Barbra Streisand’s third film, On A Clear Day You Can See Forever, was based on a 1965 Broadway show that closed June 1966 starring Barbara Harris and John Cullum.
The idea came from Broadway team Alan Jay Lerner and Richard Rodgers as early as 1962. They first called the show I Picked a Daisy but after delayed scripts, Lerner chose to work with composer Burton Lane instead of Rodgers. The show shifted and changed during previews and eventually opened on Broadway October 1965.
Paramount Pictures reportedly paid $750,000 for the film rights to On a Clear Day in 1966. Paramount producer Howard W. Koch hired Streisand at that time, too, before she’d even come to Hollywood to make Funny Girl. Then, Paramount announced in April 1967 that Vincente Minnelli would direct the screen musical.
Minnelli recalled, “It was mystical, and Lerner has been interested in that since he was a child. He was trying to say something, I dug into the story and that was what came out. Lerner had read all these books and followed the fantasy as he saw it completely. I didn’t subscribe to it, not at all.”
Koch made some changes transferring On A Clear Day from Broadway to film: Alan Jay Lerner revised his original story; Minnelli requested that the past-life sequences be changed from a Restoration to a Regency setting. He told writer Henry Sheehan, “I felt that was what was wrong with the play. It was white wigs and writing with feathers which gets to be very boring. I wanted to make it Regency, because the world was more inviting. That’s particularly why we changed it. Then I wanted to come in on a climax where she didn’t know what was happening and it was explained later on. Whereas it couldn’t matter less in the play.”
Barbra Streisand reported to Paramount Studios at the end of October 1968 to participate in the film’s hair and costume tests.
Designer Arnold Scaasi created the modern fashions that Streisand’s character Daisy would wear in On A Clear Day You Can See Forever. “In September 1968, I received a letter from Robert Evans, the head of Paramount Studios, saying that Barbra wanted me to do her modern clothes for the film On A Clear Day You Can See Forever,” Scaasi wrote in his memoir Women I Have Dressed (And Undressed). Scaasi revealed he was paid $25,000 as a design fee, with the cost of the clothes themselves charged to Paramount Pictures.
“Before actual shooting began ... I would fit some of the clothes when Barbra was in New York. Later, I would fly to Los Angeles almost every week and we would fit the new things. Usually the head of the Paramount wardrobe department was with us.”
The venerable Cecil Beaton was hired to create Streisand’s Regency gowns for the flashback scenes. Beaton wrote in his diaries: “But although the clothes were mostly made here in London, the time spent in going to Tangier to get cheap tissues, and supervising each individual ball dress, was quite considerable.”
“The public sees her as very contemporary,” Beaton wrote of Streisand, “but I think her soul is old-fashioned, and in all honesty, she was far more likeable, more at ease, in the old English sequences of the picture than as the neurotic college student in those dreadful mini-skirt creations!”
Photographer Lawrence Schiller, who shot Clear Day, recalled to V Magazine his memories of watching the two work. “This was a man of elegance and taste,” said Schiller of Beaton. “And his reputation preceded him. So Barbra and [Beaton] got along fabulously. She was like a little puppy dog in Beaton's presence. You know, she would bark every once in a while, and voice her opinion, but she was delighted with what he created. He understood her face, he understood the shape of her body. And Barbra knew what her assets were. Of course the greatest asset was her voice, but now she was moving on in life and she was making the transition to becoming a great actress. Eventually she'd become a great director. So what do you do, you surround yourself with the most talented people in the world. And she surrounded herself with Cecil Beaton.”
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