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The Guilt Trip

Barbra Streisand and Seth Rogen in The Guilt Trip (2012)

As inventor Andy Brewster is about to embark on the road trip of a lifetime, a quick stop at his mom's house turns into an unexpected cross-country voyage with her along for the ride. As inventor Andy Brewster is about to embark on the road trip of a lifetime, a quick stop at his mom's house turns into an unexpected cross-country voyage with her along for the ride. As inventor Andy Brewster is about to embark on the road trip of a lifetime, a quick stop at his mom's house turns into an unexpected cross-country voyage with her along for the ride.

  • Anne Fletcher
  • Dan Fogelman
  • Jason Conzelman
  • Barbra Streisand
  • Julene Renee
  • 131 User reviews
  • 147 Critic reviews
  • 50 Metascore
  • 1 nomination

U.S. Version #1

  • Joyce Brewster

Seth Rogen

  • Andrew Brewster

Julene Renee

  • K-Mart Receptionist
  • (as Julene Renee-Preciado)

Zabryna Guevara

  • K-Mart Executive

John Funk

  • Mature Singles Man
  • Mature Singles Woman

Worth Howe

  • Young Joyce
  • Toddler Andy
  • Budget Car Renter

Rick Gonzalez

  • Middlesex Voice Over
  • All cast & crew
  • Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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  • Trivia The Paramount Pictures marketing department were so certain that Barbra Streisand would gain a Golden Globe nomination for her performance, that not only did they put out an ad congratulating her victory, but posted it online moments before the nominations were announced, only to be swiftly pulled when Streisand ended up without the nod.
  • Goofs On the way to see her old boy friend, Joyce uses Ben's name, not Andy's, when she is talking about not having seen him in thirty years.

Joyce Brewster : I wasn't meant to be with Andy Margolis. You see? I was meant to meet him, but I was meant to marry your father. Because if I hadn't, I wouldn't have had you. Don't you see, Andy? It was always you. You're the love of my life, baby. It will always be you.

  • Crazy credits During the credits, more is shown of Andy and his mother dealing with each other during the long drive, that is, several of Rogen and Streisand's comic improvisations. The 'mini-screen' moves a few times to make room for the credits.
  • Connections Featured in Maltin on Movies: The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012)
  • Soundtracks Howlin' For You Written by Dan Auerbach and Patrick J. Carney (as Patrick Carney) Performed by The Black Keys Courtesy of Nonesuch Records By arrangement with Warner Music Group Film & TV Licensing

User reviews 131

  • Dec 6, 2012
  • How long is The Guilt Trip? Powered by Alexa
  • December 19, 2012 (United States)
  • United States
  • Official site
  • My Mother's Curse
  • Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona, USA
  • Paramount Pictures
  • Skydance Media
  • Michaels Goldwyn
  • See more company credits at IMDbPro
  • $40,000,000 (estimated)
  • $37,134,215
  • Dec 23, 2012
  • $41,863,726

Technical specs

  • Runtime 1 hour 35 minutes
  • Dolby Digital

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The Guilt Trip

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Rent The Guilt Trip on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, Apple TV, or buy it on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, Apple TV.

What to Know

Seth Rogen and Barbra Streisand have enough chemistry to drive a solidly assembled comedy; unfortunately, The Guilt Trip has a lemon of a script and is perilously low on comedic fuel.

Audience Reviews

Cast & crew.

Anne Fletcher

Barbra Streisand

Joyce Brewster

Andy Brewster

Brett Cullen

Colin Hanks

Andrew Margolis Jr.

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Best movies to stream at home, movie news & guides, this movie is featured in the following articles., critics reviews.

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'guilt trip': streisand on songs, films and family.

guilt trip barbra streisand

Barbra Streisand is Joyce Brewster in The Guilt Trip . The multitalented performer has won an Oscar, an Emmy, a Grammy and a Tony — a feat achieved by fewer than a dozen artists. Sam Emerson/Paramount Pictures hide caption

Barbra Streisand is Joyce Brewster in The Guilt Trip . The multitalented performer has won an Oscar, an Emmy, a Grammy and a Tony — a feat achieved by fewer than a dozen artists.

If a good voice is genetic, it's likely Barbra Streisand got hers from her mother. Streisand's mother was too shy to ever perform professionally, but she had a lyric soprano and would sing at bar mitzvahs in their Brooklyn neighborhood when Streisand was a girl.

The older Streisand also encouraged her daughter's talent. When Barbra was 13, her mother booked time at a Brooklyn recording studio and they recorded two songs each. It was Barbra's first studio recording; the sessions snowballed from there. In the next five decades, she would win eight Grammys and become one of the top-selling recording artists of all time.

More On Barbra Streisand

Barbra Streisand Live: Brooklyn Girl, Still Making Good

All Songs Considered

Barbra streisand live: brooklyn girl, still making good.

Culturetopia: Streisand Edition

Culturetopia: Streisand Edition

Arts & life, barbra streisand on singing, music and the movies.

Along the way, Streisand — who has a new movie out with Seth Rogen, The Guilt Trip — also began acting, and is one of fewer than a dozen artists to have won Oscar, Emmy, Grammy and Tony awards.

In The Guilt Trip , Streisand plays a mom — a well-intentioned if somewhat overbearing Jewish mom who accompanies her grown son on a road trip across the country, to be exact.

The part is based on screenwriter Dan Fogelman's own late mother, a Streisand fan herself. In her initial approach to the role, Streisand tried to capture Fogelman's mother and says that in "trying to be a woman from New Jersey," she initially went for broad humor. After consulting Fogelman, however, she "modulated that to be a little less New Jersey — but I was playing her."

Fictional or real, mothers can be tricky business. Once Streisand left Brooklyn for Manhattan and her career began to take off, her own mother "couldn't quite understand how I had the courage to stand out there and sing [in public]." And she did not always welcome Barbra's success with enthusiasm. Jealousy was an issue.

"I didn't realize it till one Christmas night," Streisand says, "when people were giving me presents and [my mother] kind of went off a bit and started getting very emotional about, 'Why aren't you giving me presents? I'm her mother. I'm the mother,' that kind of thing. It was the first time I realized she was actually jealous of me. And that was hard to take, I must say."

Streisand wants to make another movie version of Gypsy, the famous musical about the stripper Gypsy Rose Lee and her domineering mother, and it's her relationship with the woman who raised her that's fueling that desire.

"I can totally identify," she says, "but I have to play the other part. I have to play the mother. ... It's almost like channeling my [own] mother."

Interview Highlights

On Release Me, her album of previously unreleased tracks

"I've had these things for a long time — a collection of these unreleased songs — and actually a friend of mine said, 'Did you ever see yourself singing on YouTube?' I was shocked. I thought, 'What?' I thought, 'That was my private property. How did anybody get me singing in a booth? ... [T]hese were songs that I did basically in very few takes, a lot of them one take, because we ran out of time by the end of a session. ... Three days, I completed my album in basically three days. We didn't do that many takes. We didn't have any way to fix things, and there were flaws in some of these things, so I thought, 'Let's put this out. Let's put it out,' and it's OK to expose whatever flaws I might have thought were there. I kind of enjoy things now that I don't think are perfect."

On how she got to know her father, who died when she was 15 months old

"I read his theses. He had written two theses [for a Ph.D.]. ... He was a teacher, you know. ... The first one was on the behavior of my brother. It was written almost like a play, but it was based on the truth. ... And I never read my father's second thesis until I was 39 years old and wanting to see if I should direct Yentl. ... It was all about how he taught English to prisoners and juvenile delinquents at Elmira Reformatory by using Chekov and Shakespeare and Ibsen. And so you see so much is in the genes, you know?"

What she expected to be when she was 13 and she was singing

"I was known on the block when I was a child as the kid with no father and a good voice. That was my identity, you know. ... So somehow I wanted to be recognized or seen or something like that, I guess. But it's interesting, the end of that record when I was 13 was the first time I experienced an improvisation, or something that came out of nowhere, because we had rehearsed with the pianist that my mother had found in the Catskill Mountains, and he played these long interludes, you know, as a break before you come back for the last section, and I remember saying to him, 'I think that's too long. The break, it should be shorter and then I'll come back in,' and I remember standing in front of that microphone, and something came out of my voice at the end that was a whole other thing than I'd rehearsed with him. And it was like a shocking kind of, 'Where did that come from?' and I like that. It so surprised me."

On her famous 1963 TV appearance with Judy Garland

"I can remember it distinctly. ... She was holding my hand and I thought, 'Gee, she seems nervous.' At that time, I wasn't nervous. I was still very young, I think, about to do Funny Girl , and now, when I think back on it, I think, 'Oh, my God, I know exactly what she's feeling.' Or, you know, the fears. It's like, as you get older and people are kind of looking for you to fail more, I think — not people, not the audience — but, you know, critics or producers or whatever. And I just felt her. I felt her anxiety. ... Part of me is much more relaxed than I've ever been, less frightened, less anxious. On the other hand, it's a coming-of-age-thing, and she was much younger than I am, but there are things with careers. ... I just understand the anxiety even though in a sense I'm calmer. It's a dichotomy. It's hard to explain. ... You wonder, 'Well, do I give it up? Do I retire? Or do I get more in before my time is up?' "

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On the Road, With Their Baggage

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guilt trip barbra streisand

By Stephen Holden

  • Dec. 18, 2012

Contrary to what the title and casting might suggest, the Barbra Streisand-Seth Rogen comedy, “The Guilt Trip,” is not “The Shrew and the Cringing Meatball.” There are no screaming accusations, no threats or recriminations, no tearful apologies in this amiable mother-son road odyssey.

The guilt that Ms. Streisand’s character, Joyce Brewster, lays on her grown son, Andy (Mr. Rogen), a struggling inventor, is larded with enough sweetness and awareness of appropriate boundaries that its humor caresses rather than stings. Joyce’s complaints mostly have to do with Andy’s decision to live 3,000 miles away from her in Los Angeles. When his mother becomes overbearing, Andy, sucking in his lower lip, politely silences her. Joyce, even at her most psychologically invasive, never whines or raises her voice.

Directed by Anne Fletcher (“The Proposal,” “27 Dresses”) from a pallid screenplay by Dan Fogelman (“Crazy, Stupid, Love”), “The Guilt Trip” is so comfy cozy that mothers and their grown children can watch it together without squirming. Even Joyce’s recollection of the time Andy’s penis turned purple is a zany throwaway remark delivered without a trace of Freudian insinuation.

