... Rose Morgan

The Mirror Has Two Faces was Barbra's sixteenth film and third as director. The movie continued her big screen exploration of the mystery of appearances, the intricacy of relationships, the possibilities of personal transformation, and the part love plays in it all.

Barbra Streisand summed up the movie: “The theme of The Mirror Has Two Faces is that beauty is in the heart of the beholder. It also deals with the fact that the world often mirrors back to you your own perception of yourself, which is usually based on your experiences as a child. It is a romantic comedy that has serious overtones dealing with mother-daughter issues, the beauty myth, self-esteem, transformation. It's about two disillusioned university professors who enter into a sexless marriage and then fall in love.”

Screenwriter Richard LaGravenese related, “The illusion of superficial beauty and the sexual intensity it assures creates enormous problems. We are bombarded with advertisements, movies and television commercials in which impossibly perfect people hear fabulous music when they are attracted to each other. Normal looks, normal attractions, normal emotions seem somehow lacking. Isn't it curious, and confusing, that while more and more people are devoting greater effort to working on their inner selves, the frantic search for beauty is more desperate and intense than ever?”

TriStar and its Chairman Mike Medavoy acquired the rights to the French film in the early 1990s as a vehicle for the comedy actor John Candy. Screenwriter Richard LaGravenese (The Fisher King, The Bridges Of Madison County) recalled that after he watched the 1958 film, he came to TriStar “with a different take, a romantic-comedy take.”

LaGravenese explained, “[Barbra] became involved about late ’91 or early ’92. She had a lot of reservations about doing Mirror. She was very aware that the material was something she had already explored in the early part of her career.”

Streisand remembered, “When I first read the script, the woman had plastic surgery, and I thought that wasn't right. I was more interested in self-esteem from within, not from without.” That didn’t keep the showbiz columns from reporting that Streisand would star in a movie about plastic surgery, and that her own looks would be digitally altered by George Lucas’ special effects house, Industrial Light and Magic.

But at that time, Streisand was also developing other films.  “I was going to do The Normal Heart,” she said, a movie version she worked for years on which was based on Larry Kramer’s play about the AIDS crisis. “That was going to be my next project … I couldn’t raise the money, and then the actors I wanted weren’t available—they wanted me to wait until this spring coming up. So, then I reread The Mirror Has Two Faces after working on it with Richard in 1992 and not thinking it was right then. The studio also wouldn’t pay me my salary, and I thought, ‘I’m just not going to do it anymore.’ So, I didn’t make the movie for four years. But I reread the script and I thought, no, no, no, I see this, and I can do this and maybe expand the mother-daughter relationship, and maybe this element could happen. It began to really interest me, so I made the movie.”

Streisand vacillated between directing and starring or hiring another director.  She asked Robert Zemeckis and Herb Ross to helm the picture, but they declined. “At one point, I asked Garry Marshall, and he said to me, ‘Are you going to tell me where to put the camera?’” she said. “And I thought, ‘It will never work.’”

“I hadn’t directed a movie in eight years, and I was totally frightened,” Barbra stated, referring to her last film, The Prince of Tides. “But after getting into it, it was, ‘Oh, yeah, I remember this,’ and trusting my instincts.”

She went on to say, “One of the reasons I decided to do The Mirror Has Two Faces is that it had a happy ending. I was tired of doing movies where the woman never gets the guy.”  Streisand also found aspects of the character, as LaGravenese had written it, that appealed to her. “I must ask him, did he think of me at all? I never asked him that question. We had a lot in common, I would say, and that's why one chooses to play that role -- you understand that character.”

LaGravenese confessed that the Mirror screenplay was challenging for him. “Honestly, I feel that Mirror was something which I never cracked,” he said. “I wrote four different versions of it, and I liked the third version the best, but it was the fourth version which got made. I did a version where she doesn’t get plastic surgery, and I did another where she does. In one version the surgery changed her personality, in another it didn’t. In the third draft, I came up with a character who represented that lover who comes in and out of your life, and you’re so in love with them that every time they leave they break your heart, and when they reappear they can open you up again. You have no immunity to them. And that’s why in that draft the Jeff Bridges character decides that he wants to have a loveless marriage, because he’s so obsessed with this woman that he can’t put himself at emotional risk. But I just never felt like I cracked that version.”

