Part of this was filmed at New York City's Calhoun School. They were extremely cooperative with the shooting. The Calhoun School is a college preparatory institution located in the heart of Manhattan's West Side.
The portion of this film's budget provided by United Artists was cut to $2.5 million so that United Artists could properly finance the increasingly expensive financial demands of Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate (1980). As a result, this is the last film that Robert Altman personally produced for fourteen years.