What could have been a cutting satirical farce about domineering mothers and emasculated sons is a mildly funny, feel-good love story in which Mom’s sensible advice helps turn around her nerdy son’s foundering career. Although the main characters are softened Jewish stereotypes, there is no mention of religion.

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Andy, who studied organic chemistry at U.C.L.A., is traveling around the country pitching an organic cleaning product he invented that consists of coconut and palm-kernel oils, and soy. You can even drink it. But his presentations are so stiff and jargony that potential backers nod off while he is talking.

When Andy makes a rare visit to see Joyce in New Jersey, he and his mother begin reminiscing. Joyce remembers her first boyfriend before she married Andy’s father, who died when Andy was 8. She has since had no love life.

Andy, sleuthing on the Internet, discovers an unmarried corporate executive living in San Francisco who has the same name as that boyfriend. He invites his mother to join him on his eight-day cross-country return trip without telling her of his plan to look up her first love at the end of the journey. Joyce, not knowing his agenda, jumps at the opportunity to be with her only child for several days.

One bland running joke is Joyce’s obsessive thrift. She insists that they rent a subcompact car instead of an S.U.V., a decision he regrets when they find themselves sandwiched between trucks in an Arkansas blizzard. Joyce also insists that they share the same room in motels and disturbs him with her habit of crunching handfuls of M&Ms while in bed. Since Ms. Streisand , now 70, looks 20 years younger, it is not implausible when one leering motel clerk mistakes them for lovers. But the movie makes little of the confusion.

Joyce is frisky and game for adventure, and in a Lubbock, Tex., steakhouse she agrees to play beat the clock while consuming a 50-ounce steak. This challenge, which could have been milked for farce, is another missed comic opportunity in a movie so timid it seems afraid of its own shadow. The chief pleasures of this mild-mannered dud lie in watching two resourceful comic actors go through their paces like the pros they are.

“The Guilt Trip” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It has mild innuendo and some strong language.

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The Guilt Trip

Pairing Barbra Streisand and Seth Rogen as a neurotic New Jersey mother-son odd couple, then sending the two on a road trip through Texas and the South, Anne Fletcher's "The Guilt Trip" would seem to have uncovered some rarely tapped veins of Oedipal and culture-clash comedy.

By Andrew Barker

Andrew Barker

Senior Features Writer

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guilt trip

Pairing Barbra Streisand and Seth Rogen as a neurotic New Jersey mother-son odd couple, then sending the two on a road trip through Texas and the South, Anne Fletcher ‘s “The Guilt Trip” would seem to have uncovered some rarely tapped veins of Oedipal and culture-clash comedy. Yet the film scarcely bothers to mine them, making for a timid, modestly pleasant time-passer distinguished mostly by its unexplored potential. All the same, the attraction of seeing Streisand in her first non-“Fockers” role in more than a decade, as well as the general dearth of grandma-friendly comedies, should generate healthy holiday weekend business.

Dialing down his zaniness, if not his volume, Rogen plays Andy, a permanently flustered Los Angeles-based organic chemist who’s ready to launch his years-in-the-making invention, a cleaning product whose easily mispronounced name (Scioclean) poses the first of his many problems in pitching it to wholesalers. As a last-ditch marketing ploy, Andy plots a weeklong road trip to hawk his wares at company HQs across the country, starting with his hometown in New Jersey.

Popular on Variety

While there, he stops to visit his loquacious, long-widowed mother, Joyce (Streisand). Displaying all the general tendencies of a stereotypical Jewish mother with none of the cultural specifics, the overprotective, oversharing Joyce is allegedly responsible for Andy’s adult neuroses, though we rarely see her venture beyond typical motherly meddling. In any case, Andy whines through the visit until he’s about to head off, when he abruptly finds himself moved by his mother’s loneliness and revelations of a long-ago lost love, and invites her along for the journey.

Perhaps the biggest problem here is that “ The Guilt Trip ” is one of the most homebound road movies in recent memory, mostly alternating between motel rooms and cramped car seats, with little sense of forward momentum. When Dan Fogelman ‘s script does pause to build up a potential setpiece — dropping the twosome into a snowstorm , a steakhouse eating competition or Andy’s ex-girlfriend’s house — it tends to lose its nerve and simply moves on, never nudging its characters far enough past the borders of propriety to generate real laughs. In particular, to include a scene in which Streisand and Rogen are stranded at a strip club for hours, without even attempting a joke at its expense, should be a cinematic crime.

Helmer Anne Fletcher (“The Proposal,” “27 Dresses”) does achieve some genuine moments of warmth, and Streisand is consistently adorable in her tastefully dowdy duds, conveying the requisite amount of Babsiness without getting too fabulous for the character. Rogen, for his part, never quite finds the right rhythm for Andy, and often veers toward one-note irritation, although his disastrous pitch meetings eventually allow him the freedom to unleash his bellowing frustrations. (The film is chockablock with product placements, but these recurring pitch scenes provide some particularly canny, plot-friendly uses, allowing real-life companies — K-Mart, Orchard, Costco, et al. — to decline Andy’s invention by referencing the high standards of the many fine products they already offer. The shamelessness is almost admirable.)

A two-hander through and through, the pic carves out some moderate breathing room for Brett Cullen as a handsome Texan suitor and Kathy Najimy as a Jersey housewife, though most other characters are strictly relegated to scenery. Technical specs are all suitably professional, if never particularly distinguished.

  • Production: A Paramount release of a Paramount Pictures and Skydance Prods. presentation of a Michaels/Goldwyn production. Produced by Lorne Michaels, John Goldwyn, Evan Goldberg. Executive producers, Seth Rogen, Barbra Streisand, Mary McLaglen, Dan Fogelman, David Ellison, Dana Goldberg, Paul Schwake. Directed by Anne Fletcher. Screenplay, Dan Fogelman.
  • Crew: Camera (Deluxe color), Oliver Stapleton; editors, Priscilla Nedd Friendly, Dana E. Glauberman; music, Christophe Beck; music supervisor, Buck Damon; production designer, Nelson Coates; costume designer, Danny Glicker; art director, David Lazan; set decorator, Karen O'Hara; sound (Dolby/Datasat), Peter J. Devlin; supervising sound editor, Karen Baker Landers; re-recording mixers, Scott Millan, Greg P. Russell; visual effects supervisors, Jamie Dixon, Clark Parkhurst; visual effects, Hammerhead Prods., Lola VFX; assistant director, Joe Camp III; casting, Cathy Sandrich Gelfond, Amanda Mackey. Reviewed at Paramount Studios, Los Angeles, Dec. 6, 2012. MPAA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 95 MIN.
  • With: Joyce Brewster - Barbra Streisand Andrew Brewster - Seth Rogen Ben Graw - Brett Cullen Rob - Colin Hanks Andrew Margolis Jr. - Adam Scott Anita - Miriam Margolyes Gayle - Kathy Najimy Amy - Nora Dunn Jessica - Yvonne Strahovski

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The guilt trip: film review.

Barbra Streisand and Seth Rogen star in a mother-son road-trip comedy from director Anne Fletcher ("The Proposal").

By Todd McCarthy

Todd McCarthy

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The Guilt Trip: Film Review

The Guilt Trip Streisand Cheering - H 2012

Yentl goes yenta in The Guilt Trip , a creakily old-fashioned comedy that forgot to pack the laughs along with the nudging and kvetching. Possibly the first American film in decades in which characters drive cross-country courtesy of process shots out the back window, this mother-son yakfest blows a gasket and all four tires before it even hits the road. With Seth Rogen in very subdued mode, his fans will smell this one a mile away; it might be a movie only their mothers — or die-hard Barbra Streisand fans — could love.

When was the last time an overbearing Jewish mother giving her schlemiel of a son a hard time about not being married was a major component of a big Hollywood film? This sort of routine used to pop up all the time in American comedy but pretty much has vanished in the rearview mirror since the heyday of Ruth Gordon . So to behold Streisand’s New York mom Joyce Brewster hectoring her homely visiting son Andrew (Rogen) about his myriad personal shortcomings is to revisit a musty mind-set that the minor updates in Dan Fogelman ‘s woeful script can’t begin to freshen up.

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VIDEO: ‘The Guilt Trip’ Trailer: Barbra Streisand Drives Seth Rogen Crazy

The early scenes of Andrew’s return from California to his childhood home are so embarrassing that you wonder if such impressive consistency can possibly be sustained. Andrew knows what he’s in for, but that still doesn’t help when Mom immediately starts in asking what happened to former girlfriends X, Y and Z, complaining that he went to UCLA just to get as far away from her as possible, pointing out that she hasn’t had a date since her husband’s long-ago death and then recommending that Andrew get therapy. Enough, already.

In an effort to connect with Andrew, Joyce unloads what she considers a bombshell of a secret: She actually had a boyfriend before she met her husband and loved him so much she named her only son after him. Considering it odd she never tried to look him up after his dad died, Andrew does research that reveals he’s an executive in San Francisco. With an ulterior motive in mind, he invites Mom to join him on a drive across the country, during which he’ll make stops in Virginia, Texas, Santa Fe and Las Vegas to hawk a nontoxic cleansing liquid product he has created to potential retailers.

These pitch sessions are desultory affairs — a salesman Andrew is not — and Joyce doesn’t help matters by hovering and carrying on in ways that scarcely help her son’s cause. To save a few bucks, she insists they rent a compact rather than an SUV, forcing them to share very close quarters as they listen to Jeffrey Eugenides ’ gender-bending Middlesex on CD. The way Joyce gets excited about gift shops and free continental breakfasts at motels (where she insists they stay in one room to save more money), you’d think she’d never been out of New York before.

In terms of viewer relief from the constant haranguing, getting on the road held out the hope of changing scenery and a possible parade of lively supporting roles. Instead, we get process shots of the two leads crammed into the tiny car intercut with second unit coverage of highways and the countryside. They do get out of the car to look at the Grand Canyon, but after about five seconds, they decide they’ve seen enough and move on to Vegas, which Joyce actually likes.

