The most famous stunt in the movie was actually built around what went wrong with the original stunt. Buster Keaton intended to leap from a board projecting from one building onto the roof of another building, but he fell short, smashing into the brick wall and falling into a net off-screen. He was injured badly enough to be laid up for three days. However, when he saw the film (the camera operators were instructed to always keep filming, no matter what happened), he not only kept the mishap, he built on it, adding the fall through three awnings, the loose downspout that propels him into the firehouse and the slide down the fire pole.
Buster Keaton's first feature film. He chose to construct the film as a series of separate episodes so the film could be cut into individual shorts to be re-released on their own if the feature was a failure. It was also the first film where Keaton was writer, director, producer and star.
This was the first film to use the landmark Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum as a location. The future home of two Olympics (1932, 1984) was opened the year of the film's release, 1923. The stadium's east portico acts as backdrop to the Ancient Roman home of Buster Keaton's girlfriend.
Towards the end of the movie, the names "Havez", "Mitchell" and "Bruckman" appear on the football roster; they were names of Keaton's co-writers, Jean C. Havez, Joseph A. Mitchell and Clyde Bruckman.
At the time of its original 1923 release, this was widely perceived as a parody of one of the best known silent films, D.W. Griffith"s big budget pacifist epic, Intolerance (1916).