Babblin' Babs - UP THE SANDBOX (1972) || And Where Have I Been???
Siri play "I Hate It Here" by Taylor Swift
So I accidentally took a month off of watching and writing about movies. As much as I want to apologize and feel bad about it and be disappointed in myself, I know that I listened to my body and my mind and also have never done anything wrong in my entire life.
I also, funnily enough, took the break at an interesting time in Barbra’s career and in a way that makes this film a very apt one to return with. Like Margaret in UP THE SANDBOX, I needed to escape my duties and responsibilities as a modern woman (I was sleepy and my body was not built for a 9-6 job) so I created new fantasies and scenarios in my head (played Stardew Valley for 5 hours a day).
To return to writing with UP THE SANDBOX feels right. It marks a solid demarcation in Babs’s career - this was the first film she had full creative control over, as it was produced by the new production company she helped found. It’s a revolutionary picture of the early 70s sexual revolution and second wave feminism, one that I can only imagine was incredibly liberating to see on screen. She doesn’t sing, there’s no broad Babs comedy - despite already having an Academy Award and the industry at her fingertips, this is what feels like her play at a “serious” Hollywood career.
In 1969, the same year HELLO, DOLLY! was released, Barbra, Paul Newman, and Sidney Poitier founded First Artists, a production company designed to give artists more creative control in their films. Each star promised to make three movies for the company. In exchange for this increased creative control, the actors agreed to take lower salaries and a share of any potential profits.
Nowadays, this action of actors taking backend (another word for the net profits of a movie) is incredibly common place - especially as a trade for lower salaries. It’s a way to keep the upfront costs low in hopes of higher box office revenue. But for 1969, this had to have been semi-revolutionary.
Later, in 1972, Dustin Hoffman joined First Artists. This became contentious, with Hoffman eventually suing the company, due to his proclivity to do films with other studios before finishing his obligations with First Artists.
Under First Artists, Barbra made UP THE SANDBOX, A STAR IS BORN, and THE MAIN EVENT - the latter two of which were financially successful. But that was not the case for most First Artist productions - many didn’t make a huge splash, and the company shuttered in 1980.
But the creative control that First Artists championed remains - nowadays we have countless actors who become producers or who champion films in this way. Hell, Barbra probably paved the way for Tom Cruise.
For her first contractual movie with First Artists, Barbra teamed up with Irvin Kershner, director of THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK. He also directed other things, but like….come on.
Having developed a reputation on sets for being “demanding” - something you’ve surely never heard said about Tom Cruise or even the other men who founded First Artists with her - Barbra finally had a safe place to exercise her artistic choice.
Director Irvin Kershner reportedly told Barbra Streisand's biographer James Spada that he was originally unhappy with the script and that he was advised not to express his dissatisfaction to Streisand. Several days into filming, when Streisand went to Kershner and asked him why they were having so much trouble, he told her that they had started shooting with a weak script. Kershner said "Your people warned me not to tell you." Streisand said "That's ridiculous! If a script isn't good enough, let's work to improve it."
Barbra was not creating drama for the sake of being difficult or being a diva. Barbra wanted to make a good goddamn picture.
And this is something that will continue to color the rest of her career. Even when she’s a director, she’s called “exacting” and “demanding” which is, in my opinion, WHAT A DIRECTOR IS.
So is UP THE SANDBOX, the first movie she made where she was allowed to have input, allowed to have a voice…good?
Sure!
It’s the type of movie that feels bigger than just how watchable it is. The movie is the idea it illustrates more than the way it illustrates.
Barbra plays 70s housewife Maggie who, when she learns she is pregnant with her third child, daydreams wild fantasies to distract herself. These fantasies range from menial fights with her husband (a very handsome David Selby) and mother to a tryst with a transgender (??) Fidel Castro after defeating him in a verbal spar.
It becomes an exploration of motherhood and sexual freedom and the identity of women in the 1970s. I’ve read other reviews saying it “hasn’t aged well”, but as I watched it, I couldn’t help but think that it was more revolutionary than ever. There’s more to be said about how our society has started regressing again, to the point where this amount of feminine freedom seems unlikely to be produced in 2024 (unless NIGHTBITCH pulls through) - but it’s unabashed in it’s brutal honesty of how being a mother and a wife can be stifling and rewarding at the same time. It’s the type of contradiction we feel scared to point out, but UP THE SANDBOX revels in it.
It’s so brash that it’s almost alarming to find out it was written and directed by a man (though based on a female-written novel); this, we must assume, is where Barbra’s creative control took form. Barbra was already a mother by now and her dedication to her career had (to gossip channels, at the very least) ruined one marriage and multiple other relationships.
UP THE SANDBOX becomes the type of movie that I didn’t necessarily enjoy watching. It drags at moments, it never fully makes sense, and (understandably) the viewer never quite knows what’s real and what’s forged in Maggie’s psychosis. But it is so bold and so unlike anything else that it becomes a piece of art in itself. In terms of modernism, there was even a scene where Barbra, in 1972, kissed a black revolutionary; the scene was cut by the studio for unfortunately obvious reasons.
I may not love UP THE SANDBOX like I love other Barbra movies, but I must admit that it is such a relic of time that feels more relatable today than ever before. Even I, a childless and single 20-something, felt myself realizing that this movie exemplifies how my OCD manifests. The false situations, the “what ifs”, the fantasizing about the most unlikely scenario and convincing yourself that it will happen, just so you can escape from where you currently are.
In a way, it’s BEAU IS AFRAID for girls.
The movie ends with Maggie finally telling her husband she’s pregnant and asking for a day to herself. Her husband, being lovely and amazing and hot, agrees, and they all live happily ever after. Right? She shut down her fantasy of going to an abortion clinic, choosing her life as a mother over the false lives in her head.
But it’s a bittersweet ending, as (I can only assume) motherhood is as well. She’s happily resigned, blissfully aware that she has given up all her other lives for this one. It’s a cinematic reimagining of Sylvia Plath’s fig tree analogy. I’ll put the whole thing here, in case you haven’t read it, as it’s one of the most heartbreakingly honest examinations of happiness I’ve ever experienced.
“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
By choosing this life, Maggie abandons all the others. She is choosing to abandon all of the other lovers, the careers, the adventures that she could have had without children. But this is the conundrum of life, is it not? That you can’t do and be everything all at once. Life is choices and decisions that will kill all other choices and decisions.
It’s the type of mental anguish we all know, and yet so many people fail to speak about. In the subheading of this piece, I mention Taylor Swift’s “I Hate It Here” from The Tortured Poets Department. It’s partially a joke but also incredibly accurate - it was a song that almost made me cry on first listen, for I hadn’t heard anyone put this feeling to words in so long. I felt the same way the first time I read the fig tree analogy and when I watched UP THE SANDBOX.
So is UP THE SANDBOX a movie I’ll rewatch? Probably not. I also had only rented it for two days on Amazon Prime as, surprise surprise, no streaming service has thought to snatch up Irvin Kershner’s 1972 examination of second wave feminism and sexual freedom.
But I’ll think about it often. It feels like a stark transition for Barbra’s career and a stark transition for female voices in Hollywood. The next movie, THE WAY WE WERE, will probably feel like the turning point for Barbra’s stardom - but UP THE SANDBOX is the turning point for Barbra’s artistry and voice.