“Revised First Draft” September 7, 1991

This early version of the screenplay by Richard LaGravenese reads very similar to the final movie script. There are a few major differences, though:

• The script opens in flashback, with college-aged Gregory screaming outside the window of the red-haired girl he loves even though she broke up with him.  This scene is meant to bookend the final scene where Gregory yells outside Rose’s window.
• For the first few drafts, Rose’s mother goes to see Gregory at the university for lunch, where she asks him what his intentions with her daughter are.  In later drafts, Rose has Gregory over for dinner, where Hannah grills him at the table.
• Rose’s mother doesn’t treat her to a makeup makeover – she pays for plastic surgery. “[Rose’s] jaw and chin seemed to have been tightened. Her eyes lifted. Her eyebrows thinned. Her hair lightened. She is about thirty pounds lighter.”
• After Greg and Rose go their different ways, Rose accepts the attention of one of her sexy students, Luke.  He romances her on his rooftop, and they sleep together. Later, she tries to make her sister, Claire, jealous by telling her, “I fucked an eighteen year old blonde God the other night.”

“Draft for June 24 Actor’s Reading” June 22, 1992

This version is very similar to the previous one, still with the opening flashback. Streisand remembered that “the script wasn't right, initially. We had a reading with actors—this was back in 1992—and it just wasn't enough. And the studio at that time also wouldn't make my deal, they wouldn't pay me what I was normally getting.”

• Gregory and “Candy” (in some drafts she’s named “Jessie”) have a very long dialogue scene after he takes her back to his apartment, following his book party. As LaGravenese admitted above, he tried very hard to motivate Gregory with this failed relationship.
• LaGravenese introduces Rose’s search for “the perfect bite.”

Draft November 15, 1993

Let’s go into more detail on this script, because Richard LaGravenese moves scenes around and restructures the movie in this November 1993 draft. The earlier and later drafts adhere to basically the same structure and story beats; this one mixes it up considerably, and tones down Rose’s “change.”

• There is no flashback at the beginning.  Instead, the screenplay opens with Gregory and Rose waking up and dressing for the day, with Rose narrating over the images, reading from an ancient Sumerian love story (Inanna) in her classroom.
• Claire is engaged, but there is no wedding at the beginning of the film — just Claire and Rose having lunch when her finance Alex shows up, to the annoyance of Claire.
• LaGravenese, in this draft, has introduced “Alex Fantasies.”  Rose, several times, has Walter Mitty-esque fantasies about Alex that interrupt the scenes.
• Barry Neufeld and Rose actually go out on a date, except that Barry is insufferable … so much so that Rose has another fantasy that magically turns Barry into Alex.
• Gregory has a long, protracted breakup with Jessie that involves him missing classes, and holed up in a hotel for days. That’s the motivation for him seeking a simpler kind of relationship.
• Gregory does not place an ad in this script. Instead, poor Gregory is dragged to Rose’s class by Henry, where he hears her teachings about types of romantic love.  He visits her office and they begin their strange, non-sexual dating.
• Claire’s wedding comes later in the script.  Gregory pretends to be sick, so he doesn’t have to go.  Even though this scene occurs earlier in the final film, many of the same lines (“excessive vanity,” “celibates sweat,” etc.) are in this version.
• At the wedding, Rose has another fantasy where Alex mouths “I love you” to her from the alter; then Gregory appears, runs up to her and kisses her.
• Gregory does show up.  He confesses his “like” for Rose and asks her to marry him.
• This time, when Greg goes to Europe for his book tour, he meets up with Jessie in Paris. Rose and Greg talk over the phone.
• Alex shows up at Rose’s house drunk over Claire.  Rose brings him home in a cab and Alex makes a verbal pass at her.  Rose turns him down. Meanwhile, Greg sleeps with Jessie and discovers it’s just not working with her.
• There is no plastic surgery, or even a makeup montage … in this script, Rose becomes simply more confident – and she applies a little extra makeup.
• Alex and Rose dine together in a restaurant, but Greg has been hunting her down since his return. He barges into the restaurant, punches Alex, and carries Rose out where they confess their love for each other in the middle of the street.

By the time shooting began in October 1996, the final shooting script resembled the earlier drafts, minus the flashback at the beginning of the film. 

“The screenplay, by Richard LaGravenese, based on an earlier French film, is like a Shaw play — ‘Pygmalion,’ in fact, except that this Higgins has nothing to teach his Eliza, and she has everything to teach him. It’s rare to find a film that deals intelligently with issues of sex and love, instead of just assuming that everyone on the screen and in the audience shares the same popular culture assumptions.” 

... Roger Ebert review

In general, though, the set of Mirror was a harmonious place for Streisand and her actors. 

Lauren Bacall wrote in her memoir: “When we started shooting, I saw first-hand how Barbra functioned. It was very odd for us at the beginning because she would be directing the scene behind the camera, then come around in front of the camera and act in the scene. How she did it, I'll never know.

