According to Bruce Dern, who talked about the movie on The Projection Booth podcast in 2016, there were suppose to be 2500 extras in the film for the pageant scenes. Since it was really important that the same faces show up in the audience in every scene for consistency, the filmmakers came up with an idea to give away five Cadillacs each day of the three-day pageant shoot to five lucky extras. Each extra would get a ticket in the morning and by the end of the day they'd get to enter the Cadillac lottery. This not only made sure that the same people would return each day, but 7000 additional people showed up to play extras and try to win the cars. Since they didn't need that many extras, the filmmakers decided to charge the extras 25 dollars to let them be in the movie and play the Cadillac lottery. Dern concludes the anecdote by amusingly stating that this was the only time in his career that he saw a movie making money directly off the people who worked for the movie.
To heighten the tension in the final scene, no one except screenwriter Jerry Belson and director Michael Ritchie was privy to the outcome of the pageant. As such, the atmosphere was truly fraught and the actors are visibly on pins and needles in anticipation of the winner's announcement. Even the cinematographer was kept in the dark, which explains why the camerawork is so choppy as he searches for the five finalists among the crowd as each name is called.
According to Annette O'Toole, who gave an interview about the movie for the Projection Booth podcast in 2016, there were only eight professional actresses among the beauty contestants. The rest of the girls were either extras or actual professional beauty contestants.
The film's distribution company United Artists only had four of their theaters in the U.S. and it was decided that that the movie would play only there and that they wouldn't spend much on advertising the movie since it was projected that the movie wouldn't bring back any money either way. The movie's director Michael Ritchie, who loved the project, tried to promote the movie himself because of this by traveling to the cities where the United Artists theaters were located with a few girls from the cast to do on the spot promotions. Unfortunately, this didn't help the movie much and it still made little business.
This is Annette O'Toole's first theatrical feature film.