Buried in a recent story about Barbra Streisand’s upcoming book on architecture and design (based on her experiences with her just-completed dream estate that took inspiration from classic American architecture and which contains a replica city street in the basement) was the gasp-inducing info that not only is Barbra working on re-obtaining the rights to Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart, but that she already has some “interesting cast members” lined up for key roles.

Barbra has been channeling her powerful creative streams into the design and construction of her new house for the past few years but now she says she’s all systems go to get back into filmmaking and according to reports, the film she’s like to make is Kramer’s acclaimed AIDS drama about two brothers, one gay one straight, fighting their own battles and with each other as the AIDS Crisis turns to epidemic.

She previously held the rights to the play and had developed for around ten years, before the rights lapsed, and she lost them.

“This house has taken a lot out of me,” she told Outrate.net in an exclusive phone interview*. “It was a project. Instead of directing a movie, I built a house. And it’s so much more complex than doing a movie.”

Above: Barbra and Larry Kramer before the shit hit the fan.

What really fascinates me is how she’ll work with Larry Kramer, who she butted heads with in the early 1990s when both were trying (in vain) to collaborate on a script adaptation for The Normal Heart. Around that time, she produced the telemovie Serving in Silence: the Margarethe Cammermeyer Story starring Glenn Close as a decorated Vietnam vet discharged because she was lesbian and also, her son Jason came out as gay.

Kramer wrote the novel “Faggots” in the 1970s and made his name telling the New York gay community (quite presciently as it turned out) that it was in danger of “fucking itself to death” and that as a community, it was too immature to consider let alone hear any form of criticism of itself. By the early 1990s, though, the traumas of AIDS appeared to have taken their toll on Kramer’s intellect, as he disappeared under the suffocating mask of ACT-UP, which he’d helped form in 1987.

The man who’d wrote that “no one with a brain gets involved in gay politics. Gay is good to that crowd, no matter what. There’s no room for criticism, looking at ourselves critically” had become obsessed with the greedy pharmaceutical companies and evil Grandpa Reagan.

Kramer’s new-found intractability on any kind of second-questions concerning gay guys created problems at Streisand’s Malibu workshop sessions, where each occupied polar opposite ambitions for the film adaptation, and neither was prepared to give an inch.

Reportedly, Kramer insisted that Streisand frame the two brothers as identical twin souls, but she was more interested in exploring the dramatic potential of exploring their differences. “One’s homosexual, one’s heterosexual,” she said at the time in a Vanity Fair interview that I keep under glass. “They’re equal in the eyes of God and the law, but they’re not the same.”

Eventually, Kramer insisted on penning the final screenplay, recalling that he told her at one of their last meetings that “she didn’t understand: this was my life story. I had to write the final screenplay. No one else could be brought in.” He wanted to write an elegy for a paradise lost; she was more interested in “what I experienced when I first saw the play - the rage and the compassion I felt for these characters.”

How much Kramer dreamed of getting one more crack at an Oscar (he had been nominated for 1970’s Women In Love, but lost to Ring Lardner, Jr. who wrote the screenplay for MASH) we’ll never know, but he spat rage as he left the project, publicly stating that he couldn’t understand why Barbra chose to make a throwaway movie “about a woman who has a facelift” (The Mirror Has Two Faces) instead of what could have been an era-defining and career-topping piece (if it had been done correctly).

“It was a story that had a message and had to get out fast. I believed it would help change the world. I don’t think that was decent of her to do to me, her gay fans, and the people with AIDS she talks so movingly about. I love her, but she has pissed on this project for ten years.”

(Try to imagine Barbra urinating!)

For her part, Streisand said that creative control over the project was “something I can never give up. I simply have to have my power and my control over the story, but I am stepping aside and will no longer be involved with the project. I wish Larry only success in getting The Normal Heart made.”

Barbra reads from The Normal Heart at a 1993 Broadway Benefit.

Now she’s back on board, she says, and the rest of us will have to wait and see. Who are the “interesting cast members”? Will she still play the wheelchair bound Dr Emma Brookner, a frumpy but passionate survivor of childhood polio, the self-described “holy terror in the wheelchair”?

Who’ll take Brad Davis’ original role of Kramer’s alter ego Ned Weeks, a figure David Halperin derided as a ‘gay chauvinist’ who promoted ‘homosexual essentialism’ through ‘various strategies of elitism and exclusion’? Is it this for Streisand instead of Sunset Boulevard - or (gasp!) both?!?

Drooling with anticipation is surely the only reaction to all this, as it offers Streisand the chance to cap her stellar but stop-start career with something a little more memorable than a supporting role in Meet The Fockers, and her less-than-impressive final-for-the-third-time set of concerts in 2006-7.

If it eventuates, it will be interesting to see how a time capsule text from 1984 is revisited, a quarter of a century later. How does the early days of the AIDS Crisis - days when the Challenger space shuttle, the Twin Towers and Larry Kramer’s integrity were all intact - translate into a meaningful movie for today?

*No she didn’t call. But she did say those same exact words in a press release about her upcoming book, A Passion For Design.