While filming the ending scene, Burt Reynolds got a double hernia from picking up Dolly Parton. He often joked to Dolly that he'd think of her every time he got a pang of pain.
Knowing that she'd be starring opposite Burt Reynolds, it was Dolly Parton's idea to have Miss Mona and the Sheriff romantically involved, though she faced harsh criticism from both the screenwriter and critics for this drastic deviation from the real-life story which inspired the film.
Journalist Larry L. King wrote a Playboy article which brought the story to international attention, and he went on to pen the stage musical and numerous drafts of the movie's screenplay. However, King was vehemently opposed to the film's story changes, as well as the casting of Burt Reynolds and Dolly Parton, both of whom he publicly vilified on countless occasions. King went as far as to provoke Reynolds into a fist fight in a subsequent 1982 Playboy article, and Reynolds told a reporter for the Austin American-Statesman that he was game, but ultimately nothing came of it.
Dom DeLuise's character, Melvin P. Thorpe was based on the real newsman, Marvin Zindler (born 1921, died July 29, 2007) who brought down the real Chicken Ranch. The incident where the Sheriff snatches the wig off Thorpe's head and holds it high, really happened between the Fayette County Sheriff and Zindler. Zindler also pioneered "rat and roach" reports about restaurant cleanliness ("Slime in the Ice Machine!").
Betty Grable's stepson, Tim James, natural son of big band leader Harry James, was an attorney working with the then Attorney General of Texas, and became responsible for enticing television personality Marvin Zindler of Houston to investigate the famous Chicken Ranch brothel in La Grange, Texas, eventually closing it down.