Trivia for
What's Up, Doc? (1972) More at IMDbPro »

• Ryan O'Neal parodies one of his earlier performances. At the end of the movie, Judy Maxwell says, "Love means never having to say you're sorry," (a line from Love Story (1970)), to which O'Neal's character, Howard Bannister, replies, "That's the dumbest thing I ever heard."
  
  
• A male stuntman was used to double for Barbra Streisand in the long shots of her riding the bicycle. During one hairpin turn, he fell off and broke his ankle.
  
  
• As Judy stands outside the pizzeria watching the chef toss dough, "Santa Lucia" can faintly be heard coming from inside. The singer is Peter Bogdanovich.
  
  
• The fender bender Judy causes as she crosses the street to the Bristol Hotel was added on the spur of the moment. When no stunt cars were available, Peter Bogdanovich instructed a crew member to rent two cars and make sure he got collision insurance. Then he staged the wreck before returning the battered cars.
  
  
• It took a month to film the final chase scene, and it cost $1 million - a quarter of the total budget. The segment with the giant pane of glass alone took four or five days.
  
  
• Final film of Mabel Albertson.
  
  
• Liam Dunn was primarily a casting director before Peter Bogdanovich offered him the role of Judge Maxwell.
  
  
• The closing sequence features Ryan O'Neal's only on-screen singing, in a duet with Barbra Streisand in "You're The Top".
  
  
• Barbra Streisand did not want to make this film, feeling it wasn't at all funny, and even went so far as to declare it would be a terrific flop.
  
  
• The stuntman portraying the gentleman sitting in the back seat of the convertible during the chase scene was knocked cold when his head hit the awning on the dock just before the car went off the dock.
  
  
• Director Peter Bogdanovich had Ryan O'Neal and Barbra Streisand watch The Lady Eve (1941) to prepare for this film.
  
  
• First American film to credit the stunt people in the credits (first British film to do so was the James Bond film Moonraker (1979)).
  
  
• Director Peter Bogdanovich did not get permission from the city of San Francisco to drive cars down the concrete steps in Alta Plaza Park; these were badly damaged during filming and still show the scars today. Because of the damage to city property during the filming of this movie, San Francisco now requires productions to provide with its filming permit application a very detailed scene-by-scene breakdown of everything that the company is asking permission to film.
  
  
• In the parade in Chinatown with the Chinese dragon, the music the band is playing is "La Cucaracha" ("The Cockroach"), a Mexican tune.
  
  
• When Judy Maxwell first enters the Bristol Hotel, a piano version of Cole Porter's "Anything Goes" can be heard in the background. Porter also wrote "You're The Top," the song that begins and ends the movie.
  
  
• As his part is inspired by the stuffy professor played by Cary Grant in Bringing Up Baby (1938), Ryan O'Neill met with Grant. The only advice he received was to wear silk underpants.
  
  
• Film debut of Madeline Kahn.
  
  
• This film was morphed from the screen adaptation of Herman Raucher's novel, "A Glimpse of Tiger." Elliott Gould, its star, walked off the set and the project eventually came into the hands of Peter Bogdanovich, who in conceiving a remake of Howard Hawks' Bringing Up Baby (1938) switched genders of the lead couple, making the wild, unpredictable Gould character a female, who would be played by, coincidentally, his ex-wife Barbra Streisand.
  
  
• The long-haired blond delivery boy whose bike Judy steals is played by Kevin O'Neal, Ryan O'Neal's brother. The woman she sits next to on the plane in the final scene is Patricia O'Neal, their mother.
  
  
• The book which Eunice is reading in bed and which she subsequently tosses away in disgust is The Sensuous Woman by "J", a best-seller at the time, depicting in very graphic detail various sexual techniques from a woman's viewpoint.
  
  

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