Richard Dreyfuss won the Oscar for Best Actor in a Leading Role for his role as Elliot Garfield. 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.
The disastrous production of Shakespeare's "Richard III," in which Elliot Garfield (Richard Dreyfuss) portrays the title character as gay, was based on an actual production that Marsha Mason was in (as Lady Anne) and told her husband, Neil Simon, about. Like the production in the film, it took place at Joseph Papp's Public Theatre in New York in 1974, and starred Michael Moriarty.
The only ever Neil Simon-written film nominated for the Best Picture Academy Award. With five nominations, it 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, The Goodbye Girl (1977) just winning the one Oscar for Best Actor - Richard Dreyfuss.
When Warner Bros. overlooked Neil Simon's rewritten script after the disastrous early shoot, (under the working title "Bogart Slept Here") the studio was still rather uneasy about making the film, but agreed to go forward after making a deal with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to split the costs. The film was one of the earliest co-produced by two Hollywood studios, which was unusual then, but commonplace now.
One of five films written by Neil Simon that featured his wife Marsha Mason. The movies include The Goodbye Girl (1977), Chapter Two (1979), The Cheap Detective (1978), Only When I Laugh (1981) and Max Dugan Returns (1983).
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