After completing this film, Frank Sinatra took a seven-year acting hiatus that ended with the TV movie Contract on Cherry Street (1977).
Dingus Billy Magee was written as a nineteen-year-old, and had to be re-written to accommodate Frank Sinatra's casting.
Dingus translates as a generic or unnamed "thing" or, in colloquial Yiddish, to use polite terms, as "penis."
Filming on location in Arizona took six weeks, and a contemporary article in Daily Variety noted the production had spent upwards of $500,000 on food and lodging alone. That amount equates to over $4M in 2024.
An article in the 2 March 1966 edition of Variety noted MGM had purchased the rights to the novel "The Ballad of Dingus Magee" by David Markson for $100,000 (~$967,000 in 2024).