- Box Office Bomb: Budget, $5 million. Box office, $1,223,000.
- California Doubling: Literally — is set in Hollywood, but was filmed in Italy of all places.
- Creator Killer
- Director Peter Sasdy had various film credits under his belt during the previous decade. After this, he never worked on another film again.
- Ellen Shepard and Shawn Randall, two of the film's credited screenwriters, never wrote a theatrical film again, with Shepard's only other credits being on documentaries and/or as a technical consultant. This is the only known credit for Randall, period, and this combined with sharing the same surname as the film's main character — a Broken Bird screenwriter — has led to some speculation that Randall is a pseudonym for someonenote who realised how terrible the film was and took their real name off it. The third screenwriter, John Kershaw got off a little lighter in comparison, working on one more film (the extremely obscure Yellow Hair and the Fortress of Gold) and various TV shows until his death a decade after the film's release.
- Up until this point, author Harold Robbins had a successful career complete with screen adaptations of all of his dozen previous novels. The Lonely Lady single-handedly transformed him into box-office poison. Though he went on to write another 10 bestselling novels, none of them were ever adapted again.
- The Danza: Carla Maria Peroni was played by Carla Romanelli.
- Dawson Casting: Pia Zadora plays Jerilee from teenager to adult. Zadora is a petite 5' (1.5 m), which might make you think that she could pass for a much younger character. Unfortunately, that 5' is all woman, and the costumers resorted to concealing her curves in oversized sailor dresses and Punky Brewster overalls no one over the age of 10 would be caught dead in. This is coupled with a full face of very adult-looking make-up. The effect is...unsettling, particularly when the 29-year-old woman playing an 18-year-old character dressed like a 10-year-old child starts smooching a 60-year-old man.
- 29-year-old Ray Liotta also plays a high school student.
- Disowned Adaptation: Harold Robbins only saw a rough cut, which made him sleep and later blast the hell out of it to his assistant\future wife.
The movie will be a bummer, everyone will lose money. Except me. I got six hundred thousand dollars before it opened. - Hostility on the Set: Pia Zadora clashed with director Peter Sasdy and the studio-appointed script doctors throughout filming.
- Keep Circulating the Tapes: Never released on DVD, although it was released on VHS and LaserDisc back in the day, copies of which are hard to find, not that you'd want to find them. It was finally released on Blu-ray by Shout! Factory in June 2017.
- Old Shame: Pia Zadora says that she was sure the movie was terrible and tried to make her husband\executive producer halt the release. She doesn't spare mean words about how incompetent the whole thing was.
- Saved from Development Hell: Universal purchased the adaptation rights before publishing, hoping to release the movie in 1976, the year the book hit stores. But these plans went nowhere as the scripts didn't please the actress cast as Jerilee. Then in 1982 the billionaire husband of Pia Zadora joined production and the movie got off the ground.
- Star-Derailing Role: Pia Zadora, who had only a handful of small roles and cameos after this film. Except for Voyage of the Rock Aliens, anyway.
- Title Theme Tune: "Loooone-leee laaa-day...oooon-leee you can help yourself..." It's probably significant that a recording is almost impossible to find anywhere on the internet—the song is so forgettable, even connoisseurs of bad cinema haven't bothered to upload a copy for posterity.
- Troubled Production: The film had an even tougher time of things in Hollywood than its title character. Along with the aforementioned Development Hell, the studio forced a Hammer Horror veteran director which went on to clash with Pia Zadora, the script kept being fine-tuned, and eventually it got booed in test screenings. And yet it got barely changed before release, partly because the publicist who had to Polish the Turd was the same one who ran the Golden Raspberry Awards...
- The Lonely Lady won the fourth ever Worst Picture Golden Raspberry Award amongst its Razzie takeaways. And Razzie founder John Wilson, who works as a publicist, was directly involved with the movie's campaign - he states it's "one of my all time favorite assignments as a trailermaker" given he knew it was a potential Golden Raspberry winner.