“She is meticulous in her direction — every detail is as important to her as the words. I remember her telling me that she woke up at four o'clock in the morning and sketched exactly what the cape I wore should look like. Then she couldn't go back to sleep.”

Streisand enjoyed directing the legendary Bacall. “I loved Betty, but since she hadn’t been in a film in a while, she was a bit insecure and tended to overdo things. First of all, I would tell them never to cut the camera. ‘I’ll tell you to cut, but don’t cut.’”

For the scene late in the movie between Hannah and Rose in the kitchen, Streisand wanted verisimilitude from Bacall’s performance. She said: “After working all day we were rehearsing a scene that we were going to shoot the next morning and I could see that she was very tired. Her hair was messy, she had a toothpick in her mouth. And I thought, this is good, this is good, keep the toothpick, this is it, let’s just stay here, we'll stay a little later and get this on film right now. She said, ‘But I don’t know the lines yet.’ And I said, ‘That doesn’t matter, they're on the chair over there and you can look if you need to. Meanwhile, just talk to me. Tell me what you feel. Tell me about your life now.’

“She started off with something like, ‘I thought I was going to be young forever.’ And then, by engaging her in real conversation beyond the script, the scene now had this whole other layer, about growing older. She was letting us into her life. It was a golden moment, the kind I always look for on screen. They reach out and touch everyone because they’re so true. And the Academy recognized her performance with an Oscar nomination.”

Earlier in the movie, Rose asks Hannah what it was like being beautiful. Streisand said Bacall’s “first reaction was ‘Wonderful, wonderful!’ And then I say, ‘Cut,’ you know, and they have to reset the camera …” Streisand spoke with Bacall one-on-one, saying, “‘You know, Betty, when you did those movies with Humphrey Bogart and all that, what was that like?’ And she went — she thought. That’s what I wanted to see, her really think. And she said, ‘It was wonderful.’ That’s what’s in the film. Got it.”

It was December 1995 when Streisand’s director of photography, Dante Spinotti (Nell, L.A. Confidential), left the film, citing “creative differences.” Streisand told columnist Liz Smith it was a “mutual parting of the ways” — they just didn't have a “shared vision” about the movie. A source with the production told the New York Times, “[Streisand] had been complaining about the camera work almost from the beginning of the production. There were too many gauzes around the lens. Her eyes – one of her best features – got very soft.” 

Jeff Bridges produced a photography book of the wide-angle photos he took during the filming of the movie.  In it, he wrote, “Dante and Barbra butted heads a bit. Something had to give … and it was Dante. This was the end of one of the many seasons of our movie.”

Most of Spinotti’s crew quit the film shortly after, and Streisand brought Andrzej Barkowiak (Nuts) in to finish photographing The Mirror Has Two Faces. Both cinematographers share screen credit.

Streisand also dismissed editor Alan Heim and replaced him with Jeff Werner. Although reporters blamed “diva Streisand,” a 2017 interview with Heim revealed the real reason for his dismissal was probably the difficult transition from the old fashioned Moviola to the new, digital Avid machine – a video editing software that became more commonplace in film editing in the mid-1990s. “Sony wanted me to do it on the Avid. So now I have to learn another system. And Sony said they would give me an instructor,” Heim explained. “Well they gave me the guy who was doing maintenance on the lot and my assistant and I, she never worked on a film either on Avid … we spent three intense days just stuffing whatever I could into my head. And at one point I remember just putting my head on the keyboard, three or four, in the afternoon on Friday and I said, ‘That’s it. I can’t do anymore of this.’”

Streisand and her crew returned to New York at the top of May 1996 to film the last scenes of the movie. Streisand revealed, “I was going to do this helicopter shot that went up, you had to see Central Park, you had to see the whole city. So we had to postpone shooting for a month to come back when the leaves were on the trees. Meanwhile, we still did the scene with long underwear under our clothes.”

Bridges and Streisand’s street dance was filmed outside 505 West End Avenue. Streisand experienced a serendipitous moment at the location. “A man who lived there came over and told he me he remembered me when I was 18 taking [voice] lessons there with my first teacher, Peter [Daniels],” she said. The co-op building was paid $2,500 a day for the film crew to shoot in and around the apartments. (In 2018, one of the apartments in the building was listed for $2.9 million!)

Mirror filmed at this location from about 2:00 a.m. until dawn.  “I thought it was someone blasting their car radio,” Shanti Narra told the New York Times. “Then I realized it was Barbra Streisand. At first I was annoyed, but my roommate said, ‘How often do you get Barbra Streisand singing and dancing down your street?’”