The one stop that at least yields something different is at a Texas steakhouse, where anyone who can eat a 4 1/2-pound steak and all the trimmings in one hour gets it for free. Uncharacteristically, Joyce volunteers, launching a gorge-fest that at least presents the half-amusing spectacle of Streisand pigging out and wins Joyce an admirer in the form of a handsome older gent (the indisputably handsome Brett Cullen ) who’d like to have her come up and see him sometime.

The climactic visit to San Francisco to track down Joyce’s former beau predictably plays on, and aims to stimulate, bittersweet emotions. At the same time, the easy-to-get point of the enterprise is to stress that the mother and son’s prolonged time together has forced them to break through their various barriers, grudges and expectations to arrive at a more honest satisfying relationship. Yep, that’ll do the trick every time.

CONCERT REVIEW: Barbra Streisand in Brooklyn

The Guilt Trip  provides heavy competition with director Anne Fletcher ‘s previous films ( Step Up , 27 Dresses , The Proposal ) as to which is the most formulaic and conventional, but this one takes the cake for being the most visually unimaginative and clunky. Worse, even the most easy-to-please audiences will struggle to find more than a half-dozen laughs here, so bereft is the film of fresh comic ideas.

Rogen — who for some reason sports about a one-day’s grizzle of beard throughout — drastically underplays, probably realizing that, with Streisand emoting so broadly, it was the only way to go. For her part, some combination of cosmetic expertise, cinematic enhancement and natural endowment makes Streisand look more like she’s in her 50s than in her 70s, which is the actuality. Those who’ve always liked the singer-actress probably won’t mind her here; for the nonfan, this is not the film that will change your mind.

A retinue of terrific character actors could have greatly enlivened the proceedings, but Fogelman ( Cars , Bolt , Tangled , Crazy, Stupid, Love ) didn’t write the parts for them.

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Barbra Streisand and Seth Rogen Talk THE GUILT TRIP, Meeting for the First Time, Identifying with the Script, What Convinced Streisand to Sign On, and More

Barbra Streisand and Seth Rogen Talk THE GUILT TRIP. Seth Rogen and Barbra Streisand talk about The Guilt Trip, meeting for the first time, and more.

This holiday season, you can celebrate family at the movies with The Guilt Trip , which tells the story of Andy Brewster ( Seth Rogen ), as he embarks on a cross-country road trip with his mother, Joyce ( Barbra Streisand ), to turn one of his inventions into a success.  With both funny and poignant moments on their mother-son adventure, each realizes that they just want the other to be happy.

During a press conference to promote the film’s December 19 th theatrical release, Seth Rogen talked about sussing his co-star out before filming, how he approached playing the role, how crazy his own mother drives him and cracking up on set, while Barbra Streisand talked about what ultimately convinced her to take this role, how she most identified with her character, how she feels about being labeled as a gay icon, what gives her the greatest artistic satisfaction, the most challenging scene, what she hopes audiences will take from the film, and which technologies she’d like to consider using, if and when she ever directs again.  Check out what they had to say after the jump.

Question:  What was it like to meet each other, the first time?

BARBRA STREISAND:  Well, Seth sussed me out.

SETH ROGEN:  I did.  

STREISAND:  He called people from The Fockers movies.  

ROGEN:  I think I was actually working with John Schwartzman, who was the cinematographer on Meet the Fockers , at the time this came up.  I asked him what he thought of Barbra, and he said she was great.  I know Jay Roach a little, so I think I might have asked him, and he said that she was awesome, too.  I think I might have run into Ben Stiller and asked him.  So, she checked out.  This Barbra Streisand lady checked out, so I thought I’d give her a shot.

STREISAND:  I didn’t know who to call.  I don’t know any of the people from his movies.  But, I thought he was adorable.  I thought, “This is unlikely, which makes it interesting.  And yet, we’re both Jewish and I could be his mother.”  

ROGEN:  When we met, we got along.  We got along very well.  

STREISAND:  Instantly.

ROGEN:  Very fast, we got along very well.  

Barbra, how did your son ultimately convince you to do this film?

STREISAND:  He was actually very important in my decision to make the movie because he was recovering from back surgery, so he was in bed for a few days.  I brought the script over and read it out loud.  His father was in the room, too.  We were both coddling our son.  So, he became the audience, and Jason was reading all the parts with me.  He said, “I think you should do it, mom,” and I really trust his integrity and opinion.  He has great taste, in whatever he chooses to do.  It’s amazing.  So, he clinched the deal.

You must get a ton of scripts.

STREISAND:  I don’t.

Do they just not make it to you?

STREISAND:  Everybody thinks, “She must get so many scripts.  Why should I send this?  She’ll never get a chance to read it.”  Meanwhile, I go, “Where are the scripts?”                  

Seth, how did you approach playing Andy Brewster?

ROGEN:  I really thought of it as a very real-time performance.  You are thrown into the movie with him, so I thought I should just try to be as real and natural as possible.  He’s not a particularly funny guy.  He’s not even in a particularly good mood, for the majority of the movie.  But, I thought that, if you seem a little vulnerable, people seem to relate to that.  That was the balance.  And I gave options.  I would do takes where I was more harsh with Barbra and takes where I was less harsh, takes where I was more annoyed and takes where I was less annoyed,  takes where I was just fully entertained by her and takes where I was like, “Oh, shut the fuck up!”  We knew that it would be somewhere in there.  That’s how I act, especially when you don’t know.  We knew that that was going to be a line of how annoying she could be versus how annoyed he could be.  You’ve got to make sure audiences relate to both of them, so we talked a lot about it while we were filming.

STREISAND:  The director plays an instrument and modulates.  

ROGEN:  I play my own instrument a lot, too, as an actor.  

STREISAND:  I love it because it’s a transformative kind of movie.  They start at one point, both tragically alone and not finding a mate, and then, by the end, there are many more possibilities.  The horizon is open.  There’s more to life than The Gap.  It’s about love.  I always say that it’s a different kind of love story.  

ROGEN:  Which, to me, sounds gross.

STREISAND:  He pukes at that.  He goes to the sexual.  

ROGEN:  Right in the gutter.        

Barbra, what did you identify with most, with this character?

STREISAND:  Mothers develop guilt trips.  When I was working a lot, I felt guilty, as a parent, that I couldn’t pick up my son from school every day and bake him cookies.  I know that feeling, a lot.  So, you try to compensate.  Children sense that guilt, and they’re going through their own rebellious times.  And having a famous parent is an odd thing, you know?  So, I thought it was interesting to investigate trying to be my son’s friend versus his mother.  When it comes to time to really say, “You abused me.  You disrespect me.  You talk back to me.  You don’t honor what I say.  You won’t take my advice,” this movie hit on all those things that I thought I could explore.  And it was a true story.  It’s Dan and his mother, and she was a fan of mine.  There was just something right about it.  And Dan wrote this lovely script.  It just felt like it was meant to be, for me to come back to work, in a starring role rather than six days on a movie, which I really like.  It was time to challenge myself again.  Of course, I made it very difficult for them to hire me because I kept wanting an out, so I made it really hard.  I never do this, but I was like, “I really don’t want to shlep to Paramount.  It’s two hours, each way.  Would you rent a warehouse and build the sets in the Valley, no more than 45 minutes from my house?”  And they said, “Yes.”  On the Fockers movies, I had to get up early, and I’m not an early bird.  Even Seth says, “It’s very hard to be funny at 7:30 in the morning,” and he’s right.  He has to have a few cups of tea.  You have to feed him, a little bit.  So I said, “You can’t pick me up until 8:30 because that’s a normal time for me to get up because I love the night.”  My husband and I stay up until two or three in the morning, so we don’t function that well at six in the morning.  And they said, “Okay.”  I remember saying to Anne, “Would you make the movie without me?,” and she said, “No.”  That made me feel bad and guilty.  I thought, “She’s not going to have this job, and I want her to work.”  

ROGEN:  I was open to Shirley MacLaine.  No, that’s not true.  I only would have done it, if Barbra was doing it.  They were like, “They want you to do this movie with Barbra, but Barbra’s not sure if she wants to do it.”  I just said, “Let me know if she says yes.”  I literally made two movies, during that time.  We were editing 50/50 and I got a call that said, “Barbra said yes.”  

STREISAND:  It’s great to feel wanted.  

Seth, how crazy does your own mother drive you?  

ROGEN:  Very.  My mom drives me crazy sometimes, but I have a good relationship with her.  I see my parents a lot, but it’s a lot like in the movie.  For no reason, I get annoyed.  I’ll just find myself reverting back to the mentality of a 14-year-old kid, who just doesn’t want to be around his parents.  Honestly, it’s one of the things I related to most, in the script.  It was that dynamic where, the more your mother tries, the more she bugs you, and the more it bugs you, the more she tries.  You see her trying to say the thing that won’t annoy you, but she can’t.  

Who made who crack up and laugh the most, on set?  

ROGEN:  She cracked me up quite a bit.  

STREISAND:  Because it was more unexpected from me, probably, and I’m more serious.  

ROGEN:  This lady is a very serious woman.

STREISAND:  But, (director) Anne [Fletcher] and (writer) Dan [Fogelman] used to throw us things.  They would say things like, “Riff on your cousin,” and we would just go and they would laugh.

ROGEN:  The way we talk in real life is not entirely different than our rapport in the movie.  We got along.  It was a lot of me trying to explain things to her about modern times, and her trying to feed me shit I didn’t want to eat.  

STREISAND:  And yet, I was the one with the iPhone.                     

ROGEN:  She had an iPhone before me.  I had a Blackberry.  She was always playing games on her I phone, so I was like, “I’ve gotta get one of these.  If Barbra can work an iPhone, it’s got to be fun.”  And I changed her clocks during daylight savings.  

STREISAND:  He’s very handy.  

Barbra, how do you feel about the label of gay icon?

STREISAND:  I love being an icon to anybody.  Equal rights, you know.

ROGEN:  Me, too.

What gives you the greatest satisfaction, as an artist?  

STREISAND:  I prefer things that are private, so I love recording and I love making films, as a filmmaker, because it uses every bit of what you have experienced or know, whether it’s graphics composition, decorating, psychology, storytelling, or whatever it is.  It’s a wonderful thing.  

What does it mean for you to be part of a project like this?  

STREISAND:  Well, I was dealing with very talented people.  I had loved Anne’s movie, The Proposal , and I looked Dan up.  I loved Tangled , and I saw his name on it.  He’s a very gifted writer.  And Seth [Rogen] is terrific at what he does.  

