Trivia / The Oscar

• All-Star Cast: Stephen Boyd, Ernest Borgnine, Tony Bennett, Edie Adams and Frank Sinatra as himself. The list goes on.
• Creator Backlash:
  • Harlan Ellison made it very clear that he is not a fan of the film, which was his only feature screenwriting credit.
  • Tony Bennett (Hymie Kelly) reportedly hated it so much that it is the reason he opted never to do another movie where he wasn't playing himself.
• Follow-Up Failure: Director Russell Rouse and his writing partner Clarence Greene had previously won an actual Oscar for Pillow Talk. They made one other film after this, The Caper of the Golden Bulls.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: The film had a VHS release in the mid-1980s...and that was it for three decades. TCM plays the film occasionally, but is forced to use an older pan-and-scan master (unusual for the network). This is very telling of the film's current demand, because for a time, it was included in many "Worst Films of All Time" lists as well as the Medved brothers' Golden Turkey Awards, but appears to have been overshadowed by more recent films that are a lot worse and more infamous. Ultimately, Kino Lorber released the film on Blu-Ray in February 2020, with a new 4K remaster, and two audio commentaries, with one of them featuring (of all people) Patton Oswalt as a participant.
• Reality Subtext: Peter Lawford's cameo as Steve Marks, a washed-up actor reduced to working as a restaurant host is sadly indicative of Lawford's real life situation at the time. After a falling out with Frank Sinatra got him "banished" from the Rat Pack, Lawford found on-screen work of any kind hard to come by, and he spent most of the last two decades of his life appearing in low-budget films and guest spots on TV series.
• Star-Derailing Role: For Stephen Boyd. Before making the film, he was a regular actor in a number of big Hollywood productions (such as Ben-Hur and The Fall of the Roman Empire). Outside of a few films shot before this one opened, Boyd was stuck in smaller films for the rest of his career (he died in 1977 while in talks to make a possible comeback with The Wild Geese).
• What Could Have Been: Harlan Ellison revealed in the documentary Dreams With Sharp Teeth that he wrote the screenplay with Steve McQueen and Peter Falk in mind to play the leads.

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