Streisand imagined the final scene differently than what was written in the script. “One of our drafts had a jingle of an ice cream truck going by. And I said that’s not truthful. Why would an ice cream truck be going by at six in the morning, you know?” 

While she was scouting locations for the film and standing in front of the apartment building, “this idea came to me about the man in the window, and Puccini and, see what I’m saying?”

Production provided sound proofing blankets to the neighbors, plus blacking-out material for 115 windows to keep the light of the floodlights out. Some residents of 505 West End were relocated by the production to nearby hotels. 

While filming, Streisand and Bridges danced to “You Put a Move On My Heart” by an artist named Tamia, produced by Quincy Jones (the movie's theme song hadn't been written yet). Water trucks had to wet down the pavement every thirty minutes – this is a filmmaking trick (called a “wet-down”) and it makes the otherwise dull and boring black pavement look sexy and sleek. 

Click the arrows to see more photos of Barbra Streisand, her cast and crew, behind the scenes of THE MIRROR HAS TWO FACES ... ALSO: Costumes.

• Access Hollywood

• E! Entertainment – The Mirror Has Two Faces Premiere

• CBS This Morning

• Oprah

• TN Argentina Interview

• Barbra Streisand ‘Behind The Scenes: The Mirror Has Two Faces’ (Showtime)

Print Interviews:

• Barbra Streisand: The Complete TriStar Roundtable Interview
• Linda Ellerbee interviews Streisand about “Mirror”
• Hollywood Reporter Special Streisand Edition
• Streisand: Perfectionist or Tyrant?

SOURCES USED ON THIS PAGE:

• “A Passion for Truth” by Jerry Roberts. The Hollywood Reporter Salute to Barbra Streisand, October 18, 1996.
• ART OF THE CUT with Oscar Winner Alan Heim, ACE, by Steve Hullfish. Retrieved October 3, 2020. https://www.provideocoalition.com/art-cut-oscar-winner-alan-heim-ace/
• Bacall, L. (2010). By Myself and Then Some. United States: HarperCollins e-books.
• Backstory 5: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1990s. (2010). United Kingdom: University of California Press. “Richard LaGravenese A Writer Under the Influence” interview by Tom Matthews
• “Barbra in One Take” by Sean Mitchell. The Los Angeles Times, November 7, 1996.
• “Barbra Streisand looks into her ‘Mirror’ and discovers she's still a funny girl” by Jay Carr. Boston Globe, November 10, 1996.
• “Barbra Streisand, Still Not Pretty Enough” by Bernard Weinraub. The New York Times, November 13, 1996.
• BarbraFile, The. A Monthly Streisand Newsletter by Allison Waldman. Vol. 3, Issue No. 2, July 1996.
• Brenda Vaccaro; America Online chat, March 1996.
• Criterion Channel, The.  Interview with Barbra Streisand, 2020.
• Donna Karan interview. Radio Andy, November 28, 2018. Retrieved October 4, 2020. https://youtu.be/Xqw1RSFaOYQ
• Dudley Moore: The Melancholy Clown by Barbara Paskin. New Millennium Press, 2000.
• Just Like Buttah magazine, Summer 1996, #9. JLP Publishing.
• Meeting Streisand: A Miniature Comic Tragedy in 3 Acts by Tom Mizer. The Film Experience website, June 30, 2020.  Retrieved October 5, 2020. http://thefilmexperience.net/blog/2020/6/30/meeting-streisand-a-miniature-comic-tragedy-in-3-acts.html
• Richard LaGravenese: The Ladies’ Man. Interview by Martha Frankel. Movieline Magazine, April 1996. Retrieved October 2, 2020. https://lebeauleblog.com/2016/04/20/richard-lagravenese-the-ladies-man/
• STREISAND THE STAR REFLECTS ON THE MAKING OF 'MIRROR' By SUSAN LOTEMPIO. The Buffalo News, November 10, 1996. Retrieved October 3, 2020. https://buffalonews.com/news/streisand-the-star-reflects-on-the-making-of-mirror/article_0644fb1e-397f-560d-8e95-8a41292b0e72.html
• The Director’s Chair, Episode 13. Barbra Streisand interviewed by Robert Rodriquez, 2018.
• “The Occupation of West 84^th” by Michael Cooper. The New York Times, May 12, 1996.
• “The Talk of Hollywood; At MGM, Doubts Cloud Successes” by Bernard Weinraub. The New York Times, Jan. 17, 1996. Retrieved October 3, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/1996/01/17/movies/the-talk-of-hollywood-at-mgm-doubts-cloud-successes.html
• “Three-Time Oscar Nominee Jeff Bridges Looks Into Mirror.” Dramalogue, November 14-20, 1996.