What was the hardest thing for you to do in this film?  

STREISAND:  Eating steak.  For a person who doesn’t like steak, that was the hardest part.  

Is it more difficult for you to be funny or serious?  

STREISAND:  They’re both the same.  What reaches an audience is honesty.  If you’re saying something truthful that’s supposed to be a funny line, it’s going to be funny.  And if it’s supposed to be a serious line, it’s going to be serious.  But, I don’t think there’s a distinction between how you play drama or comedy, if it’s based in the truth.

You’ve had such an amazing career, at this point.  What do you think the secret to your success is?  

STREISAND:  I don’t make that many movies, and I don’t make that many appearances.  

ROGEN:  She leaves them wanting more.

STREISAND:  That’s it.  Less is more.  Maybe that keeps a little mystery, or something.  I don’t know.  I like to stay home a lot.  I like to do other things, like decorate and build.  

What do you want audiences to take away from this film?

STREISAND:  I want them to be moved.  I want to identify.  I want them to see themselves in the movie.  I want them to get closer to their children.  

ROGEN:  Yeah, all that.  

Barbra, what is your beauty secret?

ROGEN:  Sitting next to me helps.  

STREISAND:  He is so funny!  If you knew all of my self-doubt, my god.  I don’t know.  Maybe it’s because I’m slightly childish.  I like the child part of me, so maybe it reflects in my face or something.                    

You can sing, act, compose, write and direct.  What can’t you do?  

STREISAND:  I can’t cook, at all.  I would not know how to make coffee.  I took cooking classes, so I know how to make chocolate soufflé, but ask me if I want to make soufflé.  I let somebody else make the chocolate soufflé, and I eat it.  I found that, when I took cooking classes and tried to cook, I didn’t want to eat it.  The joy was gone.  I was always filthy with the stuff, and then had to clean it up.  I don’t like that.      

Since you last directed a movie, so many things have changed with the way they can be shot, with digital, 3D and even 48 fps.  What are your thoughts on these technologies and whether you might use them, as a director?  

STREISAND:  Well, when and if I direct another film, I would have to go suss out the RED camera, the Alexa and all of those new things.  I know I love film, so I don’t know what I’m going to find out about that.  I’ll suss it out.  By the way, A Star Was Born was done live.  I sang live.  I also sang live at the end of Funny Girl .  That’s what they’re talking about with Les Miserables .  I said, “How do you know where the emotion is going to hit you?”  I’m a terrible lip-syncher because I have to be in the moment.  I can’t lip-synch to something that I recorded, three months before.  So, I thought it was great that (director) Tom Hooper let the actors sing live.  

The Guilt Trip opens in theaters on December 19 th .

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Entertainer Barbara Streisand

'Guilt Trip': Streisand On Songs, Film And Family

In her new movie, singer, actor, writer, director and producer Barbra Streisand plays a well-meaning if overbearing Jewish mom in The Guilt Trip. The star says her own mother both encouraged her talents and was jealous of them.

  • Barbra Streisand
  • Terry Gross

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  • Parenting & Families

December 17, 2012

Guest: Barbra Streisand

TERRY GROSS, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Today is our first broadcast since learning about the shootings in Newtown. Our thoughts are with everyone in that community. My guest today is Barbra Streisand, and I wish I could sing my introduction of her the way Judy Garland did when Streisand was a guest on Garland's show back in 1963.

(SOUNDBITE OF TELEVISION PROGRAM)

JUDY GARLAND: We have a very exciting show planned for you tonight. We've got marvelous people.

(Singing) We've got Barbra Streisand. I think she's nice, and she has such poise, and she's got such elegance. It's a joy to have her on my show.

GROSS: Before we talk with Streisand about her long career, including that appearance with Judy Garland and her new movie "The Guilt Trip," let's get in a Streisand mood with an excerpt of her wonderful 2009 concert at the Village Vanguard. This is "Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most."

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SPRING CAN REALLY HANG YOU UP THE MOST")

BARBARA STREISAND: (Singing) Spring is here. There's no mistaking robins building nests from coast to coast. My heart tries to sing so they won't hear it breaking. Spring can really hang you up the most. Morning's kiss wakes trees and flowers. And to them I'd like to drink a toast. I walk in the park just to kill the lonely hours. Spring can really hang you up the most.

(Singing) Love came my way...

GROSS: Barbra Streisand, from her CD and DVD "One Night Only." The occasion for my interview with Barbra Streisand is her new film comedy "The Guilt Trip." Seth Rogen plays a 30-something scientist who has invented a new eco-friendly cleanser that he's trying to convince one of the major chain stores to stock.

He plans to rent a car in New Jersey, where he's visiting his mother, played by Streisand. He intends to make stops in every place he's managed to make an appointment to plug his product. Just before beginning the trip, he decides to invite his mother to accompany him. He has an ulterior motive, which he isn't going to reveal to her.

(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "THE GUILT TRIP")

SETH ROGEN: (As Andrew Brewster) Do you want to come on my trip with me, Mom?

STREISAND: (As Joyce Brewster) You want to drive cross-country with me?

ROGEN: (As Andrew) Yeah, no, it's - you know, we won't be gone long. It's only eight days in a car together.

STREISAND: (As Joyce) Wait a minute. I want to make sure that I'm hearing this correctly: You want to spend a week in a car with your mother?

ROGEN: (As Andrew) More than anything in the world.

STREISAND: (As Joyce) Don't you think I might get on your nerves a little bit?

ROGEN: (As Andrew) No, it was just a thought. And if you don't want to do it, then fine. I don't want to push you into it.

STREISAND: (As Joyce) What? What? Am I so awful that you can't spend a little time in a car with me?

ROGEN: (As Andrew) I'm inviting you. Do you want to go - do you want to drive across the country with me?

STREISAND: (As Joyce) Well, I'd have to reroute my mail.

ROGEN: (As Andrew) You have five seconds to tell me whether you want to go or not.

STREISAND: (As Joyce) I can't wait. What are you kidding me? Honey, that is so exciting. (Unintelligible) oh, my God. My boy just - oh, my God. I can't - I have to touch up my roots, though, before I go. What am I going to pack? You've got to fill me in on all the weather conditions in all the states that we're going to go through.

GROSS: Barbra Streisand, welcome to FRESH AIR. It's such a pleasure to have you on our show.

STREISAND: Thank you.

GROSS: Did you think of anybody or any people in particular when you were creating your character for "The Guilt Trip"?

STREISAND: Well, it was based on a true story. Dan Fogelman's mom...

GROSS: He's the screenwriter.

STREISAND: He's the screenwriter, yeah, and she was a big fan of mine. And that's why she wanted, before she died by the way, wanted me to play that part.

GROSS: Well, it's interesting that you should say that, because in a way I feel like you are playing the part of one of your fans.

GROSS: Like and in a way, I almost feel like there's a little bit of Linda Richman, the Mike Myers "Saturday Night Live" character who worshipped you, in the part.

STREISAND: Well, I was trying to be, you know, a woman from New Jersey, and I thought it would be funny, actually. In the reading I did it with a New Jersey accent. And then I thought, you know, I asked Dan and Anne, director and writer, what they thought, and I sort of modulated that to be a little bit less New Jersey. But I was playing her.

GROSS: So when you accept, your son - played by Seth Rogen - when you accept his offer to go on a road trip with him, you call him Tatala, which is a Yiddish term of endearment that I think is mostly...

STREISAND: That wasn't in the script.

GROSS: I figured, I figured, and my other guess is that your mother called you Tatala.

STREISAND: I wish she did call me Tatala. No, I don't think so. It's just, you know, it's the way I feel about my son, I guess.

GROSS: Did you call him Tatala?

STREISAND: Well, when that - you know, it comes out at moments of endearment, and just they're like babies. Some part of them always remains a baby to you.

GROSS: Which is part of what the movie's about, because he objects to the part of you that sees him as a baby.

STREISAND: Yeah, but because we live on two different coasts in the movie, I don't see him that much, and she's living in the past. She's a woman who lives a kind of sheltered life and doesn't really want romance anymore, and has been hurt earlier. And in a sense it's like osmosis, you know, it affects him on a cellular memory, he also has a hard time finding a girlfriend, you know, and he's been hurt, too.

So I think it's kind of a transformative trip. You know, it's more than a road trip. It's time to be set free, you know, and to get to know one another, really.

GROSS: You know, in some of your movies, including "The Guilt Trip," you have, you know, a very, like, New York or Brooklyn or New Jersey accept. How much of that did you actually grow up with?

STREISAND: Totally. I mean, I didn't leave Brooklyn - gosh, I was 16 years old. I had never been to Manhattan until I was 14, when I went to the theater every Saturday and discovered New York City, which was like a different country than Brooklyn.

GROSS: I know what you mean because I grew up in Brooklyn, and Manhattan was like - especially Greenwich Village, it was another world.

STREISAND: Yeah, it's a wonderful world.

GROSS: But, you know, it's funny because most people have to try to lose their regional accent when they break into theater or movies, but early on you were given roles where you had to zets(ph) up your accent.

STREISAND: Yeah, but see, I don't think I have that kind of accent now, when I'm talking to you.

GROSS: You certainly don't know.

STREISAND: In real life. So in a sense I had to, you know, go back there to play her, in a sense, you know.

GROSS: In the new movie.

STREISAND: Yeah, in the new movie.

GROSS: Well, your new movie is called "The Guilt Trip." You have an album that came out recently called "Release Me." And I want to play a track from that. This is an album of previously unreleased tracks.

STREISAND: Right.

GROSS: And the first thing I'm wondering is, like, did you have to be convinced to do this, to bring out previously unreleased tracks?

STREISAND: No, no, no, no, it was my idea because, you know, sometimes when people say to me how come you haven't made a movie in a starring role for so long, I go I'm basically lazy. So I enjoy my free time. But then I also like to work at periods in my life, you know. And I thought I've had these things for a long time, a collection of these unreleased songs.

And actually a friend of mine said did you ever see this, yourself singing on YouTube. I was shocked. I said what? I thought that was my private property. How did anybody get me singing in a booth, you know, something like "Glocca Morra," "How Are Things in Glocca Morra?" And I was a little shocked, and I thought you know what? I need to release another album.

