Trivia

The Courtroom scenes were filmed in the Wayne County Commission (Detroit) meeting room and most of the extras were Commissioners, their staffs, and County workers.

The word fuck and all various permutations of it are uttered 153 times.

Cameo: Director Tim Burton is one of the corpses in the Teamsters' funeral scene.

In the film, Robert Kennedy declares during the hearing "If Mister Hoffa is acquitted... I'll jump from the capitol dome!" In a scene that followed, but was cut, Hoffa and the others celebrate his acquittal by eating a cake shaped like the US Capitol Building and featuring a figurine Robert Kennedy jumping from the dome with a parachute.

Film was originally meant for director Oliver Stone, and then Barry Levinson.

Original screenplay was written by Robin Moore.

With the exception of the exchange between Jimmy Hoffa and Robert Kennedy when Hoffa first enters and delays the start of the proceedings, virtually every word between Jimmy Hoffa and Robert Kennedy is taken verbatim from the transcripts of the hearing. A portion of that hearing is included in the Special Edition DVD.

Jack Nicholson's daughter plays the young nun in the hospital scene where Billy Flynn is dying from his burns. At first, director Danny DeVito suggested she play the hooker in his hotel room in a later scene, drawing the trademark raised eyebrow from Nicholson.

In the scene after "Red" Bennett is appointed chairman in the union after the success of the Kreger strike, Jimmy Hoffa picks up a paper from the news stand and reads the headline about the strike. If you pay close attention to the moment when he slaps the paper and says "Ain't that something?" the story his hand touches on the page reads: "Ma and Freddie Barker killed in gun battle". It is a true headline and it places the date in the scene somewhere around January 1935 (when Ma Barker was killed).

The only major make-up Jack Nicholson had to wear to become Jimmy Hoffa was fake nose and a set of false upper teeth (as seen in the behind-the-scenes footage on the DVD).

At the time of the movie's release, it had been 17 years since Jimmy Hoffa disappeared and 10 years since he was declared "legally dead" (when authorities gave up actively searching for Hoffa).

When Hoffa and Ciaro encounter the trucker convoy en route to prison, the facility in the background of the scene is an actual view of Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, where both were incarcerated.

The Courtroom scenes were filmed in the Wayne County Commission (Detroit) meeting room and most of the extras were Commissioners, their staffs, and County workers.