Warren Beatty is purported to have sponsored its 1981 reissue by Paramount, while he was working there making Reds.
Alternate titles for this included "I Changed My Sex", "He or She" and "I Led Two Lives".
In March 1981, Paramount placed a full-page page ad in the New York Times announcing the reissue of Glen or Glenda, seriously (or so it appeared) heralding it as a lost trail-blazing masterpiece in the tradition of Citizen Kane, Freaks, The Godfather and Napoleon. A big New York premiere was scheduled for the reissue but the date of the event - April 1 -left film buffs suspecting the whole thing was just an April Fool's Day joke engineered by studio pranksters. In any event, the studio abruptly canceled the event on the eve of the event, with Paramount pointing to the March 30 assassination attempt on then-president Ronald Reagan just two days earlier. (The curio was quietly put into limited re-release the following month, then soon afterward began showing up on TV "bad movie" film festivals.)
Originally intended to be (loosely) based upon the story of sex-change pioneer Christine Jorgensen, but Edward D. Wood Jr. - a transvestite - instead made it into a film about transvestism.
Stock footage totals 13 mins, 48 secs, or 20% of the total run time including credits. 73 seconds of stock run concurrently with new footage of Bela Lugosi. Stock scenes include "Fake Lightning", used 6 times, "Pedestrians" 3 times, "Highway Day" 3 times, "Highway Night" twice, "Playground" twice, "Superior Court" twice, "Ridiculous Soft Core", "Natives", "Bison Stampede", "Parking Lot", "Steel Foundry", "WWII", "Ambulance", "Airplane", "Signalman", "Milkman", and "Girls with Fuzzy Hats or Sweaters"
Surrealist filmmaker David Lynch has stated that this is one of his favorite films, and used the "howling wind" sound effect in his film Eraserhead.
The scene where a man wearing a fake beard ties up a girl on a sofa was shot separately, before the production of this film, and edited in to add 'spice'.
This film is listed among the Top Ten Best Bad Films ever made in Golden Raspberry Award founder John Wilson's book THE OFFICIAL RAZZIE MOVIE GUIDE.
This is the only movie that Edward D. Wood Jr. directed but didn't produce.