Production
After the release of Julie Brown's 1984 EP Goddess in Progress, Warner Bros. Pictures began writing a musical comedy based on the song "Earth Girls Are Easy", starring Brown. The film was to have a screenplay written by Brown, Terrence E. McNally and Charlie Coffey. The film was originally slated to go into production in 1986, but the studio lost confidence in the project when director Julien Temple's previous film, Absolute Beginners (1986), proved to be a dismal box-office failure. The role of Valerie Gail was offered to some of the era's box-office draws such as Madonna and Molly Ringwald, but when they rejected it, Warner Bros. dropped the project. Several other studios expressed interest in producing the film, but none wanted Temple to direct. Ultimately, French bank Crédit Lyonnais agreed to finance the film with Temple at the helm (if $4 million was shaved off of the film's estimated $14 million budget) and the De Laurentiis Entertainment Group agreed to distribute it.
Principal photography was finally underway in late 1987. Temple brought his own ideas to the project, including peppering the background with then-modern-sounding pop songs, featuring an homage to The Nutty Professor (1963), and using media personality Angelyne in a brief cameo (the director declared her "the patron Saint of Los Angeles"). However, Temple's studious eye for detail caused delays on the set, and according to producer Tony Garnett, "The first cut we had of the picture was a problem." The film underwent more than five months of post-production tinkering, including the removal of numerous scenes and the production number "I Like 'em Big and Stupid" (a different version of the song plays in the club scene; the deleted sequence appears on the DVD extras) and reshoots later commenced (the song "Cause I'm a Blonde" was injected into the film late in production), by which time the De Laurentiis Entertainment Group had filed for bankruptcy.
The finished print of the film had several very positive previews, which captured the interest of potential distributors Nelson Entertainment, New World, MGM/UA, Carolco Pictures, Lorimar Studios and 20th Century Fox, but ultimately Vestron Pictures acquired the distribution rights. The film debuted at the Toronto Festival of Festivals in September 1988 and was slated to be released the following February, but legal entanglements delayed its release until May 1989.
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