It’s ‘Goodbye’ again

Neil Simon insists it wasn’t his idea to do a remake of his 1977 movie hit, “The Goodbye Girl.”

After all, his original screen comedy was one of his biggest box office smashes. He was nominated for an Oscar for his screenplay, just one of many Academy Award nods the romantic comedy garnered. And Richard Dreyfuss won the best actor Oscar for his engaging, energetic turn as a struggling actor who finds himself sharing a New York apartment with a divorcee (Marsha Mason) and her wisecracking daughter.

There was nothing broken about “The Goodbye Girl” that needed to be fixed. But that didn’t stop TNT from producing a new version of the comedy, this time with Jeff Daniels (“Dumb and Dumber”) as Elliott and Emmy Award winner Patricia Heaton, from “Everybody Loves Raymond,” as the world-weary Paula, a chorus dancer who has been dumped by men one too many times. Richard Benjamin, who appeared in the 1975 film of Simon’s “The Sunshine Boys” and directed the acclaimed 2000 Showtime version of the playwright’s “Laughter on the 23rd Floor,” directed this “Goodbye Girl,” which debuts Friday, and repeats Saturday and Sunday on the cable network.

“This version wasn’t my idea,” says Simon, by phone from New York, where his latest play, “Rose’s Dilemma,” has just opened to less-than-stellar reviews off-Broadway. “It was the idea of TNT, and I said I would love to do it because we got a chance to do it with some other actors as well.”

While the remake may not have been something Simon proposed, the prolific writer is no stranger to revivals; his “The Odd Couple” started as a play, became a hit film, then a long-running TV series, which spawned a reunion movie starring the series’ stars, Tony Randall and Jack Klugman. There was also an “Odd Couple II” film. And the play has been performed with all-black casts and all-female casts.

Sure enough, in the 1990s, Simon wrote the book for a short-lived Broadway musical version of “The Goodbye Girl,” which starred Martin Short and Bernadette Peters. He wrote the screenplay for the TNT movie and is an executive producer on the project as well.

Simon says that bidding “hello” to “Goodbye” was fun because the original had worked so well. “And I was going to be doing it again in the same medium. So I know what to make it look like when you shoot it and the kind of actors you want.”

Simon updated a few references here and there in the script, but basically the lines and plot are the same. But this “Goodbye Girl” seems different in tone. Both Heaton and Daniels are older than Mason and Dreyfuss were in the original movie, and they bring a more mature sensibility as two of life’s losers who find each other.

“That one was more of a comedy and a love story,” Simon says of his original. “This one is more of a love story.”

“The little deceptive thing” about Simon’s comedies, Benjamin says, “is that there is real life there. You can hire actors like Patty and Jeff who have the comedy gene but you can’t catch them [at being funny]. They are funny people.... They know where all the jokes are and they know how to do them, but underneath it’s all real life and you have to do Neil like real life.”

Benjamin points out “tragedy is what happens to you, comedy is what happens to somebody else, and [these characters] are in a tragedy. She has no money. This guy just walked out on her. He’s desperate. He’s in a horrible production. What is funny about it is Neil’s take and actors who can do it.”

“I think there is something about watching other people in desperate circumstances that is just hilarious,” says Heaton. “It is part of the human condition. I also think when you are watching this movie and stories like this, there is a sense of hope. They are almost to the edge but not there yet.”

Perhaps the biggest surprise of the new film is Daniels, who comes across as a sexy leading man adept in romantic comedy -- a far cry from his goofy “Dumb and Dumber” image. “Nobody has asked me to do this,” says Daniels, who admits he’s known at his daughter’s high school as the “Dumb and Dumber” guy. “I had never done Neil before.”

He admits that when Benjamin called him about the role his first question was, “Why?”

“Dreyfuss won an Oscar and deservedly so, but the question you have to ask is, ‘Is it definitive? Is there no other way to do it, or if you are going to try it are you going to be compared to somebody who put his stamp on it?’

“I looked at it and said there is another way to do it. We kind of went the leading man route. [Dreyfuss was more of a cuddly teddy bear.]

“And it’s a great part. You get to do everything, so I jumped in. It may be a smaller window of success here that I can jump through, but it’s worth a shot.”

“Jeff actually works the same way I did,” says Heaton. “We both got in there and did it. It was fun to immediately play off of each other.”