Facts from: Sleeper

The initial idea was to make two movies instead of one. The first part would be a Manhattan comedy, at the end of witch Woody dies and his body was cryogenically preserved. Then he would wake up, five hundred years in the future, and the second part would take place. The idea was too risky and the first part was dropped.

Allen had early ideas of shooting the film in the capital of Brasilia, Brazil, using the futuristic looking buildings as background.

In the movie, scientists speculate, while watching Richard Nixon’s Checkers speech, that he must have been a President of the United States who committed some heinous crime. Allen agreed on that. But the remarkable fact is that the shootings preceeded the Watergate scandal by few months.

The film was initially suppose to end with Miles being refrozen and despatched to a culture where he really belonged, in a more distant future.

The film seems to be influenced by Davids Butler, who produced a comedy musical Just Imagine, in which the main character is struck by a lightning and wakes up fifty years later to a science-fictionally more futuristic world.