When Francis Ford Coppola called up Bob Hoskins to offer him a part, the actor didn't believe it was really him. Coppola introduced himself, to which Hoskins replied, "Yeah, and this is Henry the fucking Eighth", and hung up.
At one point relations were so strained between director Francis Ford Coppola and producer Robert Evans that Coppola had Evans banned from the set.
The relationship between the characters played by Gregory Hines and Maurice Hines was partly based on the brothers' real lives.
Richard Gere really is an accomplished cornet player and performed his own solos in this movie. The cornet is circular in shape like the French horn rather than straight like a trumpet.
Laurence Fishburne's character, Bumpy Rhodes, was based on real-life Harlem gangster Ellsworth "Bumpy" Johnson. Fishburne would play Bumpy in Hoodlum (1997) 13 years later.