Robert Downey Sr. redubbed all of Arnold Johnson's lines. According to Downey, he did this because Johnson had trouble remembering his lines and often flubbed them during filming.
According to a contemporary article in the New York Times, director Robert Downey Sr. hired a real homeless man for $10 and four bottles of wine to add "authenticity" to a scene shot in a garbage-strewn alley in the Bowery section of Manhattan. The man performed perfectly by drinking the wine and passing out on a pile of trash.
This film cost $250,000, all labor non-union.
In a 2000 interview, Marlene Clark, who plays a topless stewardess in the film's Lucky Airlines commercial spoof, said this was her first experience with onscreen nudity. She said director Robert Downey Sr. lied to her and other topless actresses in the scene. "He said, 'Take off your tops. You're out of focus. Nobody will see anything,' and we were so stupid, we believed him. Of course, when I saw the movie, I was speechless. I couldn't have been more in focus!"
This was the first film Elzbieta Czyzewska made after arriving in the United States. She had been one of the most famous actresses in Poland before she was forced to flee the country.