Better Off Dead...

According to Savage Steve Holland, the film is mostly autobiographical. Holland really was suicidal when his high school girlfriend left him for captain of the ski team. Also, he really did have a paperboy named Johnny Gasparini who would harass him for two dollars. According to Holland, when the film came out, the ex-girlfriend contacted him to apologize.

In a 2004 interview, Savage Steve Holland said of his suicide attempts which inspired this movie: "I went into the garage, and I put an extension cord on a pipe and I'm on a garbage can, and I'm thinking, 'Should I do this? Maybe this isn't a good idea.' Anyway, it was a plastic garbage can, and my weight just like crashed through it, and I fell, and the pipe broke! And it starts pouring water everywhere. And I'm basically in a garbage can, drowning. And my mom comes and...starts yelling at me for breaking a pipe, which is what any mom would do. So I started writing down stupid ways to kill yourself that would fail after that, and I put them in sort of a diary. And that diary kind of became Better Off Dead... (1985)".

Savage Steve Holland stated in an interview that John Cusack hated this movie and walked out of the film after twenty minutes during a special screening prior to the star of production on One Crazy Summer (1986). Holland said: "The next morning [Cusack] basically walked up to me and was like, 'You know, you tricked me. 'Better Off Dead...' was the worst thing I have ever seen. I will never trust you as a director ever again, so don't speak to me' . . . He was just really upset. And I said, 'What happened?! What's wrong?!' And he just said that I sucked, and it was the worst thing he had ever seen, and that I had used him, and made a fool out of him, and all this other stuff . . . It was so out of left field that it just floored me." Cusack completed principal photography on "One Crazy Summer" due to contractual obligations but if it had it not been for this, Cusack likely would have not done the second film with Holland.

As a promo for the movie, Diane Franklin had her manager contact Dodgers Stadium to see if they'd be interested in having her do an autograph signing. "I just kind of thought it would be fun for people, because if they saw the movie, and I was at Dodger Stadium - it would kind of be a fun venue for everyone to come and see me there," she said. The ballpark said no to a signing but asked her to sing the anthem. "What was unusual about that, was when they introduced me, I thought they were going to say, 'And here's Diane Franklin from Better Off Dead,' or, 'Here's Diane Franklin from Bill & Ted' or something. And they wound up saying, 'And here's Diane Franklin.' And I'm thinking, 'Who knows Diane Franklin?' Nobody knows who I am.' It was so funny."

Lane's mother's experimental cooking was inspired by Savage Steve Holland's mother, who did the same thing. "My mom would get McCall's magazine, and she would find these recipes and make these things, and have some excuse why they didn't taste good-because she forgot something or she didn't have an ingredient," Holland told Entertainment Weekly. One year for his birthday-not Christmas-she gifted him with some TV dinners. "She was like, 'And I got you these really cool frozen dinners because you like the peach cobbler in this one' or something. And I was like, 'Wow. Really? This is my life.'"