Up the Sandbox

Up the Sandbox (1972)

What's Barbra up to? Up the marriage trap. Up the revolution. Up the Zambesi River. And up to something surprisingly wonderful.

Bored with day-to-day life in New York City and neglected by her husband, a young wife and mother slips into increasingly outrageous fantasies: her mother breaking into the apartment, an explorer's demonstration of tribal fertility music at a party causing strange transformations, and joining terrorists to plant explosives in the Statue of Liberty.

Date of release
1972-12-21
TMDB
5.9 / 10 (25)
Runtime
1h 37m
Genres
Comedy, Drama
Director
Irvin Kershner

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Based on: Up the Sandbox!
  • Filmed in: Kenya

Up the Sandbox is a 1972 American comedy-drama film directed by Irvin Kershner, with a screenplay by Paul Zindel, based on the novel of the same name by Anne Roiphe. The film stars Barbra Streisand as Margaret Reynolds, a young wife and mother in Manhattan, who slips into increasingly bizarre fantasies to escape the predicament of her pregnancy. The film's supporting cast includes David Selby, Paul Benedict, George S. Irving, Conrad Bain, Isabel Sanford, Lois Smith and Jacobo Morales as a character who closely resembles Fidel Castro.

Production

Producer Irwin Winkler purchased the film rights to Anne Roiphe’s novel for $60,000, beating director Robert Altman, who confessed in 1972, “I wanted to do Up the Sandbox. But I wasn’t able to get it.”

Director Irvin Kershner reportedly told Barbra Streisand's biographer James Spada that he was originally unhappy with the script and that he was advised not to express his dissatisfaction to Streisand. Several days into filming, when Streisand went to Kershner and asked him why they were having so much trouble, he told her that they had started shooting with a weak script.

Kershner originally planned to shoot on a backlot at MGM. When Streisand convinced him it would be better for the film to shoot some scenes on location in East Africa, he agreed and then convinced producers Robert Chartoff and Irwin Winkler. Kershner used Samburu tribesmen as extras, portraying the fabled Masai tribe.

Streisand remembered Kenya as "quite beautiful...I remember it being so hot. We had no air conditioner or anything, so I had a little, dinky trailer filled with flies. Flies everywhere. But I loved the people, the Samburu people, and I made very good friends with a woman of the tribe. We didn’t speak the same language, obviously, but she understood what I was trying to say to her. She showed me how to dress.

Streisand filmed a kiss with a black revolutionary in the scene at the Statue of Liberty, however the studio ordered the footage cut from the final film, due to social attitudes at the time.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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