Trivia / Shakes the Clown

• Box Office Bomb: Budget, $1.4 million. Box office, $115,103.
• Creator Killer: Bobcat Goldthwait had to wait 15 years before he could be able to write and direct another feature film.
• Harpo Does Something Funny:
  • Quite a bit of the clown dialogues were done on the spot by the actors themselves. Bobcat even says that every line that LaWanda Page spoke, including the infamous "He's gonna fuck that little dog," was entirely unscripted.
  • The detectives pre-scene lines and topics during their car stakeouts were entirely thought out by the actors themselves.
• Real-Life Relative: Bobcat Goldthwait's daughter Tasha Goldthwait appears as the little girl playing on the lawn around the sprinkler.
• Referenced by...: R.E.M. titled a song off of their 1996 album New Adventures in Hi-Fi after Binky's description of himself as "Binky the Doormat". Coincidentally, the band were originally signed onto I.R.S. Records, whose film division distributed this movie.
• Those Two Actors: Bobcat Goldthwait and Tom Kenny were formerly the comedy duo "Bobcat and Tomcat."
• What Could Have Been:
  • Colin Quinn was in the running to play Stenchy, but when he found out he had to wear a dress, he turned it down.
  • Demi Moore auditioned to play Judy.
  • Bobcat has said that he wrote Shakes to be played by John Goodman originally.
  • The original script was a lot more fantasy-based and Shakes had a bit of mysticism surrounding him; The scenes of him doing giant leaps were leftovers of his powers from that draft.
• Write What You Know: Bobcat wrote the chunk of the film as a bit of a metaphor about stand-up comedians. The clown bar in general was based on an actual bar he went to where comedians hung out, which he called "just as depressing and hostile" as the one in the film.

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