The 29 Jan 1968 DV announced that Paramount Pictures would finance and release Goodbye, Columbus, a film adaptation of Philip Roth’s novella that won the 1960 National Book Award for Fiction. First-time movie producer Stanley R. Jaffe told the 6 Oct 1968 LAT that when he discovered that the book, despite fifteen editions over the previous ten years, had never been optioned for film, he “moved quickly,” hired Arnold Schulman to write a screenplay, and made a deal with Paramount.
       Cameras were set to roll on 17 Jun 1968, according to the 7 Jun 1968 DV, but production was pushed back to 8 Jul 1968, when principal photography began at a $175,000 Colonial mansion in suburban Purchase, NY, a hamlet in the Westchester County town of Harrison, the 12 Jul 1968 DV noted. Westchester stood in for the upper-middle-class milieu of the “Patimkin” family. The rest of the film was shot in New York City.
       Many pictures were currently being shot on the streets of New York, according to the 22 May 1968 Var. When producers avoided the city because of labor problems, Mayor John V. Lindsay in 1967 worked out a formula with over a dozen movie industry unions to make filmmaking more reliable and affordable. Producer Jaffe and director Larry Peerce originally wanted to shoot Goodbye, Columbus in Philip Roth’s hometown of Newark, NJ, where the novel was set, but Newark’s airport created a constant noise problem. During filming, New York locations provided local newspapers with plenty of color. During the fifth week of the eight-week shoot, the 15 Aug 1968 NYT chronicled a visit to the garishly decorated grand ballroom of the Hotel Delmonico at 502 Park Avenue and Fifty-Ninth Street (converted decades later to the Trump Park Avenue), where a Patimkin wedding and reception scene was filmed. Opera star Jan Peerce, the director’s father, portrayed a Patimkin relative, and his voice coach and accompanist, cantor David Benedict, played the wedding’s officiating rabbi; along with the primary characters, sixty costumed extras were used in a scene in which ravenous guests mobbed the wedding buffet table. The “Patimkin Kitchen and Bathroom Sinks” factory scenes were shot at the Webster Plumbing Supply Warehouse on Webster Avenue in the Bronx. The 6 Oct 1968 LAT added that other locations included the Hotel Earle at 103 Waverly Place in Greenwich Village (now the Washington Square Hotel), the Port Authority Bus Terminal at 625 Eighth Avenue, the fountain in front of the Plaza Hotel at 768 Fifth Avenue, and the old Biograph Studios at 807 E. 175th Street in the Bronx, where interiors were filmed. The 8 Sep 1968 NYT visited the production again during a pivotal scene between “Neil Klugman” (Richard Benjamin) and “Brenda Patimkin” (Ali MacGraw) at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-Ninth Street. As cameras rolled, MacGraw exited the Squibb Building at 745 Fifth Avenue, rushed across the street among a throng of real New York pedestrians mixed with extras, and met Benjamin beneath an equestrian statue of Civil War General William T. Sherman in the Grand Army Plaza. For a moment, director Peerce lost sight of MacGraw in the crowd.
       Besides being Philip Roth’s first novel, Goodbye, Columbus was the first film version of any of his works. Larry Peerce stressed during a NYT interview that although Roth was commonly identified in the media as “a Jewish writer,” and the story took place “in a Jewish world,” the film was really about America’s “nouveau riche,” one or two generations removed from their immigrant forebears. “No one in the movie has a Yiddish accent,” producer Jaffe added. Both men wanted authenticity, but some critics wondered why they chose Ali MacGraw, a non-Jewish actress, to portray the “Jewish princess” at the heart of the story. Peerce answered: “American Jews are like the American-Irish or American-Italians; their great desire….is to become part of [the American middle-class]. Ali’s looks represent the ideal they’re aiming at.” He added that sexual mores had changed considerably in the ten years since the novel was published, and the idea of a woman being fitted with a diaphragm, treated so dramatically in the book, had become quaint, because the birth control pill had supplanted it. However, screenwriter Arnold Schulman wanted to keep the diaphragm scene in the film, so he had Brenda explain to Neil that she was allergic to the pill.
       The 20 Aug 1968 DV noted that Peerce recently completed filming.
       Goodbye, Columbus marked Broadway and television actor Richard Benjamin’s first feature film and fashion model Ali MacGraw’s first starring role.
       The film was scheduled to open at two New York theaters, Elson’s Forum and Loew’s Tower East, on 19 Mar 1969, the 29 Jan 1969 Variety announced, but the date was pushed back to 3 Apr 1969, coinciding with a one-theater opening in Los Angeles, CA. The film benefited from the huge success and controversy of Philip Roth’s then current novel, Portnoy’s Complaint (New York, 1969). Reviews for the film were generally positive, but with reservations. In the 6 Apr 1969 LAT, Charles Champlin called Goodbye, Columbus “ruthlessly honest, and unsparing in its look at those who have finished in (and out) of the money,” but added that some of the authenticity “felt uncomfortably like anti-Semitism.” Vincent Canby, in his 4 Apr 1969 NYT review, praised the “very funny, immensely appealing movie of surburban romance,” but “resent[ed] the really vulgar manners that Mr. Peerce allows his middle-class Jews…not because of any particular bias, but because it is gross moviemaking.”
       Budgeted at under $2 million, the film grossed over $1 million in its first seventeen weeks at the Forum and Tower East theaters alone. Charles G. Bluhdorn, board chairman of Gulf + Western Industries, which owned Paramount at the time, bragged to shareholders that the then-unknown Ali MacGraw, who had since become a sensation, cost the studio only $20,000 for her role in Goodbye, Columbus, but helped fuel its $10 million gross by the end of the year, according to the 10 Dec 1969 Var. A tabulation of U.S. and Canadian film rentals that ran in the 7 Jan 1970 Var revealed that Goodbye, Columbus, with a $10.5 million box office, was the ninth best-selling film of 1969.
       Arnold Schulman received the film’s sole Academy Award nomination for Writing (Screenplay—based on material from another medium).