Trivia / Stir Crazy

• California Doubling: Played straight in some parts; While most of the prison scenes were in fact shot at an actual prison, some had to be shot at an abandoned jail in Los Angeles, due to some areas of the prison being closed off to filmmakers.
• Cast the Expert: Three hundred fifty Arizona State Prison inmates worked as extras in the film.
  • Grossburger's only dialogue is singing. He's played by the late opera singer Erland Van Lidth de Jeude.
• Completely Different Title: The Bulgarian release of this film was under the title The Crazy Prison.
  • The Greek version loosely translates to Now... Nothing Can Stop Us!
• Harpo Does Something Funny: Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder improvised many of their scenes together.
• Playing Against Type: Or rather directed by…….Sidney Poitier?
• Those Two Actors: This is the second of four films Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor made together.
• Troubled Production: Issues were constantly happening on set; First off, this was starting right when Richard Pryor was getting heavily into cocaine, and as a result he'd show up hours late to shootings. He would also claim that members of the crew were being racist towards him and was threatening to quit, though this was cooled off when they fired one of the specific employees. It being shot at an actual prison put some members on edge as well, especially when one was almost mistaken for an escaped prisoner and taken back to a cell. Many who worked on the film considered it a miracle that it ended up being as good as it did.
• Working Title: The original title for the film was Prison Rodeo, but the name was changed before release as the producers felt like the rodeo wasn't a major part of the film.

---