actor and he’s a very smart, disciplined person—and yet open to the moment,” Barbra said. “So I thought he was great as the attorney.” 

The casting of Levinsky could have gone a different, interesting way, though. Barbra’s ex-husband, Elliott Gould, stated recently, “Barbra once called me when she was casting Nuts. First, we thought Mark Rydell was going to direct the picture with Debra Winger, and he had talked to me about playing her lawyer. But he couldn’t do it, so then Barbra decided to do it, and then Richard Dreyfuss wound up playing the lawyer. Barbra called me when she was doing the film and asked, ‘If you had a choice, what would you do? Your television series or my movie?’ My television series at that point and moment was a series for CBS called Together We Stand with Dee Wallace Stone and the whole family. I said, ‘I don’t have a choice, I’m committed to the television series, I’m in New York to meet the affiliates. We had done a pilot, they picked us up and they want us to go on air.’ And then she said, ‘But if you had a choice?’ I said, ‘Okay, I’ll talk with you later.’ Richard Dreyfuss, who wound up doing it, was excellent and terrific.”

“For every movie I like to do a lot of research,” Streisand said in the Nuts DVD commentary, “and I went to visit doctors and patients, schizophrenic patients; I watched a lot of tapes on sexual abuse.  Went to hospitals, observed patients and doctors. Talked to some of them. It was very interesting to go to one of these mental hospitals and see that the behavior of the doctors was crazier than the patients.

“I walked into this place and I saw a girl that was very interesting, drawing barefoot,” Streisand said. “I asked if she could come into the room. And we needed an extra chair in the room. The doctor started to yell at the nurse. Maniacal, I swear to god. And the girl was very interesting, and she wanted to draw me. She drew me as a llama. And then said, ‘when I get out of here, can I come visit you?’ And I said, ‘No, you can’t come visit me.’”

One column reported that before filming began Streisand spent a day at one of the “best houses in Los Angeles” where she spoke to the women there about their circumstances and what made them choose that line of work. The newspaper ended the story with a joke: a businessman saw the star waiting for her car and asked the madam, “How much are you charging for the Barbra Streisand look-alike?”

Streisand filmed the only location scenes for the movie in early October 1986 at Whitehall and Bridge Streets in lower Manhattan.  They also filmed scenes at the U.S. Custom House in New York, which doubled as the exterior of the courthouse.  None of those scenes ended up in the movie, but there are plenty of stills of Streisand cavorting with construction workers and homeless people on the steps of the building.

Because Nuts was a courtroom drama, with many of its scenes taking place indoors, the majority of it was filmed on stages 15, 16, and 28 in Hollywood at Warner Brothers.

Karl Malden recalled a comradery between the older character actors during the courtroom testimony scenes. “When, for example, Eli [Wallach] was on the stand and Marty would call, ‘Cut!,’ Eli would look over to me. I would smile and nod, sometimes hold up one finger for one more take. And then when I was on the stand Eli would do the same thing. It had nothing to do with usurping Barbra’s power or Marty’s; it was just wanting the other person to be as good as we knew that person was capable of being. We had seen the best we all had to offer so many times before.”



“It was the toughest film I've ever made,” Martin Ritt said. Not because of Streisand's temperament, he explained, but because “you've got 71 pages of courtroom action without a jury to cut to.”

It was clear on set that Streisand, as producer and star, held as much power as director Ritt. Malden recognized that Streisand’s concentration was “spread so thin,” though. “At one point Barbra came up to me and said that she had specifically hired Marty because he was supposed to be good with women. What had happened, she wondered,” Malden stated. “I said, ‘Barbra, let him direct.’ But it is just not in her makeup to turn over the reins.”



Streisand stressed that “It was a very collaborative relationship, me and Marty [Ritt]. Since [Ritt] told me he respected the work I did in Yentl, it was a very close creative relationship. Sometimes if he didn’t even agreewith me, he would say, ‘But you have final cut’ since I was the executive producer, so I’ll try it from that point of view. He was usually very accommodating to what I saw, what I imagined, and that was good.” 

“We had our arguments, but the film got made,” Ritt said. “She won some, I won some. She's tough, but I'm sure I'm not easy. I figure you could call it a washout.”

