Trivia / Running on Empty

• Box Office Bomb: Made with a $7 million budget, but only took in $2.8 million at the box office.
• Creator Backlash: In later years, Sidney Lumet would say he felt this movie was a more sentimental version of a story he had told five years earlier in the movie Daniel (a fictionalized version of the story of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and their children), with the theme of, as Lumet put it, "Who pays for the sins of the parents?".
• Production Posse: This was the fourth of five films Sidney Lumet did with Ed Crowley (who plays Mr. Phillips) and the second of five films he did with Marcia Jean Kurtz (who plays an admissions secretary at Danny's school).
• Real-Life Relative: Jenny Lumet, Sidney Lumet's daughter, plays a student in Danny's music class.
• Wag the Director: Or, in this case, wag the writer - in the original script by Naomi Foner, in the scene where Lorna catches Danny playing the piano at her house, Danny was supposed to switch from playing classical to jazz. Lumet objected, feeling it was pandering to the audience to show Danny wasn't serious about classical music, but agreed to shoot it the way Foner wanted. When it came time to shoot the scene, River Phoenix objected for the same reason, and Foner eventually agreed to cut that part out. In his book Making Movies, Lumet described how impressed he was by Phoenix's sensitivity because of this.