Trivia / The Day of the Locust

• Billing Displacement: Although Donald Sutherland has top billing in the credits and posters, he doesn't appear until roughly 40 minutes into the film. Similarly, the prominently billed Burgess Meredith only appears in the first half of the movie. William Atherton, who plays protagonist Tod Hackett, is billed fourth behind Sutherland, Karen Black, and Meredith.
• Cast the Expert: Shows up in the film version; who better to cast as the director of the film within a film than an actual veteran film director? And so the director of the Napoleonic drama on which Tod is employed as a set designer is played by veteran B-movie director William Castle in his last onscreen role.
• Dawson Casting:
  • Faye Greener is 17 years old in the book. In the film, she is played by Karen Black, who was more than twice that age.
  • In the book, Adore Loomis is eight years old. In the film, he is played by Jackie Earle Haley, who was in his early teens at the time.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Peter Bogdanovich was offered the chance to direct.
  • Malcolm McDowell was offered the role of Tod Hackett, but turned it down, feeling it was too similar to his Mick Travis character from If and O Lucky Man!. Dustin Hoffman was briefly attached.
  • Jane Fonda and Goldie Hawn turned down the role of Faye Greener. Cybill Shepherd tried out for the role, but John Schlesinger felt she was too old (though the fact Karen Black, eleven years her senior, ended up getting the part makes this a bit puzzling).
  • James Cagney turned down the role of Harry Greener.
• Working Title: The novel was originally going to be called The Cheated.
• Write What You Know: Nathanael West had been working as a screenwriter for Columbia Pictures for several years when he wrote The Day of the Locust, and many of the characters and settings in the novel are based on his experiences living in a hotel on Hollywood Boulevard, while the abortive sexual encounter between Homer Simpson and Romola Martin in Chapter 8 is based on a similar experience West had when working as a night manager in a Manhattan hotel in the early 1930s.

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