Trivia for
The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) More at IMDbPro »

• Lana Turner plays an actor whose career started as a movie extra. Turner started her own career as an extra in A Star Is Born (1937).
  
  
• Kirk Douglas stands no more than 5'9" and wears super high lifts that almost distort his walking. If you look closely at him in long shots you can spot the lifts (it's really apparent in Seven Days in May (1964)).
  
  
• The scene showing the production of the fictional low budget horror film was based on how Val Lewton produced Cat People (1942).
  
  
• Scenes in the film were based on the career of producer David O. Selznick.
  
  
• This movie holds the record for most Academy Awards won by a film not nominated for Best Picture, with five.
  
  
• The working title, "Tribute to a Bad Man", was later used as the title of an unrelated MGM feature (Tribute to a Bad Man (1956)). One reason for the title change was to add "beautiful", in consideration of the top-billed Lana Turner.
  
  
• The character played by Kathleen Freeman was based on Alfred Hitchcock's wife, Alma Reville.
  
  
• Cameo: [T.E.B. Clarke] Barry Sullivan's assistant.
  
  
• Leo G. Carroll's brief appearance as a "demanding" director is a thinly veiled reference to Alfred Hitchcock. When he first came to Hollywood, Hitchcock was under contract to producer David O. Selznick for years. Carroll had roles in many Hitchcock films of this era.
  
  
• The photograph of King Douglas' detested studio-head father, which Barry Sullivan straightens on the wall in this MGM film, looks exactly like Jack L. Warner, the head of Warner Bros. - MGM's competitor.
  
  
• Ned Glass, who plays the wardrobe man in the cat costume scene, was an active member of the Living Newspaper unit of the Federal Theater project on Broadway during the Depression, an organization accused of being "leftist" and "pro-communist" by many on the political right. When Glass was blacklisted during the McCarthy "Red scare" era, he became a carpenter.
  
  
• Douglas landed the lead role after Clark Gable had turned it down.
  
  

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