Trivia for
Bowfinger (1999) More at IMDbPro »

• Director Frank Oz encouraged improvisation during select scenes, and occasionally the result wound up in the film. Some instances of this are Robert Downey Jr. saying "and all this" while flipping through the script of Chubby Rain, Eddie Murphy asking his manager to find him a retarded slave role so he can win an Academy Award, and Steve Martin saying, "It could've worked" after Chubby Rain was shut down.
  
  
• The Eddie Murphy part was actually written for Keanu Reeves.
  
  
• Steve Martin said his inspiration for writing the part of Daisy (Heather Graham) was Anne Heche, with whom he had an affair years before. The joke at the end of the movie in which Daisy comes in and announces that her latest conquest is "one of the most powerful lesbians in Hollywood" is a reference to the fact that after Heche and Martin stopped dating, Heche had a highly publicized relationship with Ellen DeGeneres.
  
  
• Based on a real incident in 1927. A Russian filmmaker covertly shot footage of the vacationing Mary Pickford, and fashioned an entire film around the footage, creating the illusion that Pickford was actually starring in this Russian film.
  
  
• Originally entitled "Bowfinger's Big Thing".
  
  
• The company could only get Eddie Murphy for a brief, six week window, to shoot his role in the movie. He was in between shooting Life (1999/I) and Nutty Professor II: The Klumps (2000) and had just a brief time in his busy schedule to work on this project.
  
  
• The license plate for the FedEx van at the end reads "T3THANS". Tethans are relevant to the Scientology cult, which this movie makes a satire of as the Mind Head organization.
  
  
• When Bobby shows Kit the script, Kit says he is not a expecting a script from Paramount Pictures, but maybe Universal. In real life, Eddie Murphy's movies in the 1980s and early 1990s were produced by Paramount, but his later movies (including 'Bowfinger') have been produced by Universal.
  
  
• Eddie Murphy accepted his role in this movie when he heard he would be working with Steve Martin, of whom he is a huge fan.
  
  
• In one scene, Bowfinger comments as how he's 49, and could, possibly, pass for 38. This is clearly a poke at how, often, in Hollywood, people deflate their ages, which is also explained when he gets down his box that he's put a dollar in every week since age 10. The sum given is $2,184.00, which would actually put Bowfinger's age at 52.
  
  
• In the film, Kit Ramsey's house is the same residence depicted as "Stately Wayne Manor" in the 1966 "Batman" (1966) television series.
  
  

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