Mark Salzman, the martial arts expert, is an accomplished writer and also director Jessica Yu's husband. Many of the personal life stories he shares are included in his book Lost in Place: Growing Up Absurd in Suburbia (1995).
Marina Sirtis, one of the narrators of the Greek play puppetry scenes, is famous for her role as Counselor Diana Troy in Star Trek The Next Generation.
Joe Loya wrote a book with reflections on his bank robbing life in The Man Who Outgrew His Prison Cell (2004).
Hans-Joachim Klein published his book Return to Humanity (1979) after the OPEC event. He was arrested in France in 1998 and delivered to Germany in 1999. He died Nov 9, 2022.
Director Jessica Yu says in the DVD commentary that they did not set out to make a documentary exclusively about men. However while looking for examples of people's real lives that fit the Euripidean tragedy which consists of an arc of setting out on a very personally obsessive journey that crashes spectacularly and then picking up the pieces of what's left, the stories they found that fit were overwhelmingly men's stories. Out of the personal stories of about 200 people she and her team reviewed, only 4 or 5 were women and the women tended not to crash so badly and moreover they tended to recover sooner, before disaster ensued. So because they wanted real life examples that very clearly hit proverbial rock bottom before picking up again in true Euripidean fashion they went with the four men's stories in the film.
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