Al Pacino turned down the role of Ted Kramer. He didn't even read the script. Hoo-ah!
(Source)

Justin Henry lost the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor to 78-year-old Melvyn Douglas, who refused to attend the ceremony. "The whole thing is absurd, my competing with an eight-year-old!" he groused. How ironic is it that Douglas won his Oscar for a movie called Being There? (Source)

When Henry lost Best Supporting Actor to 78-year-old Melvyn Douglas (Being There), he was crushed…so crushed that Superman himself—a.k.a. Christopher Reeve—had to be brought over to console him. (Source)

If you want to recreate Dustin Hoffman's infamous (and improvised) wine glass swat, you're in luck. The restaurant, J.G. Melon, still stands. Just look for the table with a framed photo from the film hanging nearby—and don't blame us when your date gets mad about all that glass in their hair. (Source)

Some people think that Kramer was made to answer the burning question of baby-boomers everywhere: What happened to Benjamin Braddock and Elaine Robinson from The Graduate? Last we saw them, in the 1967 film that made Dustin Hoffman famous, Elaine had ditched her 30-second-old marriage to another guy and they were sitting in the back of a bus headed who-knows-where, wedding dress and all. Did their relationship last? Did it just turn into another sad suburban marriage story?

Rumor has it that Katharine Ross, The Graduate's Elaine, was even considered for the role of Joanna. Shmoop can't say how much an influence the earlier film was, if at all, but the fact is that both movies, one a satire and one a drama, were both major cultural phenomena of their time. In Kramer, Hoffman did for single dads what he did for alienated college grads a decade earlier. (Source)