The letter on which this movie is based was referred to by its author Neal Cassady, and its recipient Jack Kerouac as "the Joan Anderson letter" (even though the only extant fragment more prominently and dramatically dealt with a different girlfriend of Neal's at the time, nicknamed Cherry Mary). This letter, written in December 1950 about events in Cassady's life from the summer through Christmas of 1945, was "lost" circa 1954 and 1955. But before that happened, a 5,000-word fragment (on which this movie is based) had been copied (retyped) likely by Kerouac himself, and was subsequently published in 1964 in a small San Francisco literary magazine called "Notes From Underground", then again later in Cassady's posthumous autobiography "The First Third" (beginning "To have seen a specter isn't everything ..."). The entire 16,000-word letter by Cassady - which Kerouac had praised as a turning point in his approach to writing - was never seen again after 1955 - and consequently became something of a Holy Grail in the Beat world. Miraculously, in 2012, the entire letter was found after nearly sixty years in old boxes that had been stored since being rescued from the Sausalito publisher Golden Goose's garbage when it folded in 1955. It's set for auction on December 17, 2014.
The film is based on a letter written by Cassady to Jack Kerouac in 1950.
Joe Charbanic, who has a minor role as a police officer towards the end of the film, would go on to direct the Keanu Reeves crime thriller El observador (2000) three years later.
On the cover of a September 2005 DVD release, there is an image of Keanu Reeves with facial hair that is not from the film itself.