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 Der 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 Der Stadtneurotiker (1977), which took home most of the awards this film was nominated for, Der Untermieter (1977) just winning the one Oscar for Best Actor - Richard Dreyfuss.
With this film, Richard Dreyfuss became the first actor in history to headline three consecutive films that grossed $100M. The others were "Jaws" and "Close Encounters of the Third Kind."
Marsha Mason recalled a scene between her and Quinn Cummings in which Cummings was supposed to say her line and move to a chair and sit down. "I noticed that she did it exactly the same way every time. Acting that way shows good discipline, but the freshness can go away pretty quickly." Mason decided she wanted to try something different just to see how it might change the scene. "Quinn and I started the scene again and when it came time for her to move to the chair," said Mason, "I sat in it instead. Naturally, she was thrown by this and looked to Herb. He carefully and quietly explained to Quinn that in life we never know what another person is going to do and we don't always know how we are going to respond to someone or something. She listened intently, nodded her head, and said, 'I got it.' She was extraordinary in her ability to go with it. At nine!"