King Vidor originally hoped to cast Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall in the lead roles, but Ayn Rand insisted on Gary Cooper in the lead. Bacall was cast opposite Cooper, but dropped out before filming began. Hoping the film would make her a star, Warner Bros cast a relative unknown, 22-year-old Patricia Neal, after considering and then rejecting Bette Davis, Ida Lupino, Alexis Smith, and Barbara Stanwyck as replacements for Bacall. Cooper objected to Neal being cast, but during filming, Cooper and Neal began an affair.
Warner Bros. approached Frank Lloyd Wright (who had been the inspiration for Ayn Rand's character, Howard Roark) and asked him to submit some architectural designs to be used in the film. However, the studio balked when Wright requested his usual fee of $250,000, and decided instead to leave the designs to the film's art director, Edward Carrere.
Ayn Rand was furious that Roark's courtroom speech was edited down for time and, as a result, refused to allow for a film adaptation of "Atlas Shrugged" during her lifetime.
The window view from Henry Cameron and Howard Roark's office appears to place the office in the Hudson Terminal office building, which later would become the site of New York's World Trade Center.
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