Ritt was ambivalent in the press about the issue of ‘final cut,’ however. “The producer, you see, is always reserved final cut,” Ritt explained. “It was never used with me until I worked with Streisand. She’s a very complicated lady.”  Ritt also told the Dallas Morning News, “Barbra was not my favorite girl. When the cast and crew arrived on the set each morning, they expected a huge fight between Barbra and myself. They were never disappointed.” 

When a Dallas Morning News reporter asked Richard Dreyfuss about Ritt’s quote, Dreyfuss replied, “Well, I’ll comment on the making of Nuts, but only after everyone else involved in the movie is dead.” 

Others who worked on the film had positive things to say about Streisand. Cece Hall, supervising sound editor for Nuts, said: “I found Barbra really easy to work with as the producer. She was actively involved, very hands-on, and she worked hard. She had a clear, strong vision of what she wanted so nothing was confusing. That made my job easier. Sound effects can create important, significant, and subtle nuances in a scene. In Nuts, her character was in a kind of mental ward, which offered lots of fascinating sound backgrounds. I loved working with her and with her executive producer, Teri Schwartz.” 

Robert “Buzz” Knudson was a sound re-recording mixer on Nuts. He also worked for Streisand on A Star is Born and The Main Event. “I will say that most directors, the Streisands, the Taylor Hackfords, the Friedkins, they’re all very bright people and they learn quickly,” Knudson said. “And you know Barbra is just—she’s a genius I think. Her mind works so well. When you do a picture with her now she’s light years ahead of you and what you’re thinking … I never will forget the very first foot of the pre-dub, there was a line that—I reached up to hit stop and she was getting ready to tell me to stop. She said, ‘You and I are going to get along good because we both think the same way.’”

Streisand assumed a new behind-the-scenes role for Nuts—composer. “I was able to write the score for this movie because I saw very little music in it,” Streisand stated. “I don’t know how to read or write music. I hear it in my head. I have somebody write the notes down. I sing it. That’s what I actually do. I’ll sing somebody the melody and then they write it down. Irving Berlin never wrote down music either … I actually wrote this melody on the guitar — the Nuts melody—then I have to hire an arranger to arrange it.” 



Streisand hired Jeremy Lubbock. “I remember calling up Jeremy at two or three in the morning singing him the atonality, like Bartok, Stravinsky, of the theme I wrote to play it with cellos,” said Streisand. “Jeremy’s wonderful at changing the chords. It’s the minor side of the chord. I’m told I always gravitate toward the ninth of the chord, the eleventh of the chord. It’s not the five or the seven. I love it because when you do it correctly, it comes out right. Unlike when you cook, and you can try to follow the recipe, and it still doesn’t come out right ... But when it comes out right it’s very rewarding.” 

Nuts was ignored by the Academy Awards in 1988 but nominated for three Golden Globe Awards (Best Drama Film, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor). Barbra Streisand only did one television interview in the U.S. to promote the movie (perhaps she was still feeling stung by the criticism of Yentl five years earlier?) Her publicist Lee Solters explained to the press that Streisand “doesn’t feel like she has to” do hundreds of interviews for the film. “She’s going to let the picture stand on its own feet.”

For Europe and Australia, Streisand participated in a handful of T.V. and print interviews.



She told the Daily Mail: “When I wasn’t nominated for an Oscar for Nuts, someone actually said it was because I looked too coiffed in my appearance. But the woman I play looks rough because she is going through a pretty bad time emotionally and that is what I had to show. They say I care so much about my appearance that I cut people out of my films or I cut them down. But … I don’t know who they are talking about. Certainly not me. Would I pick a lousy actor for a part just to make myself look better?”

Tom Topor, who saw the play he wrote move from Broadway to the Big Screen, commented on the final film: “I think Nuts is a good movie, a very good movie. It’s not the movie I would have made. It’s Barbra Streisand and Marty Ritt’s movie. When you consider how much they eliminated, it’s not bad at all. Except for one sentimental scene, when Dreyfuss visits her in the prison hospital, it’s an enormously brave picture for her.” 

