Trivia / Now and Then

• California Doubling: In this case Georgia doubles for Indiana.
• Dawson Casting: The girls are supposed to be 12 years old, but as for the actresses playing them:
  • Christina Ricci was 14 during filming, turning 15 before the premiere.
  • Ashleigh Aston Moore was 13, and Gaby Hoffmann turned 13 during filming.
  • Averted by Thora Birch, who was actually 12 throughout filming, though she was 13 by the time the film premiered. (Curiously both she and Melanie Griffith, her adult counterpart, are the only two actresses to be the correct age.)
  • Devon Sawa, meanwhile, was 16 playing a character who was clearly supposed to be the same age as the girls. Fortunately the girl he was paired with romantically was played by the oldest of the actresses.
• Executive Meddling: Roberta was supposed to be a lesbian, but a voiceover was looped in to add the line "Roberta lives in sin with her boyfriend".
  • It was actually because test audiences found the way Roberta's girlfriend Cynthia was introduced in the original script to be confusing.
• Fake American: Devon Sawa is Canadian.
• Real-Life Relative: Samantha's sister Angela is played by Rumer Willis, daughter to Demi Moore.
• Separated-at-Birth Casting: Gaby Hoffmann, Ashleigh Aston Moore, and Thora Birch really do look like they could be younger versions of Demi Moore (brown doe eyes, strong eyebrows, straight hair), Rita Wilson (auburn curls, thick eyebrows, similar noses) and Melanie Griffith (blonde hair, same smiles, big blue eyes). Christina Ricci and Rosie O'Donnell... not so much.
• Those Two Actors:
  • Devon Sawa and Christina Ricci sort of played love interests in Casper too. In fact Sawa was cast on Ricci's recommendation, because she had enjoyed working with him on Casper (which hadn't been released yet when the film went into production).
  • Sawa and Travis Robertson, who plays one of the younger Wormer brothers, also co-starred in Little Giants, though they didn't share any scenes together in that film.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The original title was The Gaslight Addition. It was going to be set in a real town in Indiana called Winchester, known for their gaslight addition, but the town of Winchester didn't want to be associated with the movie. They later changed their minds years later and have begun preserving areas that are mentioned in it.
  • A TV spin-off was planned in the 2010s but it never got past the development stages.
  • There was a subplot about the girls running a carnival to raise money for their clubhouse, but the scenes were cut from the film.
  • Kirsten Dunst was offered the role of Chrissy but didn't want to gain weight for it. She later said "it wasn't worth ruining my figure".