Barbra Streisand on Hollywood’s Double Standard: “What Does ‘Difficult’ Mean, Anyway?”

Streisand was criticized for having demanded too much control over the movie and, at the same time, suspected of having had to turn to established male filmmakers for help. That decades-old charge was recently recycled by Maureen Dowd in her New York Time Magazine article “The Women of Hollywood Speak Out.” Dowd wrote, “Men in Hollywood still joke that Barbra Streisand conferred over each frame of Yentl with everyone from Spielberg to her gardener.” Observing that male directors often routinely show their works-in-progress to each other, Streisand notes, “It seems that only when a woman shows her film to a male director, the assumption is she needs rescuing!” Read More…