Richard Dreyfuss was reflective about the experience with Streisand on Nuts. “Barbra is a case,” he said. “She’s very specific. I think if there is one thing that you can say is a common denominator to all movie stars — especially female movie stars — is that they are, as opposed to the other actresses, they are definite. You can see a clear line around Katharine Hepburn’s personality, and Bette Davis’ personality, and Joan Crawford’s personality, and Gene Arthur, and Barbra Streisand. That is what sets them apart and makes them compelling for us to watch them. But what Barbra is is definite. And because she’s a woman we take issue with that in a greater degree than if she were a man. If she were a producer-star-director of the male gender, we would accept all of her eccentricities in a much more forgiving, normal, unquestioning way. The fact that she is a woman brings all those things out in very sharp relief. And that’s why, in a sense, we’re here discussing Barbra’s personality. We wouldn’t be discussing Marty Ritt’s personality, or mine or yours. That doesn’t mean I forgive her eccentricities, by the way, it just means that’s the phenomenon we’re discussing.”

“Nuts” on Home Video & Network T.V.

Nuts was originally released on home video on VHS tape June 1988.  Nuts was released on DVD as part of a Warner Brothers box set called The Barbra Streisand Collection in 2003.  (Also in the set: What's Up Doc, The Main Event, and Up the Sandbox.)

The Nuts DVD included Barbra Streisand's feature length commentary on a separate audio track. Streisand's observations about the film and its themes are very interesting to listen to.

iTunes has carried an HD version of Nuts for a few years now (1080p resolution), so it's curious why Warner Brothers has never released the film on Blu-ray.

In 2017, Warner Archives reissued Nuts on DVD through Amazon.com and also at their online store. The new DVD is MOD (made on demand).

“Nuts” — Novels, Graffiti, & Doodles

Nuts has some interesting details in its set design and some of the cinematic tools used to tell the story.  Click the arrows to read more ....

Claudia’s Costumes

Claudia’s Erotic Photos

SOURCES USED ON THIS PAGE:

• “Cracking ‘Nuts’ – the author’s tale” by Jerry Tallmer. New York Post Weekend, November 20, 1987.
• Daily Mail, April 5, 1988 interview with Streisand by David Lewin
• “Darryl Ponicsán Interview” by Nick Clement.  Wearecult.rocks, September 1, 2017. Retrieved June 14, 2020. http://wearecult.rocks/the-darryl-poniscan-interview
• “Dreyfuss Honored at USA Film Festival” by Philip Wuntch. Dallas Morning News, May 17, 1994. Retrieved June 15, 2020. https://www.deseret.com/1994/5/17/19109268/dreyfuss-honored-at-usa-film-festival
• Elliott Gould: “The greatest artist in the world is an uninhibited child at play.” FilmTalk.org, February 3, 2020. Retrieved June 14, 2020. https://filmtalk.org/2020/02/03/elliott-gould-the-greatest-artist-in-the-world-is-an-uninhibited-child-at-play/ 
• James Whitmore Interview 2000.  Youtube, January 8, 2015. Retrieved June 24, 2020. https://youtu.be/mquEDLjyXaU
• The Films of Barbra Streisand by Christopher Nickens and Karen Swenson. Citidel Press, 2000.
• The Films of Martin Ritt: Fanfare for the Common Man by Gabriel Miller. University Press of Mississippi, 2000.
• “Leslie Nielsen king of small role” by Ed Blank.  The Pittsburgh Press, December 22, 1987.
• “Mark Rydell vs. The 800 Pound Gorillas” by Stephen Rebello. Lebeau’s Le Blog, December 15, 2016.  Retrieved June 14, 2020. https://lebeauleblog.com/2016/12/15/mark-rydell-vs-the-800-pound-gorillas/
• Nuts DVD — Barbra Streisand commentary. Warner Video, 2003.
• Robert “Buzz” Knudson: An interview by Leslie Shatz Part 1. March 1, 2000, cinemontage.org. Retrieved June 21, 2020 https://cinemontage.org/robert-buzz-knudson-1/
• “The Silence of Streisand.” Milwaukee Journal, December 18, 1987.
• “The Star Outshines the Actress” by Ivor Davies. South Florida Sun Sentinel, November 29, 1987.
• The Today Show interview, November 18—20, 1987. Retrieved June 15, 2020. https://youtu.be/J1eajO1_Lgw
• When Do I Start? A Memoir By Karl Malden, Carla Malden. Limelight Editions, 1998.

END / Nuts 1987 Movie