Writer and director Walter Hill said that Jeff Bridges was "an actor I greatly love... a very nice man, decent, hard working, got along well, no problems", but that there "was always a kind of tension between Jeff and myself" because "Jeff does a lot of takes, I don't. My focus is very intense, but when it gets to be you just doing it again and again, I lose it, and I find an awful lot of performers go stale. He would always have an idea he thought he could make something better."
Keith Carradine played Wild Bill Hickock on the HBO series Deadwood (2004). Walter Hill directed the first episode
Jeff Bridges's father Lloyd Bridges previously played Wild Bill Hickok in Wild Bill Hickok - the Legend and the Man (1964).
Walter Hill took details of the town from the novel "Deadwood" by Pete Dexter, but the relationship between McCall and Hickok was mostly from the play "Fathers and Sons" by Brian Friel, itself adapted from the novel by Ivan Turgenev.
The film bombed at the box office. Produced on a budget of $30 million, it took in just over $2 million in the United States.