When a drunken Margaret Elliot takes her Oscar for a ride in her car, Bette Davis used one of her own Oscars.
At least two different Oscar statuettes were used in the "c'mon, Oscar, let's you and me get drunk" sequence. For the first 18 years, Oscar statuettes had a short base. Starting with the 1946 awards (presented in 1947), Oscar statuettes had a taller pedestal base with a brass collar designed for personalized engraving. The statuette that Maggie holds in her apartment and in front of her old house has the pre-1946 base. The one she sets on the dashboard of her car has the newer pedestal base. The switch was made because the Oscar had to rest its head on the backside of the car's rear-view mirror in order to balance on the dashboard while Maggie drove around. Bette Davis' two pre-1946 Oscars were too short, so a newer Oscar was used during shots of the car's interior.
Bette Davis accepted this role in hopes that its similarities to her hit Eva contro Eva (1950) would boost her struggling career. Although it did garner her another Best Actress nomination, it failed to forestall the downward trend in her fortunes that plagued her throughout the 1950s.
Barbara Lawrence's presence is felt even though her actual screen time is brief. Besides her fleeting appearance, she is referred to at least five other times as the young nemesis to Bette Davis' aging star. She is mentioned as an up-and-coming prospect by an agent, a drunken Davis drives by her house in a mock tour of stars' homes, her image appears in a drugstore ad that confronts Davis, Davis stops to stare at a huge portrait of Lawrence before entering her prospective producer's office, and she spitefully uses Lawrence's vacant dressing room to alter her clothes and makeup before her screen test. For added Hollywood verisimilitude, references are made to other contemporaneous Fox stars, including Victor Mature, Debra Paget, Mitzi Gaynor, and Jeanne Crain. Curiously, there is a reference to an actor named Ralph Bellows, who's playing the rich, stuffy second lead. This is an obvious reference to the screen persona of Ralph Bellamy, who was not under contract to Fox at the time.
One scene required young Natalie Wood, who had a lifelong, morbid fear of water due to a near-fatal on-set accident when she was nine, to dive off the pier near the Sterling Hayden character's seaside home. When director Stuart Heisler demanded take after take, Wood became progressively more hysterical, until Bette Davis intervened on Wood's behalf and requested a break in filming, thus allowing Wood to regain her composure. Eventually, a stunt double was used to do the dive.