When Addie is going to meet Moses and a businessman on the corner (near the end of the film) she walks out of the hotel and does a little skip before hitting the street. According to Peter Bogdanovich, Tatum O'Neal was very proud of this little skip - she thought of it on her own.
Peter Bogdanovich has said that the long, one-take sequence where Addie and Moze fight in the car about running out of Bibles took 2 days and 39 takes to get right. It was shot on a one-mile stretch of road just before hitting a very modern portion of the town, so each time a line was flubbed, they would have to turn everything around and drive back.
Peter Bogdanovich didn't like the title of the novel "Addie Pray", but wasn't sure whether "Paper Moon" was good enough; so he asked his mentor Orson Welles what he thought about it. Welles replied, "That title is so good, you shouldn't even make the picture, just release the title!"
Tatum O'Neal was (and still is) the youngest person ever to win an Academy Award (she was 10).
Tatum O'Neal's role is regarded to be the most substantial role ever nominated as a supporting performance. She is on screen for nearly all of the film's running time.
Orson Welles, a close friend of director Peter Bogdanovich, did some uncredited consulting on the cinematography. It was Welles who suggested shooting black and white photography through a red filter, adding higher contrast to the images.
The scene where Addie says, "I want my $200!" shows the Dream Theatre's marquee displaying Steamboat Round the Bend (1935) placing the film in 1935.
The cigarettes used by Tatum O'Neal contained no nicotine. They were made out of lettuce.
In the picnic scene, Madeline Kahn initially refused to say the line "Let Miss Trixie sit up front with her big tits," objecting to the vulgarity. Director Peter Bogdanovich convinced her to say the line for only one take. This take appears in the final film. Kahn's odd reaction of embarrassment after saying the line is genuine.
Moze refers to a "Coney Island" delicacy. It's a version of the hot dog, as popularized by restaurateur Nathan Handwerker in the Coney Island section of Brooklyn. Out-of-state eateries would create variations called "Coney Islands"; the name would also be applied to the eatery itself.