By Kathy Blumenstock | Washington Post

In 1977, Neil Simon's "The Goodbye Girl" arrived in movie theaters, starring Richard Dreyfuss and Marsha Mason. At the time, Mason was married to Simon, who wrote the role for her. Dreyfuss's portrayal of Elliot Garfield, the sporadically employed actor, won an Oscar. The film's theme song, performed by David Gates of the group Bread, was a pop-chart staple, pouring forth from AM radios. 

Now a new version of "The Goodbye Girl," starring Jeff Daniels and Patricia Heaton, will air on Friday, Saturday and Sunday at 8 on TNT. The song has been rerecorded, with a different tempo, by the band Hootie & the Blowfish. 

For Simon and the others involved in the production, the question was not so much, why remake the movie, but why not? 

"This is one of the few movies I wrote as an original screenplay," said Simon, who wrote and executive-produced the project. "TNT' s challenge is that they want to get into the feature picture business. They all talked about it and called me and said they wanted to do it with a new cast. I said as long as I get the right people. 

"With the right director and the right cast, I thought I could make it different enough that it would work," he said. 

For Simon, the "right director" was Richard Benjamin, whom Simon has known for more than 40 years, ever since Simon first cast him in "Barefoot in the Park." 

"It goes against my belief, that you should only remake flops," joked Benjamin, who also appears briefly in the new film. "But when Neil said there was interest in redoing 'The Goodbye Girl,' we all said the same thing: Plays are revived all the time, and there are some hits that are remade. In the theater no one would even question it." 

Heaton was the first to be cast. "Neil said, 'Look at that '[Everybody Loves] Raymond' show. That girl is great and she doesn't care if you like her or not,' " said Benjamin. "We offered it to Patricia and she responded immediately. Neil likes that kind of commitment and enthusiasm." 

Heaton plays the unlucky-in-love Paula McFadden, a former New York dancer whose lovers too often leave her. Mere hours after she reads a goodbye note from her most recent actor-boyfriend, Chicago actor Elliot Garfield arrives on her doorstep, with the claim that he is subletting her spare bedroom. Grudgingly, Paula lets him share the apartment where she lives with her daughter, Lucy, played by Hallie Kate Eisenberg. 

"Paula is just a wreck, she's completely falling apart and it's hilarious the way Neil does it," said Heaton. "She's trying to be strong for Lucy but she's fighting off this attraction to Elliot. There was just so much to play there and it's a comedy, so even the heaviest stuff has a certain lightness." 

Jeff Daniels was at the top of everyone's wish list for the role made famous by Dreyfuss, Benjamin said. 

"Jeff read it and liked it. He said what he thought it was about, which was a love letter to the theater, a universal kind of story," said Benjamin. 

"And then he said the greatest thing. Jeff said, 'Do you want me to have everything learned when I get there?' He knew it was a feature I had to shoot in half the time. And with a Neil Simon piece, you have to know your lines backward and forward. You absolutely must know them, so you can let your mind play. You cannot change a word, you can't put lazy handles on lines like 'listen' or 'look'." 

Daniels said, "It was the first movie I ever memorized before the shooting began. We did a reading at Neil's apartment. This was the first time I have ever done anything of his and I wanted to see if I could pull it off. 

"Neil said,'this is a duet,' and there really is a musicality, a rhythm, to the speeches. Neil didn't just throw these words on a page," Daniels said. 

"Sometimes on movie sets, you try to make it your own but you can't do that with Neil," he said. "You've got to know it to the letter, since Richard will say, let's do it once more but faster. And you have to rifle through it." 

Daniels said he went into the film "with the ghost of Richard Dreyfuss over me. And the question for me was, is there anything we could do to bring something different to it. And with Richard [Benjamin] directing and Patty across from me, I knew we could." 

Daniels had seen the movie when it was first released, then watched it on DVD again after he was cast. 

"I only watched it once, primarily to see what I got out of it, which was that Richard did a terrific job. 

"But there are some signature Dreyfuss moments in there and I knew I had to find something else to do," he said. 

"And when you get to that point, you say, okay, here's what I'd do, and then suddenly you remember less of Dreyfuss." 

Daniels found the role both "great fun and a challenge," with some scenes more demanding than others. 

"The Richard III stuff, it's way out there," he said, referring to Elliot's role in an unusual Shakespeare production. "I had to learn all the Shakespeare, then camp it up and do it in front of that crowd," the scene's theater audience. "To look over at Alan Cumming, sitting there and just enjoying it all, those were the trickiest to do," Daniels said. Cumming plays the pompous, pretentious director whose vision of the Bard is Elliot's theatrical low point. 

Because the script focuses heavily on the two central characters, Daniels said he and Heaton worked "really hard, since often it was just the two of us. The daughter kept leaving the room and it was pretty much the two of us as far as what was happening." 

For the remake, Simon rewrote film's script in longhand "as he does all of his things," said Benjamin. "I had seen the movie when it first came out, just as a person. I almost did not want to watch it again before we made this. But Neil said, look at it, you might get something from it. 

"And it was helpful to me in some structure. I was glad that I did look at it. You have to respect it, but we wanted to have our own take on it too. " 

Those who recall the original film will note a few minor changes in the contemporary version. Simon has revised some lines to fit the characters and the current times. 

"The references to ESPN and the Cooking Channel are in there, yeah, but except for a couple of adds, it's pretty much the same," said Daniels. "We deleted the references to short actors, because I'm 6-foot-3." 

Turner Classic Movies will broadcast the original on Thursday at 8 for those who want to compare the two versions. 

"On the one hand, we have this huge legacy of the original, and you can't go wrong with the original. It was so much fun," said Heaton. "And yet so many people who watch our film will not have seen the original, so ours will be very new for people." 

Heaton said the film was produced "like a play. We did it pretty much in sequence, so we were able to take the emotional journey for the actors." 

She did find some details different from her work on the sitcom set. 

"On 'Raymond,' we know the characters and make our own artistic decision on how to do something," she said. "I might have wanted to do some things in different ways. 

"But with a movie, you do a scene again and again, and you don't get to choose which performance they use. A speech you do one time is a bit hotter, and then the next time you might take it down a bit. But you can't really tell what is going to work until you see it all together." 

She called Benjamin "a real stickler, and he had to be. Neil's characters talk at a very rapid rate and the humor comes with the pace. You have to know the words. It wasn't too much of a departure [from shooting a sitcom] but it was exhausting. Our shortest day was 15 hours." 

Heaton called Daniels "the perfect choice for Elliot, much more of a leading-man type, so in many ways that really made this version of the story work, with more chemistry between the two of us," she said. "I think he had more of a challenge in that Richard Dreyfuss won an Oscar for the role." 

The remake was shot primarily in Vancouver, but the exterior New York shots are genuine. 

"New York is a character in this, and I liked the part of innocence especially since 9/11," said Benjamin. 

Heaton said she "lived in New York for nine years and struggled, so I could relate quite a bit to Paula. And when we closed down Greenwich Village to shoot my scene there, I thought, 'YESSSS!' That was just great." 

Benjamin, who often conferred by phone with Simon throughout production, said when the film was finished, "the place I held my breath was when I showed Neil the movie for the first time. I had thought going in about how it would change, in the way I was shooting it. With the new people, the chemistry changes," he said. "And Neil really was pleased. He thought it was a complete realization of what he had hoped for." 

Simon, who said he always watches and is caught up in the 1977 film whenever it appears on TV, said of this new version "I was really moved at the end. It touched me. I forgot I had written this or done it. There was comedy in this but it was very moving."