I really liked that "Glocca Morra." And these were songs that I did, basically in, you know, very few takes, a lot of them one take because we ran out of time at the end of a session, and we used to do four songs a session, three days. I completed my album in basically three days.

We didn't do that many takes. We didn't have any way to fix things. And they were - there were flaws in some of these things. So I thought let's put this out. Let's put it out, and it's OK to expose, you know, whatever flaws I might have thought were there. I kind of enjoy things now that I don't think are perfect.

GROSS: Yeah, I've always liked things that aren't perfect, things that are more off-the-cuff. There's a track I want to play that I think is just a really interesting document, in addition to being a beautiful recording.

STREISAND: What is it?

GROSS: It's "I Think It's Going to Rain Today" with Randy Newman at the piano, recorded in 1970. What's the story behind this session?

STREISAND: I think that was - Richard Perry(ph) was the producer, and he was sort of bringing me into the new century of contemporary music with "Stony End" and so forth. And he paired me with Randy Newman, and I liked that song. I remember coming up to my apartment and playing the piano, and we just did it sort of in, you know, I think one or two takes.

And I like the simplicity of it. I like it a lot. So here it is, you know.

GROSS: Yeah, so here it is, and this is from Barbra Streisand's latest album, which is called "Release Me."

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG "I THINK IT'S GOING TO RAIN TODAY")

STREISAND: (Singing) Broken windows and empty hallways, a pale dead moon in a sky streaked with gray. Human kindness is o'erflowing, and I think it's going to rain today. Scarecrows dressed in the latest styles with frozen smiles to chase love away. Human kindness is o'erflowing. And I think it's going to rain today.

GROSS: That's Barbra Streisand, recorded in 1970 with the songwriter of that song, Randy Newman, at the piano. And that's on her latest album "Release Me," which is an album of previously unreleased recordings. Barbra Streisand, your mother sang. Did she want to be a professional singer?

STREISAND: She did, but she said she was very shy. So she couldn't quite understand how I had the courage to stand out there and sing. She would sing at Bar Mitzvahs. My mother had a beautiful voice. My mother took me to Nola Studios because she wanted to record two songs, and so she had me record two songs when I was 13. And she was kind of a lyric soprano.

GROSS: Did your mother sing a lot around the house when you were growing up?

STREISAND: She kind of did sometimes, yeah. My sister and I used to laugh, and I used to record her. I think when I was 18 I got a tape recorder, and I would record my mother. Some of it is on my "Just for the Record" collection.

GROSS: Which I happen to have right here.

STREISAND: Will you hear my mother?

GROSS: Yeah, that's what we're about to play.

STREISAND: Oh good.

GROSS: And this is - honestly, for any, like, serious Barbra Streisand fan, this has, like, so many interesting, like, demos and TV broadcasts. And it's filled with interesting documents.

STREISAND: Yeah, I said "Just For the Record" because it's - most of these collections, these box sets, aren't they just recordings that we've heard before. But this was really just for the record. So my mother happened to sing "Secondhand Rose" in the same key as I did. I put them together, or me singing with Michel Legrand at a piano before I recorded "What Are You Doing The Rest of Your Life?"

I'm very proud of that box set.

GROSS: Oh, it's wonderful. So what I want to play is your mother singing "Secondhand Rose," recorded in 1965.

STREISAND: Oh, cute.

GROSS: Yeah.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SECONDHAND ROSE")

STREISAND: Where's mother. Mother, mother? Come sing a song for us, mother.

DIANA ROSEN: (Singing) Father has a business, strictly secondhand, everything from toothpaste to a baby grand. Stuff in our apartment came from father's store. Even things I'm wearing, someone wore before. It's no wonder that I feel abused. I never have a thing that ain't been used.

STREISAND: (Singing) I'm wearing secondhand shoes, secondhand hose. All the girls hand me their secondhand bows. Even my pajamas...

GROSS: That's Barbra Streisand cross-faded with a recording of Streisand's mother singing "Secondhand Rose" in 1955. That mix is on the Streisand box set "Just For the Record." Streisand stars in the new movie comedy "The Guilt Trip." We'll talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

GROSS: My guest is Barbra Streisand. She stars as Seth Rogen's mother in the new movie comedy "The Guilt Trip." When we left off, we heard a recording of Streisand's mother singing. So was your mother jealous of you or competitive with you when you started to have, you know, a career?

STREISAND: It's interesting you should ask that. I didn't realize it until one Christmas night when people were giving me presents, and she kind of went off a bit and started getting very emotional about why aren't you giving me presents, I'm her mother, I'm the mother, that kind of thing. It was the first time I realized that she was actually jealous of me.

And that was hard to take, I must say.

GROSS: I know you're trying to do a movie adaptation of "Gypsy." Does that feeling that she was jealous have anything to do with you wanting to do this classic musical about a stage mother who becomes jealous of her daughter's stardom?

STREISAND: Yeah, I think that's true. I can totally identify. But I have to play the other part, right. I have to play the mother.

GROSS: Right, right.

STREISAND: But I - it's almost like, you know, channeling my mother, yeah.

GROSS: So I know your father died when you were 15 months old, I believe, of a cerebral hemorrhage. How did you learn about who he was to better learn about who you were?

STREISAND: Well, I read his theses. He had written two theseses(ph), or however you say that word.

GROSS: Like doctoral theses? Oh, he got his Ph.D.?

STREISAND: Yeah. He was a teacher, you know. And one was very interesting. He was also listed in a book called "Great Leaders of Education." And he was very young when he died, he was 35. But the first one was on the behavior of my brother. It was written almost like a play, but it was based on the truth and then his analysis afterwards. That was fascinating to read.

GROSS: All about your brother?

STREISAND: Yeah, about my brother. I wasn't born yet.

GROSS: Wow.

STREISAND: Now, I never read my father's second thesis until I was about 39 years old and wanting to see if I should direct "Yentl." And with this experience that I had, I was able to read that second thesis, and it was all about how he taught English to prisoners and juvenile delinquents at Elmira Reformatory(ph) by using Chekov and Shakespeare and Ibsen.

And so, you know, so much is in the genes, you know.

GROSS: I guess that made you think about how there could be, which you already knew by then, like so much meaning in great works of literature or theater.

STREISAND: Yeah, exactly.

GROSS: You tell a story in the liner notes for the recording that we just heard from when you were 13 about how back in those days, you wanted to buy sheet music, but you and your mother didn't really have any money. So you convinced your mother to pretend that she was Vaughn Monroe's secretary and pick up sheet music.

STREISAND: That's right.

GROSS: And I thought: That really is chutzpah. And was your mother game to do that? And why, of all the singers in the world, why Vaughn Monroe?

STREISAND: You know, he was famous at the time.

GROSS: Well sure, but so were a lot of other singers.

STREISAND: I didn't know them. But I thought gee, I don't know if somebody told me, or how did I figure that if you called, since they want you to record their songs, the publishers would send you free sheet music. But it worked.

GROSS: Oh I get it, I get it. Oh, that's really funny. And so what songs did you order? Do you remember?

STREISAND: Yeah, as a matter of fact, I just found the letters that I wrote my mother when I was 17, 18, my first job away from New York City after the Bon Soir. So I was 18 years old, and I was giving her a list of songs to get the sheet music to, some - you know, Harold Arlen, I loved Harold Arlen. I discovered him when I was about 17.

GROSS: Don't tell me when you were already performing at clubs, your mother had to pretend she was Vaughn Monroe's representative?

STREISAND: I think so.

GROSS: Really? Oh boy.

GROSS: Barbra Streisand will be back in the second half of the show. She stars with Seth Rogen in the new movie comedy "The Guilt Trip." I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

GROSS: This FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross, back with Barbra Streisand. She stars with Seth Rogen, playing his mother in the new movie comedy, "The Guilt Trip." When we left off, we were talking about her childhood and getting started as a singer.

So we heard a very early recording by your mother. I want to play a very early recording of you. This is something you did at age 13 in 1955, that's...

STREISAND: Mm-hmm. That's the same day. Yeah.

GROSS: The same day? OK.

STREISAND: As my - well, as my mother recorded her two songs. Yeah.

GROSS: So this is also from the Barbra Streisand box set from a few years back called "Just for the Record." And let's hear it, and then we'll talk about it.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "YOU'LL NEVER KNOW")

STREISAND: (Singing) You'll never know just how much I miss you. You'll never know just how much I care. And if I tried I still couldn't hide my love for you. You ought to know for haven't I told you so, a million or more times?

(Singing) You went away, and my heart went with you. I speak your name in my every prayer. If there is some other way to prove that I love you, I swear I don't know how. You'll never know if you don't know now.

GROSS: That's Barbra Streisand, recorded in 1955 when she was 13. And she and her mother went to a recording studio and just, you know, made a couple of tracks. And, of course, Barbra Streisand is in the new movie "The Guilt Trip," with Seth Rogen.

It's so interesting to hear you before you were really formed as a singer, before you're, you know, an adult. When I know it's you, I can recognize that it's you. If you just played it for me, I'm not sure - if you give me a blindfold test, I'm not sure I'd recognize you. But so many of the characteristics that you're kind of famous for as an interpreter aren't quite there yet. What were you expecting to be when you were 13 and you were singing?

STREISAND: Well, I was known on the block, you know, when I was a child, as the kid with no father and a good voice.

STREISAND: That was my identity, you know. But...

GROSS: A negative and a positive.

STREISAND: Mm-hmm. So, somehow, I wanted to be recognized or seen or something like that, I guess. But it's interesting, that was, the end of that record when I was 13, was the first time I ever experienced an improvisation, you know, or something that came out of nowhere. Because we had rehearsed with the pianist that my mother found in the Catskill Mountains, and he played these long interludes, you know, as a break before you come back for the last section. And I remember saying to him, I think that's too long, your - the break. I mean, it should be shorter, and then I'll come back in. And I remember standing in front of that microphone, and something came out of my voice at the end that was a whole other thing than I'd rehearsed with him. And it was like a shocking, kind of, where did that come from? And I like that. It so surprised me. It was, like, where does - where is that coming from?

GROSS: What were your aspirations then?

STREISAND: Probably to be just famous, I think.

GROSS: It's funny, because once you became famous, I think you receded from - I mean...

STREISAND: Exactly.

GROSS: You know, you, like, you don't make many movies. You don't get many concerts.

STREISAND: Mm-hmm.

