Trivia / Crimes and Misdemeanors

• Award Category Fraud: Martin Landau, despite being the main character of one of the film's two subplots, was nominated for Best Supporting Actor at the Academy Awards.
• Box Office Bomb: Budget, $19 million. Box office, $18,254,702. This movie did succeed in becoming an Acclaimed Flop, so it didn't hurt its helmers' careers much at all.
• Cast the Runner-Up: Martin Landau was originally cast as Jack Rosenthal until Woody Allen decided that he'd be better suited for his brother Judah.
• Deleted Role: One-third of the film had Cliff shooting a documentary on old vaudevillians, with Mia Farrow as the head of the institute to which they belonged. Woody Allen didn't like the scenes in the final cut. During postproduction he cut an entire third of the film, then rewrote and re-shot that section from scratch. As a result, Sean Young's scenes were cut out, and Daryl Hannah's role was reduced to a brief cameo.
• Real-Life Relative: Dylan O'Sullivan Farrow, appears as an extra at the end, as a guest at Rabbi Ben's daughter's wedding.
• Write Who You Know: Lester is based on Larry Gelbart, whom both Woody Allen and Alan Alda worked with and reportedly disliked because of his despotic ways. Lester's various comments such as "Comedy is tragedy plus time" and "If it bends, it's funny; if it breaks, it isn't" were actual Gelbart quotes. In spite of this reputed dislike for Gelbart, Allen called him "the best comedy writer that I ever knew and one of the best guys" in a statement shortly following Gelbart's death, whilst Alda said in the Los Angeles Times obituary, "Larry's genius for writing changed my life because I got to speak his lines - lines that were so good they'll be with us for a long, long time; but his other genius - his immense talent for being good company - is a light that's gone out and we're all sitting here in the dark".
• Writing by the Seat of Your Pants: Originally, Alan Alda was only supposed to appear in the opening party scene with Daryl Hannah. Woody Allen expanded Alda's part after he asked Alda to improvise and Allen liked the improvisation. Allen wrote Alda's part as they went along.

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