Trivia

The Professor's pocket watch always shows the time at being 8:15 which was the time of the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan.

In an interview, A Conversation with Theresa Russell by Sam Wasson, actress Theresa Russell said of this film: "Actually, originally I turned it down. Here's what happened. [Producer] Alexander Stewart kind of approached me before he even approached [director] Nic [Nicolas Roeg] to do it. I don't know if Nic will even remember that, because he kind of rearranges history sometimes like his movies [Laughs] - but that is in fact how it was. Maybe he wanted Nic all along, I don't know, but he came in that way. I knew the writer of the play [Terry Johnson] didn't want me to do it. He wanted Judy Davis, who had done the play in London. I think they were kind of an item for a while. So he was not happy with me doing it. Also, there had been a slew of Marilyn things going on, and Madonna was in her Marilyn phase, and I was just like, Oh, God, I just can't even think of going there, it's just too silly. I just don't want to . . . I loved the play. I just thought it was a terrific play. But to be Marilyn seemed so daunting, and I didn't know how I would begin to go there in a way that wasn't a caricature-so obviously it was just easier to say no! But then when Nic wanted to do it, that's when it got to another level.

Since the film was a British production, all of the interiors were shot at Lee Studios in Wembley, London, with only limited on-location filming of exteriors in New York,

The photo collage calendar of Theresa Russell, echoing Marilyn Monroe's famous Playboy pose, was created by British artist David Hockney at the request of director Nicolas Roeg, and has since been exhibited at museums throughout the world.

According to show-business trade paper Variety, the film's "four celebrated American figures of the 1950s . . . for legal reasons are not specifically named."