Trivia

Quentin Tarantino named it one of his favorite films of the 80s in a podcast with Joe Rogan.

Director Hal Ashby was fired just after principal photography wrapped, and the studio, PSO Entertainment (whose first major production this was), took over creative control.

As Oliver Stone was busy in Mexico shooting Salvador (1986) and thus unable to rework his screenplay before production began, Hal Ashby started to write his own script for 8 Million Ways to Die (1986). Ashby worked from both Stone's script and the original novel by Lawrence Block as well as his own research. The fifty pages that Ashby wrote had neither the fiercely evocative color of Stone's screenplay nor particularly exciting dialogue, yet they were the starting point for a much more complex and psychologically interesting film and were consciously designed as a blueprint that the actors and possibly other writers could move forward with later. Ashby gave the fifty pages he wrote to producer Stephen J. Roth (who said he liked them) but abruptly stopped work on his screenplay when he discovered that, without his knowledge, PSO had hired R. Lance Hill to rewrite Stone's script. Ashby, who had confidence in his own screenplay, felt hurt and told Roth, "I don't think I have ever had that one happen to me before." He was further upset on learning that Hill was to report directly to the executive producer, Mark Damon, cutting Ashby out of the rewriting process completely.

Alexandra Paul said years later that this film taught her something very important: you can have great talent on a movie (Jeff Bridges, Andy Garcia, Hal Ashby, Oliver Stone, Robert Towne), but if you don't have a good script you got nothing. She said the final cut of the movie was totally unfamiliar to her because the script had been rewritten so much during production.

Oliver Stone was very displeased with how the final version of the film turned out as it had little to do with his original script, which subsequently was re-written by R. Lance Hill who reported straight to producer Mark Damon an act which offended Hal Ashby. Hill's draft of the script was not popular with the producers or the cast and contained a huge gun battle climax in an airport which would inflate the budget to at least $16 million. Robert Towne was then hired to doctor the script for a fee of $250,000 (a quarter of his usual amount) and began erasing much of Hill's work. While the producers tried to console Hill he was furious with Ashby and claimed he had been back-stabbed. Towne was highly critical of Hill's effort on the script, claiming "if it had any more clarity it might have risen to the dignity of an exploitation film." The dialogue was further revised in improvisation. Stone only visited the set once and wanted to have his name taken off the picture but it was too late as the credits were already made up for it. Hill opted to use his pseudonym of 'David Lee Henry' for his work on the film.