GROSS: You don't seem to really like the limelight that much anymore.

STREISAND: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. That was kind of shocking, too. It's, like, with stardom, you mean they shake your car as you get out. And Marty, who you spoke to, once got punched by a...

GROSS: Your representative.

STREISAND: Yeah. Punched by a photographer, and the blood is coming down his face in the opening night of a movie. And I thought: This is fame? This is stardom? I don't want it, you know.

GROSS: Mm. Yeah.

STREISAND: I like to stay home. I just like the work process. I like the creative experience of, like, that, you know, that word that I felt at 13, is it inspiration? What is it? You know, it's, like, where did it come from? What part of the mind or the heart or wherever that comes from?

GROSS: My guest is Barbra Streisand. She stars with Seth Rogen in the new movie comedy, "The Guilt Trip."

More after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

GROSS: Let's get back to my interview with Barbra Streisand. She stars in the new movie comedy, "The Guilt Trip."

When you were young, you went to a yeshiva for girls. A yeshiva is a Jewish school...

STREISAND: It was a yeshiva for boys and girls.

GROSS: For boys and girls.

STREISAND: Yeah.

GROSS: OK. So how did what you studied compare to what students in public schools got? Did you get a lot of Jewish education in the yeshiva?

STREISAND: Half the day was Hebrew, half the day was English. So we learned how to read Hebrew. Of course, they didn't teach you how - what it meant. That was odd, you know, to not understand. You could read it, but you didn't understand what we were saying. Yes, so that's my first public appearance since the yeshiva didn't have a stage, was at PS 25, was like the first time I went into a public school. Oh, this is different, you know. It was big.

GROSS: So did going to yeshiva influenced you wanting to make the film "Yentl," which is about a girl whose father is a rabbi and the girl really wants to - this is based on an Isaac Bashevis Singer story.

STREISAND: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

GROSS: The girl really wants to study Torah, but you have to be - this is set in Eastern Europe in the early 1900s.

STREISAND: Mm-hmm. Turn-of-the-century. Yeah.

GROSS: Yeah. And the only way you could study Torah then was to be a boy.

GROSS: And so when her father, the rabbi, dies, she doesn't want to be on the wife-homemaker track...

STREISAND: Right. Exactly.

GROSS: So she dresses as a boy and goes to a yeshiva, where she hopes she will never be exposed as a boy. So did going...

STREISAND: And falls in love with a boy...

GROSS: And falls in love with a boy.

STREISAND: ...who thinks she's a boy.

GROSS: Yeah. So did going to yeshiva yourself influence you wanting to make that story into a movie?

STREISAND: No, it's - the parallel was me wanting to direct a movie, and people saying, but she's an actress. How is she going to direct the movie and be in it, and so forth? That's the parallel. So you have to - I had to put on a man's gear to be accepted. It's like to be accepted in a man's role as a, you know, that handles finances, as well as just the, as just, you know, acting. You know, it's kind of a man's role to handle money, produce something, actually. It was just so paralleled in a way that it was - it worked for me.

GROSS: I want to play a clip from "Yentl." This is the scene in which you've entered the yeshiva. Mandy Patinkin plays another yeshiva student who thinks you really shy, so he's kind of taking you under his wing. And the yeshiva students, the boys, are all like stripped naked and swimming in the lake. And you're sitting with the book over your eyes, because you don't want to see them naked. And they're all saying hey, take off your clothes and come on in, you know.

And in this scene - so Mandy Patinkin is saying, come on in. And he's just gotten out of the water, and he standing next to you, stark naked. And you're just, like, like horrified. And so this scene covers, like, him telling you to take off your clothes, come in the water, you being horrified. And then, as he's shaking you and telling you come on, come into the water, you - something switches in you and you realize you're feeling things you never felt before, and that you love him. And that segues into a song that we'll also hear, which is called "The Way He Makes Me Feel."

So this is Barbara Streisand and Mandy Patinkin in "Yentl."

(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "YENTL")

(SOUNDBITE OF THE WATER SPLASHING)

MANDY PATINKIN: (as Avigdor) Come on, Yentl. I'll teach you.

STREISAND: (as Yentl) No. No, no.

PATINKIN: (as Avigdor) Don't be afraid.

STREISAND: (as Yentl) I don't really want to learn.

PATINKIN: (as Avigdor) Don't be afraid. You're not going to drown. I'll hold you.

STREISAND: (as Yentl) No. I don't like swimming.

PATINKIN: (as Avigdor) Take off your clothes.

STREISAND: (as Yentl) No. Stop it.

PATINKIN: (as Avigdor) I'll hold you. Take your clothes off.

STREISAND: (as Yentl) No. No.

PATINKIN: (as Avigdor) You're going to get all wet.

STREISAND: (as Yentl) Please stop it. I don't - no...

PATINKIN: (as Avigdor) Aw, stop it. Come on. What are you ashamed? You embarrassed?

STREISAND: (as Yentl) I don't want to. I don't want to. Just drop it.

PATINKIN: (as Avigdor) All right. All right. All right. All right. If you're that scared. I'm not going to force you.

STREISAND: (as Yentl) Next time.

PATINKIN: (as Avigdor) Sure. When you're ready.

STREISAND: (Singing) There's no chill, and yet I shiver. There's no flame, and yet I burn. I'm not sure what I'm afraid of, and yet I'm trembling. There's no storm, yet I hear thunder. And I'm breathless. Why, I wonder? Weak one moment, then the next I'm fine.

(Singing) I feel as if I'm falling every time I close my eyes. And flowing through my body is a river of surprise. Feelings are awakening I hardly recognize as mine.

GROSS: So that was my guest, Barbra Streisand, and Mandy Patinkin in a scene from "Yentl," which Barbra Streisand also wrote and directed.

So one of the things I find really interesting about this movie is the way you wanted to make a musical, but it's not like the characters are getting up and singing songs.

GROSS: It's all, like, these are thoughts that they're thinking that they express - when I say they, I mean you. It's only you who sings.

STREISAND: Because It's her point of view.

GROSS: It's your point of view. So it's singing what's in your mind.

STREISAND: So it's an interior monologue.

GROSS: Exactly. An interior monologue.

GROSS: And so I'd like you to talk a little bit about the kind of musical you envisioned this being and the kind of transitions you wanted to make between dialogue and singing, which I think is always the most difficult part of a movie or a stage musical, but more so a movie musical.

STREISAND: Well, that's why I chose to do a lot of it, you know, in her head, so that transition becomes easy as you're talking about it. She's thinking these things, and only when she's alone, when she's far away from people, can she sing out and be heard, you know, in terms of her own voice. I think it made it much easier. And believe me, I would've loved to use Mandy singing, but the Bergmans, Michel Legrand and I all agreed that that would've made it more a conventional musical.

GROSS: Right.

STREISAND: By the way, I always like to sing live, which I did - did you know "A Star is Born" was done live?

GROSS: I didn't know that.

STREISAND: I had a - Phil Ramon was the producer, and we had a truck following us so that I could sing live. If you notice - if you know the movie at all - but I sing "Evergreen" in it. I actually sing the wrong lyric, because it's live.

GROSS: Oh, I did notice that.

STREISAND: Isn't that funny? But I felt, I'm a very bad lip-syncher.

GROSS: Mm-hmm.

STREISAND: And I have to be in the moment, and I can't lip-sync to something that I've recorded, you know, a month, three months before.

STREISAND: I did it, actually, the first time at the end of "Funny Girl" when I sing "My Man" at the beginning. Even though the studio really liked it lip-synching, I said, you know, but I feel like I want to - I don't know where I'm going to cry. I can't lip-sync that. So can you reshoot the first part, so I could do it live? And we had just a piano offstage - as I hear they do "Les Mis" like this - a piano offstage, and you sing live. Because every time I did it, was slightly different, you know?

GROSS: That's the kind of singer you are. But...

GROSS: ...I enjoy that kind of singing much more.

STREISAND: Yeah, me, too. And that's the way I knew I had to do "A Star is Born." We did all the close shots first, you know, and then when I picked the take, you know, we would do the wide shots.

GROSS: My guest is Barbara Streisand, and she stars with Seth Rogen in the new film, "The Guilt Trip."

You worked with Jule Styne on your second Broadway musical "Funny Girl." Great composer. Did he work with you directly on the songs?

STREISAND: God, I don't remember. I adored Jule. He was very funny, very kind, very supportive. And he had come down to the Bon Soir to hear me and then he brought everybody there to...

GROSS: That was a club in New York.

STREISAND: A club in New York, in the Village. Yeah. I remember at one point questioning the validity of "People Who Need People." I thought isn't it people who don't people are the luckiest people in the world?

GROSS: Good point.

STREISAND: But I loved the song, so.

GROSS: But of course he didn't write the lyrics so he'd be the wrong guy to challenge on that.

STREISAND: Well, you know, I meant Bob Merrill.

STREISAND: But Jule was so prolific. Can you imagine that he wrote "Gypsy" too? I did a little bit in my show recently which is going to come out around Mother's Day, I think. I put together a Jule medley that goes from "Hallelujah, Baby" to "Gypsy" to "Funny Girl."

GROSS: If you took liberties with the melody in "Funny Girl", in any of the songs, would Jule Styne say anything to you? Or would he appreciate that?

STREISAND: Marty has a funny story about "Wholesale" because I would sing it slightly different and the conductor at that time...

GROSS: This is your first show, "I Can Get it For You Wholesale."

STREISAND: Yeah. "I Can Get it For Your Wholesale." He didn't like that. He would complain to Marty.

GROSS: Your agent, manager.

STREISAND: My manager - of 50 years. But when I did "Funny Girl" I had a fantastic conductor, Milton Rosenstock, who I adored. And we loved each other and he loved following me. Just like Bill Ross or Marvin Hamlisch, you know, because they had to be - it's like somebody breathing with you, somebody watching you, seeing how you're phrasing it that night. You know? And that is a great asset to any musical performer.`

GROSS: Well, that's a way - I'm wondering if you think that that might be a way that you changed Broadway. Because I think you probably took more liberties with melodies than Broadway singers typically did or do. And it was a very, you know, for its time a very contemporary style of singing that was maybe also, you know, a little different for Broadway.

STREISAND: Well, I didn't have a kind of a soprano voice.

GROSS: Exactly. Right.

