![]() ![]() I would go in with butterflies in my stomach. But it was not the physical pain he remembered, it was the agony of getting hold of his character. "It was a hard picture for me," said the actor a few weeks before the opening of What's Up, Doc? O'Neal was staying at his beach house in Malibu recuperating from back surgery necessitated by an accident that occurred during the shooting of the film. ![]() Playing a madcap kook in a rollicking comedy was not difficult for Barbra Streisand, the wonder child of the film industry but it was a complete departure for her co-star, the long-suffering hero of TV's Peyton Place and Love Story, Ryan O'Neal. "It went over very well," he said, "they seemed to love it." He had just returned from a business trip to New York where he had shown What's Up, Doc? to a few selected audiences. Although his eyes were circled with weariness, his nose red, and his voice hoarse from a cold, Bogdanovich was obviously well pleased with the result. The film is jam-packed with sight gags, word gags and feature a hair-raising chase. girl, Judy, who has been tossed out of 30 colleges and an eccentric young man named Howard, who become nonsensically involved with four identical traveling cases and a musicologists' convention in San Francisco. What finally emerged was a wild, zany store about a near genius I.Q. ![]() Sometimes that meant 10 takes – 12 takes." "Peter likes to shoot a lot of film," says O'Neal, "he likes to do it over and over until he sees it the way he wants to see it. (Above) Peter Bogdanovich works out a love scene in What's Up, Doc? with his two stars Barbra Streisand and Ryan O'Neal. It was good but we kept working on it to improve it." He joined us and we tossed around more ideas trying to find the right direction. It wasn't right, they did another, it still wasn't right. For four days we sat and talked out the plot, then they went away and in two weeks completed the first draft. I hired David Newman and Robert Benton to write it. We had to begin shooting in July which meant we were under tremendous pressure to get a script. Calley said, ‘Well, that sounds interesting.' Based on three sentences and enthusiasm, we started work. Barbra will play a wacky girl and Ryan will be a musicologist who gets involved with her, it will be a farce. That's the way I saw Barbra, as sort of Carole Lombard, and I thought she'd be fine for that. "I read the script and I didn't want to do it, but I told him I'd love to do a picture with Barbra – ‘Let's do a screwball comedy,' I said. The genre went into disuse in the ‘60s and I wanted to revive it." His opportunity came late last Spring when John Calley, production chief of Warner Brothers asked him to take over the direction of their film Glimpse of Tiger starring Barbra Streisand and Ryan O'Neal. "I've always liked the comedies of the ‘30s, the kind of pictures that used to be called typically American. " What's Up, Doc? Is a picture with no socially redeeming value," said Director Peter Bogdanovich leaning back on a chair in the Warner Brothers dubbing room. The cover photograph of Barbra Streisand and her son Jason Gould was taken on location in San Francisco by Bruce McBroom Show Magazine April 1972 Barbra and Ryan in Bogdanovich's Salute to the Zany Comedies of the ‘30s What's Up, Doc? by Jacoba Atlas and Steve Jaffe
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