According to Bruce Dern, who talked about the movie on The Projection Booth podcast in 2016, there were suppose to be 2500 extras in the film for the pageant scenes. Since it was really important that the same faces show up in the audience in every scene for consistency, the filmmakers came up with an idea to give away five Cadillacs each day of the three-day pageant shoot to five lucky extras. Each extra would get a ticket in the morning and by the end of the day they'd get to enter the Cadillac lottery. This not only made sure that the same people would return each day, but 7000 additional people showed up to play extras and try to win the cars. Since they didn't need that many extras, the filmmakers decided to charge the extras 25 dollars to let them be in the movie and play the Cadillac lottery. Dern concludes the anecdote by amusingly stating that this was the only time in his career that he saw a movie making money directly off the people who worked for the movie.
