Songfacts®:

• This is the theme song to the 1982 romantic comedy Tootsie, starring Dustin Hoffman and Jessica Lange. Although Bishop had written for movies before, such as the title theme to Animal House in 1978, this tune was written by Alan and Marilyn Bergman, the Oscar-winning lyricists behind "The Way We Were" and "The Windmills Of Your Mind," and jazz musician Dave Grusin. "It was an assignment," Bishop told Songfacts of his Tootsie gig. "I'd been around for a while. The producers knew what I sounded like and they paid me quite a lot of money to do it. I remember they had me watch about four hours of the unedited movie, mostly with Kenny Loggins' music as a temp."
• This expresses the singer's lifelong search for someone to share his life with and the possibility that he's found her. In the movie, Hoffman, who disguises himself as a woman to get a job, befriends Lange and starts developing feelings for her. Marilyn Bergman told Performing Songwriter: "Tootsie's about a man who had to become a woman to become a better man. Because the song's all iffy, with all the might's and if's, you know that this guy is getting ready to make a commitment."
• This was a #1 hit on the Adult Contemporary chart.
• Bishop performed this at the Academy Awards ceremony in 1983, where this was nominated for Best Original Song. "Up Where We Belong" from An Officer And A Gentleman won. Taylor Hackford, who directed the winning film, used Bishop's song "Separate Lives" in his movie White Nights a couple years later. Sung by Phil Collins & Marilyn Martin, it was a #1 hit on the Hot 100 and also earned Bishop an Oscar nomination for Best Original Song.
• When Bishop spoke to us in 2018, he was working on a documentary about the song's enormous popularity in the Philippines. "It's just revered over there," he explained. "Everybody knows the song, young and old. And everybody knows me. I've played there 11 times. It's really a fascinating place. I'm not sure when they caught on to the song, but by the '90s it was pretty well known. I get a lot of attention when I go there. So, this is a film that documents my last trip. It was just a crazy experience and it's all captured on film."
• Roberta Flack recorded this for the 1995 movie Waiting To Exhale, starring Whitney Houston and Angela Bassett. It plays over the ending credits but doesn't appear on the soundtrack.
• This was used in the Family Guy episodes "Blue Harvest" (2007) and "Go, Stewie, Go!" (2010). It was also featured in Amazon Prime's '80s-themed series Red Oaks in the 2016 episode "The Wedding."