STREISAND: Yeah. Yeah. I guess it was new. I don't know.

GROSS: And you have a way of reworking melodies and holding certain notes longer than they were written to be held.

GROSS: It's probably stretching...

STREISAND: Carrying it over to another phrase or another sentence, you mean?

GROSS: Yeah. And also just - especially, like, on the higher notes, I think you tend to hold certain notes and bend certain notes and change certain notes in a way that is distinctively Barbara Streisand.

STREISAND: Hmm.

GROSS: And when people imitate you I think that's one of the things they're picking up on.

STREISAND: Really?

STREISAND: I'm not aware of it.

GROSS: I was wondering if you were, like, if you had any sense of what...

STREISAND: No. I just get inspired by the music, you know.

STREISAND: Maybe a horn line or something.

STREISAND: But I just play with it, you know. As long as it doesn't interfere with the integrity of the lyric.

STREISAND: And I love to state the melody as written in the beginning. And then play with it, you know.

GROSS: Well, why don't we hear - since we're talking about "Funny Girl" why don't we hear "People" from the original cast recording.

GROSS: And here's my guest, Barbara Streisand.

STREISAND: OK.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "PEOPLE")

STREISAND: (singing) People who need people are the luckiest people in the world. Where children needing other children and yet letting a grownup pride hide all the need inside acting more like children than children. Lovers are very special people...

GROSS: That's Barbara Streisand from the original cast recording of "Funny Girl." She's now starring in the new movie comedy "The Guilt Trip." More after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

GROSS: My guest is Barbara Streisand. She stars with Seth Rogan as his mother in the new movie comedy "The Guilt Trip." So there's a very iconic moment in television history in which you and Judy Garland sing together.

GROSS: This is on the "Judy Garland Show" in 1963 and it's like the end of her career and the very beginning of your career.

STREISAND: An amazing moment. Yeah.

GROSS: Yeah. And, you know, I've seen this. Like, public television has shown...

GROSS: ...the "Judy Garland Shows" at various times over the years. And it's really an incredible moment. You're singing your famously slowed-down version of "Happy Days Are Here Again" and she's singing "Get Happy," which she did in the 1950 film "Summer Stock." Was she a hero of yours? Did she influence you? I mean, I know you remade "A Star is Born" but...

STREISAND: I didn't know of her in my early years and I wasn't particularly a fan until I walked in to a recording session that she was doing live on some place on 30th Street. And it said Judy Garland and asking people to come in, like an audience. And then she astounded me. It was like oh, my god is this woman great. So I became a big fan.

I was already living in New York, I guess. I was probably 16, 17 years old. And so it was really a thrill to be on her show. And she was wonderful to me and very kind and very sweet and very supportive. And we became friends.

GROSS: Oh, you did?

GROSS: Do you have any memories of that night when you performed together?

STREISAND: Oh, yeah. I can remember it distinctly.

GROSS: Anything you'd like to share?

STREISAND: No, just she was holding my hand and I thought, gee, she seems nervous. At that time, I wasn't nervous. I was still very young, about to do, I think, "Funny Girl." And now, when I think back on it, I think, oh, my God, I know exactly what she's feeling.

Or, you know, the fears. It's like, as you get older and people are, kind of, looking for you to fail more, I think - not people, not the audience - but, I don't know, critics or producers or whatever. And I just felt her. I felt her anxiety.

GROSS: So does that mean, like, you've gotten more nervous?

STREISAND: Well, that's a difficult question. It's like part of me is much more relaxed than I've ever been.

STREISAND: Less frightened, less anxious. On the other hand, it's a, you know, coming-of-age-thing - and she was much younger than I am, but you reach a certain age and you wonder, well, I give it up? Do I retire? Or do I get more in before my time is up? It's kind of a dual thing. One day I think, god, you know, I don't need this pressure or, you know, promotion or whatever.

I could just travel around the world. But then I think I'd get bored and I'd need to create. I need to be creative and time is going so fast. And, you know, I do wonder how I want to spend the rest of my life.

GROSS: Mm-hmm. Barbara Streisand, I know you have to leave now. You're on a tight schedule. I want to thank you so much for talking with us. And whatever you decide to do about performing or not performing onstage or screen, I wish you the best with it.

STREISAND: To be or not to be. That is the question.

GROSS: To be or not to be. Yeah.

STREISAND: Thank you, Terry.

GROSS: Thank you so much. Barbara Streisand stars in the new movie comedy "The Guilt Trip." Our thanks to engineer Carlos Ascencio. Let's close with that now famous TV duet between Streisand and Judy Garland on Garland's TV show.

(SOUNDBITE OF "JUDY GARLAND SHOW")

GARLAND: (singing) Forget your troubles...

STREISAND: (singing) Happy days...

GARLAND: (singing) ...come on, get happy.

STREISAND: (singing) ...are here again. The skies...

GARLAND: (singing) You better chase all your cares away.

STREISAND: (singing) ...above are clear again.

GARLAND: (singing) Shout hallelujah.

STREISAND: (singing) So let's sing a song...

GARLAND: (singing) Come on, get happy.

STREISAND: (singing) ...of cheer again.

GARLAND: (singing) Get ready for the judgment day.

STREISAND: (singing) Happy days are here again.

GARLAND: (singing) The sun is shining.

STREISAND: (singing) Together.

STREISAND: (singing) Shout it now.

GARLAND: (singing) The lord...

STREISAND: (singing) There's no one...

GARLAND: (singing) ...is waiting to take your hand.

STREISAND: (singing) ...who can tout it now.

STREISAND: (singing) So let's tell the world...

GARLAND: (singing) And just get happy...

STREISAND: (singing) ...about it now.

GARLAND: (singing) We're going to...

GARLAND: (singing) ...the promised land. We're heading across a river. Soon your cares will all be gone.

STREISAND: (singing) There'll be no more from now on.

JUDY GARLAND AND BARBARA STREISAND: (singing) From now on.

GARLAND: (singing) Forget your troubles.

GARLAND: (singing) And just get happy.

STREISAND: (singing) ...are here again.

GARLAND: (singing) You'd better chase...

STREISAND: (singing) The skies above...

GARLAND: (singing) ...all your worries away.

STREISAND: (singing) ...are clear.

STREISAND: (singing) So let's sing a song.

STREISAND: (singing) Of cheer again. Happy times...

GARLAND: (singing) Happy times...

STREISAND: (singing) Happy nights...

GARLAND: (singing) Happy nights...

Transcripts are created on a rush deadline, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of Fresh Air interviews and reviews are the audio recordings of each segment.

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guilt trip barbra streisand

The Reasons You Don't See Much Of Barbra Streisand Anymore

B arbra Streisand was known for her tireless work ethic as both a singer and actor, but after a storied career, she eventually took a step away from the limelight. "My stamina comes from my own life force, and exercise and diet allow me to keep my energy up," she told the Harvard Business Review in 2012. At the time, the "Yentl" star was still touring and starring in movies. That same year, "The Guilt Trip" was released, which wound up being the last movie she acted in. Prior to that, Streisand appeared in "Little Fockers," and neither movie was well-received by critics. Yet, other factors contributed to Streisand not wanting to return to acting . 

Over the years, Streisand struggled with the difficulties of getting movies made, which was among the reasons she retired from acting. In 2011, her passion project, a film production of the musical "Gypsy," was axed. It was picked up again, only to be canceled once more after the studio lost a major financial backer in 2016.

As her acting career came to a close, the multi-hyphenate spoke about the frustrations of the Hollywood system. "[I]t gets exhausting, trying to come up with the structure of the movie and then have it not happen," she told People in December 2023 while discussing her choice to step away from acting. "I had many movies that I wanted to make, and then I get lazy ... I like time off," Streisand added. Having free time was a major reason she quit performing.

Read more: Old Hollywood Stars You Didn't Know Were Gay

Barbra Streisand Retires ... Again

The frustrations in the movie business led to Barbra Streisand releasing a memoir titled "My Name is Barbra" in November 2023. "If I could have made my movies, I never would've written a book," she told People at the time. In the book, the "A Star is Born" actor spoke about leaving the entertainment industry in the rearview. "I want to live life. I want to get in my husband's truck and just wander, hopefully with the children somewhere near us," she told the BBC ahead of the book's release. "I haven't had much fun in my life, to tell you the truth. And I want to have more fun," Streisand added while discussing retirement.

It should be noted that Streisand is among the celebs who announced they retired but never really meant it . In December 2000, the "Woman in Love" singer said she was retiring from performing live. "Why should I do something that I don't enjoy doing at this stage in my life?" she told  ABC News  at the time. Streisand added that she would still record music, but wanted to quit performing shows.

Of course, that was not Streisand's swan song, as she hit the road in 2016 for the "Barbra: The Music .. The Mem'ries ... The Magic" tour, which was a massive success. Afterward, Streisand announced she was once again retiring from performing. "No, I would never do another show. It's exhausting," the singer told  AP . Through the years, Streisand had openly discussed her issues with singing live. 

Barbra Streisand Is Still In The Public Eye

Prior to retiring from performing, Barbra Streisand developed crippling stage fright which led to her taking an extended hiatus from singing live. "In front of 135,000 in Central Park ... I forgot the words and it sort of triggered this feeling that I would forget the words," she told WENN in September 2009, per  Digital Spy . That led to Streisand staying off the stage for 27 years. "I didn't perform again until they discovered teleprompters," she added.

Later, Streisand did quit performing live, but that did not mean she was through with appearances. The "Funny Girl" actor did "Carpool Karaoke" on " The Late Late Show with James Corden" in November 2018 where she discussed her stage fright. "I don't get nervous nervous, but I don't enjoy it," she told the late-night host. "I get scared. I just don't want to disappoint people." To promote her memoir, Streisand made another notable late-night appearance in November 2023 when she sat down for an interview on "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert." During the appearance, Streisand discussed a wide range of topics, including her first date with husband James Brolin .

The "Meet the Fockers" actor had fully retired from performing but was still in the public eye. In February 2024, Streisand was honored with a SAG-AFTRA lifetime achievement award. "That make-believe world was much more pleasant than anything I was experiencing. I didn't like reality," she said during her acceptance speech, per People .

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Barbra Streisand Records First-Ever Song for a TV Series, for End Credits of ‘The Tattooist of Auschwitz’

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Barbra Streisand  has released her first song in six years, titled “Love Will Survive” — and it’s her first work for an onscreen project in 12 years, since she herself last appeared in a movie, 2012’s “The Guilt Trip.”

