The film was produced by Roxbury Productions, a company established by
Pandro Berman to make two films for
MGM. Berman bought the film rights to the
stage play a year and a half before it debuted on
Broadway, for $400,000.
Richard Brooks, who wrote and directed, said the cost of the play rights was $600,000 but there may have been an extra fee payable after the play had been on Broadway. "
Sweet Bird I didn’t want to do," he said. "While I thought it was a very good play, I felt that time had passed, that there were too many imitations of [Tennessee Williams'] work. So many of his pieces had been done and were even being brought back and were playing at the same time." According to
Hank Moonjean, who was assistant director, a condition of Brooks' contract was that Tennessee Williams would have nothing to do with the screenplay. However, Williams did insist on a small role for actor Mike Steen, who Moonjean says was the original inspiration for the character of Chance Wayne. He played the police officer watching Heavenly Finley (
Shirley Knight). The castration was cut from the film and replaced by Finley (
Ed Begley)'s son Tom Jr. (
Rip Torn) clubbing Chance in the face with a cane, followed by Chance and Heavenly escaping together. Williams called Richard Brooks "a wonderful director except that at the end he cheats on the material, sweetens it up and makes it all hunky-dory.... [he] wrote a fabulous screenplay of
Sweet Bird of Youth but he did the same fucking thing. He had a happy end to it. He had Heavenly and Chance go on together, which is a contradiction to the meaning of the play." Brooks says he wanted to shoot a different ending. He felt "no man waits to be castrated" so he wanted Chance "to do something more: to go and look for the trouble. But M.G.M. felt it was bad enough they were doing the picture. " He wanted Chance to be beaten up and for Princess Kosmonopolis, the alias of Alexandra Del Lago (
Geraldine Page) and Lucy (
Madeleine Sherwood) to leave town on the same ferry and see Chance on a garbage scow. According to Brooks, MGM executives said "We’ll let you shoot it after we’ve had the preview, and, of course, they never did." Geraldine Page had played the lead female role on Broadway but producer Pandro Berman was unsure about using her in a film, worried she was insufficiently glamorous to play a movie star. Page did a screen test with an MGM contract actor which was not well received. Berman offered the role to
Ava Gardner but she turned it down (which Gardner later regretted). Paul Newman requested another screen test with Page and offered to appear in it with her; Berman says the issue was not Page's acting but with her looks. Another screen test was done, with a wig from
Sydney Guilaroff, a gown from
Orry-Kelly and make up from William Tuttle. This test was successful and she was cast. Filming started July 6, 1961 and went until October. Brooks said "It’s a very harsh picture, and I didn’t see why the photography had to be as harsh as the content." According to Brooks, the cost was $2.8 million including $600,000 for the play rights, $700,000 for the cast and $1.6 million for overhead. ==Reception==