Stanley Kubrick disowned the film soon after it's release and wanted to make sure it was never seen again by not re-releasing the print. What he didn't know was that Kodak when making the print had a policy of making an extra print for their archives. It is this one that survives and where the DVD-R and VHS bootleg prints come from.
Stanley Kubrick got his uncle, a pharmacist, to put up most of the money to finance this film.
Stanley Kubrick insisted on setting up the lighting himself, as he liked to do, and did it without allowing a place for microphones. When his sound recordist Nathan Boxer objected, Kubrick fired him and recorded the sound himself.
Stanley Kubrick's father cashed in his life insurance policy to help finance the film.
Stanley Kubrick's first wife, Toba Metz, worked as a Dialogue Director in the movie.
Kubrick later denounced this film as amateurish, saying he considered it like a child's drawing on a fridge.
Originally shot silent with a budget of US$13,000. The budget went up an additional US$20,000 when the actors dubbed their lines in a studio.
The original camera negative was discovered in the late 1980s in the holdings of a now-defunct film storage facility in Puerto Rico, and was acquired by the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., in 1993. (How the negative got to Puerto Rico in the first place remains a mystery.) The OCN is being kept at the Library's National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, Virginia.
This was thought to be a lost film, and one researcher, Mark Carducci, had suggested that Kubrick destroyed the negative following the death of Joseph Burstyn, the film's distributor. Bootleg copies abound, however, and there is one (legal) print in all of the Americas. It is located in the Kodak archives in Rochester, New York; the Kubrick estate allows viewing of the film with the provisos that it is screened by individuals (not groups), that the print never leaves the building in which it is housed, and that it cannot be duplicated in whole or in part.