In the film, Michael Dorsey (Hoffman), a talented actor with a reputation for being professionally difficult, runs into romantic trouble after adopting a female persona to land a job.

Tootsie was partly inspired from a play written by McGuire in the early 1970s, and was first made into screenplay by Dick Richards, Bob Kaufman, and Robert Evans, in 1979.

Principal photography took place across New York and in New Jersey, with filming locations including Manhattan, Hurley, and Fort Lee.

At a party, when Michael (as himself) approaches Julie with a pick-up line to which she had previously told "Dorothy" she would be receptive, she throws a drink in his face.

Meanwhile, Dorothy has her own admirers to contend with: older cast member John Van Horn and Julie's widowed father, Les.

The tipping point comes when, due to Dorothy's popularity, the show's producers want to extend her contract for another year.

Delays in the film's production forced Evans to renew the option,[4] but in 1979, he cowrote a screenplay based on the play with director Dick Richards and screenwriter Bob Kaufman.

[5] A few months into the process, Richards shared the screenplay with Dustin Hoffman, his partner in a company that bought and developed film-development properties.

Hoffman wanted complete creative control and Evans agreed to remove himself from screenwriting tasks, instead becoming a producer of the film, which was retitled Tootsie.

[7] As preproduction began, the project experienced additional delays when Richards left as director over "creative differences".

Columbia then forced Ashby to quit because of the threat of legal action that would ensue if his postproduction commitments on Lookin' to Get Out were not fulfilled.

[9] Hoffman, in an attempt to get the interest of Sydney Pollack to direct, asked Elaine May, who provided a few weeks of work that added the character played by Murray to go along with suggesting Garr for a key role.

[12] Hoffman suggested that Pollack play Michael's agent George Fields, a role written for Dabney Coleman.

The website's consensus reads: "Tootsie doesn't squander its high-concept comedy premise, with fine dialogue and sympathetic treatment of the characters"[23] Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 88 out of 100, based on 21 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".

[24] Roger Ebert praised the film, awarding it four out of four stars and observing: "Tootsie is the kind of Movie with a capital M that they used to make in the 1940s, when they weren't afraid to mix up absurdity with seriousness, social comment with farce, and a little heartfelt tenderness right in there with the laughs.

It also pokes satirical fun at soap operas, New York show business agents and the Manhattan social pecking order.

[47] A stage musical of the film premiered at the Cadillac Palace Theatre in Chicago from September 11 to October 14, 2018, before opening on Broadway in the spring of 2019.

[48] He was joined by Lilli Cooper as Julie Nichols, Sarah Stiles as Sandy Lester, John Behlmann as Max Van Horn, Andy Grotelueschen as Jeff Slater, Julie Halston as Rita Mallory, Tony Award winner Michael McGrath as Stan Fields and Tony nominee Reg Rogers as Ron Carlisle.