This is one of the few movies from the 80s that holds up. Alternate, sanitized takes of several scenes were filmed for use on broadcast television.
-Universal didn't think the film would become a hit. In fact, the studio had thought about not releasing it on the East Coast so that the film would die quickly at the box office.
-Some of the actors who had auditioned for roles were Ralph Macchio, Matthew Broderick, Meg Tilly, Michelle Pfeiffer, Lori Loughlin, Elisabeth Shue, Kelly Preston, Rosanna Arquette, Carrie Fisher, Ally Sheedy, Christopher Reeve, D.B. Sweeney, Brooke Shields, Ellen Barkin, Tom Hanks, Eric Stoltz, Melanie Griffith, Tatum O'Neal.
-Justine Bateman was offered the role of Linda but declined. Instead, she preferred to star in the TV series Family Ties (1982) which ran for 7 years.
-According to Amy Heckerling, Sean Penn and pals were actually smoking marijuana in the van as they exited for the prom.
-For his masturbation scene, Judge Reinhold brought a large dildo to work with, unbeknown to the rest of the cast. Phoebe Cates' look of horror and disgust is very real.
-Nicolas Cage actually taunted the rest of the cast by bragging about his uncle Francis Ford Coppola. He told all the other young actors that he would be famous faster than any of them, because he had the connections. After a few weeks of this, the cast started to strike back at Nicolas by doing imitations of Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now (1979), which finally got Cage to stop bragging about his famous family.
-Jennifer Jason Leigh father Vic Morrow died in a helicopter accident on the set of Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983) about three weeks before the US release of "Fast Times."