His Girl Friday > Trivia

Based on the play The Front Page by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur.
The normal rate of verbal dialogue in most films is estimated at around 90 words per minute. In His Girl Friday (1940), the delivery has been clocked at 240 words per minute.
While shooting, Rosalind Russell didn’t think she had as many good lines as Cary Grant had, so she hired an advertising writer through her brother-in-law and had him write more clever lines for the dialogue. Because Howard Hawks allowed spontaneity and ad-libbing, he and many of the cast and crew didn’t notice, but Grant knew she was up to something, so he greeted her every morning: “What have you got today?”
One of the first films (preceded by Stage Door (1987)) to have characters talk over each other for a more realistic sound. Before this, movie characters finished their lines before the next lines began.
Right after Williams is found at the desk, the Mayor tells Walter that he’s “Whistling in the dark. Well, that isn’t going to help you this time. You’re through.” Walter says, “Listen, the last man that said that to me was Archie Leach just a week before he cut his throat.” Archie Leach was Cary Grant’s birth name.
According to Ralph Bellamy, Cary Grant ad-libbed the line, “There’s a guy in a taxi down at the court building who looks just like that movie star. What’s his name? Ralph Bellamy!”
Ginger Rogers wrote that she was offered the role of Hildy Johnson. She read the script, but before Cary Grant was cast, she turned it down. After learning that Grant was cast, she regretted it.
In addition to casting Hildy as a female reporter and editor, the City Room of the Morning Post had a half dozen other women sitting at reporters’ desks. As a 1940 film, this was an extraordinary number for what was then an overwhelmingly male profession.
A “girl Friday” is an assistant who carries out a variety of chores. The name alludes to “Friday”, Robinson Crusoe’s native male dogsbody in Daniel Defoe’s novel. According to Merriam-Webster’s definition, the term was first used in 1940 (the film’s release).
Howard Hawks originally wanted Carole Lombard to play Hildy Johnson, but because she had just left a studio contract and gone freelance, she proved too expensive.
The film plays a prominent role in the Twilight Zone: Rod Serling’s Lost Classics (1994) segment “The Theatre” in which a woman named Melissa Sanders (Amy Irving) attends a screening of His Girl Friday (1940) at a cinema and sees scenes from her life on the screen.
Charles Lederer wrote three drafts of the screenplay. Major changes from the first draft to the shooting script included making Hildy less submissive and transforming her fiancé from a bully into a comic patsy. The earlier drafts also opened with a divorce court scene, indicating Walter and Hildy had been married and divorced three times. All three drafts ended differently. In the first, Burns fakes an accident, which prompts Hildy to declare her love. The second ends as the original stage production did: Burns lets Hildy leave, then has her arrested. Only the shooting script ends with him letting her go with his blessing, which convinces her to stay. That version's wedding scene was never filmed, however.
Jean Arthur, Irene Dunne, Margaret Sullavan, and Claudette Colbert were all considered for the role of Hildy.
Director Billy Wilder remade the film as The Front Page (1974) with Jack Lemmon (as Hildy) and Walter Matthau (as Walter).
Another remake was attempted in 1988 with Switching Channels, directed by Ted Kotcheff. The movie starred Burt Reynolds and Kathleen Turner in the lead roles, working in a TV newsroom instead of a newspaper. Christopher Reeve also starred as Turner’s fiancé.