Trivia / The Long, Hot Summer

• Career Resurrection: The success of the film helped Martin Ritt reestablish himself as a major director following his 5-year blacklisting from Hollywood.
• Romance on the Set: Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward fell in love while filming. They married soon after and remained so until Newman's death in 2008. They are still cited today as one of the rare examples of a Hollywood marriage that actually lasts.
• Money, Dear Boy: Orson Welles agreed to be in the film due to a tax debt of $150,000
• Underage Casting: Orson Welles was 42 years old, but was cast as a 61 year old man due to his weight. He had already played a similar older fat man the year before in Moby-Dick and the following year in his Touch of Evil.
• Wag the Director: Orson Welles had a rough time making the film and caused plenty of trouble. Used to being in control of his own projects, it was hard for him to do things someone else's way. According to Angela Lansbury, "He was always nudging and pushing for things and wanted to change lines, but had to be carefully handled so that he didn't always get his way because his way wasn't necessarily the best way for everybody else in the scene." Welles would irritate his co-stars by overlapping his own lines with their dialogue, ad-libbing, and mumbling to the point where his lines were barely comprehensible. "There was something you couldn't resist about Orson," said Lansbury, "even though he was a son-of-a-bitch at times. I mean, there's no question about it, he was very difficult." Joanne Woodward added in a 2001 interview, "Orson had a hard time. It must have been a terrible, terrible feeling for him to be confronted by all these young hot shots who thought they were so great because they came from New York and the Actors Studio. It was a problem."