This is Streisand’s first recording for a TV series. The EGOT winner said in a press statement that she felt compelled to record the original song due to the horrific resurgence of antisemitism in the modern world.

“Because of the rise in antisemitism around the world today, I wanted to sing ‘Love Will Survive’ in the context of this series, as a way of remembering the six-million souls who were lost less than 80 years ago,” Streisand said. “And also to say that even in the darkest of times, the power of love can triumph and endure.”

The lyrics to “Love Will Survive” were written by Charlie Midnight. Walter Afanasieff and Peter Asher produced the track, with Streisand, Jay Landers, and Russell Emanuel executive producing. The song will be released on April 25, ahead of the limited series premiering on May 2. 

Streisand previously recorded songs for her own films such as “The Way We Were” , “The Main Event,” “Yentl,” “A Star Is Born,” and “The Mirror Has Two Faces” — as well as the extraordinary end-title anthem for a film she did not otherwise appear in, 1978’s “The Eyes of Laura Mars.” Her last studio album was 2018’s “Walls.” Streisand released two anniversary albums, “Evergreens: Celebrating Six Decades on Columbia Records” and “Yentl: 40th Anniversary Deluxe Edition,” in 2023.

“Ever since I was a young girl sitting in the Loew’s Kings Theatre in Brooklyn, I dreamed of being one of those actresses I saw on the screen. The movies were a portal to a world I could only imagine,” she said of the honor. “Even though I was an unlikely candidate, somehow my dream came true. This award is especially meaningful to me because it comes from my fellow actors, whom I so admire.”

My new song “Love Will Survive” from the upcoming Sky/Peacock Original Limited Series The Tattooist of Auschwitz will be released on April 25th. Because of the rise in antisemitism around the world today, I wanted to sing ‘Love Will Survive’ in the context of this series, as a… pic.twitter.com/ykSPm4uNPQ — Barbra Streisand (@BarbraStreisand) April 17, 2024

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Product Description

Guilt Trip, The (DVD)

Product details

  • Is Discontinued By Manufacturer ‏ : ‎ No
  • MPAA rating ‏ : ‎ PG-13 (Parents Strongly Cautioned)
  • Product Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7.5 x 5.25 x 0.5 inches; 2.4 ounces
  • Item model number ‏ : ‎ 27811516
  • Director ‏ : ‎ Anne Fletcher
  • Media Format ‏ : ‎ Multiple Formats, Color, NTSC
  • Run time ‏ : ‎ 1 hour and 35 minutes
  • Release date ‏ : ‎ November 12, 2013
  • Actors ‏ : ‎ Barbra Streisand, Seth Rogen
  • Studio ‏ : ‎ Paramount Catalog
  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00EP06KQ4
  • Number of discs ‏ : ‎ 1
  • #19,919 in Comedy (Movies & TV)

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  4. 'Guilt Trip': Streisand On Songs, Films And Family : NPR

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VIDEO

  1. Barbra Streisand Explains Her Tragic Reason for Giving Up Therapy

  2. The Guilt Trip Movie Official Clip: Wrong Car

  3. Barbara Streisand ft Barry Gibb

  4. Guilt Trip

  5. Barbra Streisand "Filmography" ( 1968

  6. THE GUILT TRIP (2012) Clip

COMMENTS

  1. The Guilt Trip (film)

    The Guilt Trip is a 2012 American road comedy film directed by Anne Fletcher from a screenplay written by Dan Fogelman, starring Barbra Streisand and Seth Rogen, who both also served as executive producers on the film. Andy Brewster, going on a cross-country trip to try and sell the non-toxic cleaning product he developed, invites his mother to ...

  2. The Guilt Trip (2012)

    The Guilt Trip: Directed by Anne Fletcher. With Barbra Streisand, Seth Rogen, Julene Renee, Zabryna Guevara. As inventor Andy Brewster is about to embark on the road trip of a lifetime, a quick stop at his mom's house turns into an unexpected cross-country voyage with her along for the ride.

  3. The Guilt Trip

    Seth Rogen and Barbra Streisand have enough chemistry to drive a solidly assembled comedy; unfortunately, The Guilt Trip has a lemon of a script and is perilously low on comedic fuel. Read Critics ...

  4. 'Guilt Trip': Streisand On Songs, Films And Family : NPR

    Barbra Streisand is Joyce Brewster in The Guilt Trip. The multitalented performer has won an Oscar, an Emmy, a Grammy and a Tony — a feat achieved by fewer than a dozen artists. Sam Emerson ...

  5. The Guilt Trip Official Trailer #1 (2012)

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  6. Watch The Guilt Trip

    The Guilt Trip. As inventor Andy Brewster is about to embark on the road trip of a lifetime, a quick stop at his mom's house turns into an unexpected cross-country voyage with her along for the ride. ... Lorne Michaels, John Goldwyn, Evan Goldberg, Seth Rogen, Barbra Streisand, Mary Mclaglen, Dan Fogelman, David Ellison, Dana Goldberg, Paul ...

  7. Barbra Streisand and Seth Rogen Discuss 'The Guilt Trip'

    Barbra Streisand and Seth Rogen play mother and son driving from New York to San Francisco in "The Guilt Trip.". A scene from the film, with Pedro Lopez as a hitchhiker. Sam Emerson/Paramount ...

  8. 'The Guilt Trip,' With Barbra Streisand and Seth Rogen

    The Guilt Trip. Directed by Anne Fletcher. Comedy, Drama. PG-13. 1h 35m. By Stephen Holden. Dec. 18, 2012. Contrary to what the title and casting might suggest, the Barbra Streisand-Seth Rogen ...

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    Seth Rogen and Barbra Streisand talk about The Guilt Trip, meeting for the first time, and more. This holiday season, you can celebrate family at the movies with The Guilt Trip, which tells the ...

  12. The Guilt Trip TRAILER (2012)

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  13. Prime Video: The Guilt Trip

    The Guilt Trip. 1 h 35 min 2012 X-Ray 13+. Barbra Streisand and Seth Rogen are the perfect comedy duo as they embark on one mother of a road trip! When Andy invites his mom on an 8-day, 3,000 mile journey across the country, the farther they go, the closer they get. Directors. Anne Fletcher.

  14. Amazon.com: The Guilt Trip : Barbra Streisand, Seth Rogen, Brett Cullen

    This film is packaged to look ordinary; a date movie. The title, "The Guilt Trip" adds to that, whereas the title has several possible meanings. Then the cast: Barbra Streisand and Seth Rogen, two of our most versatile and confusing actors, one gets into this film expecting a typical, safe Hollywood comedy where all the best bits are in the ...

  15. Guilt Trip

    Watch the trailer for The Guilt Trip, starring Barbra Streisand and Seth Rogen, on the official movie site. IN THEATERS DECEMBER 19.

  16. Prime Video: The Guilt Trip

    The Guilt Trip. "Barbra Streisand and Seth Rogen are the perfect comedy duo"* as they embark on one mother of a road trip! When Andy invites his mom on an 8-day, 3,000 mile journey across the country, the farther they go, the closer they get. *Jake Hamilton, FOX-TV. IMDb 5.8 1 h 36 min 2012. PG-13. Comedy · Charming · Joyous · Exciting. This ...

  17. The Guilt Trip (2012) Movie

    The Guilt Trip. 2012. PG13 CC. Paramount Pictures English 1h 36m. movie. (82) Cast Barbra Streisand, Seth Rogen, Brett Cullen, Nora Dunn, Ari Graynor, Colin Hanks, Kathy Najimy, Danny Pudi, Adam Scott, Yvonne Strahovski. Director Anne Fletcher. As inventor Andy Brewster is about to embark on the road trip of a lifetime, a quick stop at his mom ...

  18. Amazon.com: The Guilt Trip : Seth Rogan, Barbra Streisand, Anne

    The Guilt Trip - DVD - In Anne Fletcher's family comedy, Barbra Streisand plays Joyce Brewster, a sixtysomething widow who has given up on men and seems to spend most of her free time phoning her son Andrew (Seth Rogen), a chemist who has created an all-natural cleaning solution that he's bet his career on and is trying to sell to retailers (a wager that he's losing thus far).

  19. 'Guilt Trip': Streisand On Songs, Film And Family

    49:17. Queue. In her new movie, singer, actor, writer, director and producer Barbra Streisand plays a well-meaning if overbearing Jewish mom in The Guilt Trip. The star says her own mother both encouraged her talents and was jealous of them.

  20. Amazon.com: The Guilt Trip : Barbara Streisand, Barbra Streisand, Seth

    This film is packaged to look ordinary; a date movie. The title, "The Guilt Trip" adds to that, whereas the title has several possible meanings. Then the cast: Barbra Streisand and Seth Rogen, two of our most versatile and confusing actors, one gets into this film expecting a typical, safe Hollywood comedy where all the best bits are in the ...

  21. The Guilt Trip (2012)

    The Guilt Trip - I Named You After Him: Joyce (Barbra Streisand) reveals how she named her son.BUY THE MOVIE: https://www.fandangonow.com/details/movie/the-g...

  22. The Reasons You Don't See Much Of Barbra Streisand Anymore

    Barbra Streisand isn't exactly lacking in accolades, but there are a few solid reasons why the multi-hyphenate has taken a step back from the spotlight. ... That same year, "The Guilt Trip" was ...

  23. Barbra Streisand Records New Song for 'Tattooist of Auschwitz'

    Barbra Streisand Records First-Ever Song for a TV Series, for End Credits of 'The Tattooist of Auschwitz' ... 2012's "The Guilt Trip." ...

  24. The Guilt Trip (2012)

    The Guilt Trip - The Steak-Eating Contest: Joyce (Barbra Streisand) gets support from a handsome spectator.BUY THE MOVIE: https://www.fandangonow.com/details...

  25. Amazon.com: The Guilt Trip : Barbra Streisand, Seth Rogen, Anne

    This film is packaged to look ordinary; a date movie. The title, "The Guilt Trip" adds to that, whereas the title has several possible meanings. Then the cast: Barbra Streisand and Seth Rogen, two of our most versatile and confusing actors, one gets into this film expecting a typical, safe Hollywood comedy where all the best bits are in the ...