Trivia / Medium Cool

• Completely Different Title: Several countries used the local translation of Cold Eye as a title (Soviet Union, Poland, Sweden). Italy and Portugal used America, America, Where Are You Going? Other titles include An Insensitive Eye (Finland), Days of Fire (Brazil), Which Way to America? (Turkey) and Perspectives (Spain).
• The Danza: Eileen's son Harold is played by Harold Blankenship.
• Enforced Method Acting: "Look out, Haskell. It's real!!"
• Reality Subtext: The director considered ending the film at MLK's planned Poverty March on Washington in 1968 and have it be how the media will only cover violence. Then MLK got shot. Then the director was told about the Chicago demonstration by the people the actors were interviewing for the film. Then RFK got shot...
• Screwed by the Lawyers: Music licensing snarls have affected various prints of the film. The biggest victim was "Merry Go Round" by Wild Man Fischer, which originally played during the roller derby sequence. With Fischer's recordings from The '60s tangled up in the various rights issues involving his discoverer and original producer Frank Zappa, "Merry Go Round" only got licensed for theatrical and television screenings, and Paramount was sued over its use in the VHS release in The '80s, which resulted in the then-destitute Fischer getting awarded money for infringement. Because of this, all subsequent home video releases, including the DVD and Blu-ray versions, have replaced "Merry Go Round" with the whistled version of "Sweet Georgia Brown" used as the theme song for the Harlem Globetrotters. Fischer's death in 2011 may have left the whole situation unresolvable.
• Technology Marches On: John's Motorola pager was still a newfangled, cutting edge device in 1968, the closest thing to having instantaneous mobile communication without a two-way radio setup in the pre-cell phone era.
• What Could Have Been: Haskell Wexler initially wanted to cast John Cassavetes in the lead, playing a character named "John Cassavetes". As an artifact of that idea, Forster's character has the very similar name of "John Casselis."

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