The Goodbye Girl

 On this date in 1977, "The Goodbye Girl" was released.

The film began as a screenplay called" Bogart Slept Here" that was to star Robert De Niro and Marsha Mason for Warner Bros. It would have been the film De Niro would have made immediately after "Taxi Driver" (1976). Mike Nichols was hired to direct.

Neil Simon recalled the original idea for the film: "The basic idea of the story was that Marsha, an ex-dancer, was married to a very promising but struggling off-Broadway actor who gets discovered in a small play and is whisked out to Hollywood, where he reluctantly moves with his family. He feels very out of place there...and they have trouble adjusting, especially after his first film makes him an international star...and it creates chaos in their marriage. The story was coming out a little darker than I had imagined, but I envisioned the character of the wife as a very good role for Marsha."

Filming began on "Bogart Slept Here" when it became apparent that De Niro wasn't right for the role. Simon recalled, "It was clear that any of the humor I had written was going to get lost. It's not that De Niro is not funny, but his humor comes mostly from his nuances, a bemused expression on his face or the way he would look at a character, smile and then look up at the ceiling." Nichols insisted on recasting De Niro. Soon after, Nichols left the project.

Richard Dreyfuss was brought in to try out with Mason. At the end of the reading, Simon decided that the chemistry was there, but the script needed work. He rewrote the screenplay in six weeks.

"[The screenplay] had to be funnier, more romantic, the way Marsha and I first imagined the picture would be. What I wanted to do was a prequel. In other words, instead of an off-Broadway actor, married with a child, why don't I start from the beginning? I'd start when they first meet. Not liking each other at first, and then falling in love."

The disastrous production of Shakespeare's "Richard III," in which Elliot Garfield (Dreyfuss) portrays the title character as gay, was based on an actual production that Mason was in (as Lady Anne) and told Simon about.

The only ever Simon-written film nominated for the Best Picture Academy Award, with its five nominations, "The Goodbye Girl" is also the most ever Oscar nominated Simon film. In its year at the Oscars, it was up against another New York writer's film, Woody Allen's "Annie Hall" (1977), which took home most of the awards this film was nominated for, with "The Goodbye Girl" winning just one Oscar for Best Actor Dreyfuss. At 30, he was the youngest actor to win this Oscar. This record was broken by Adrien Brody when he won the Best Actor Oscar in 2003 for his lead role in "The Pianist" (2002) at age 29.