During rehearsals of "We're in the Money", Ginger Rogers began goofing off and singing in pig Latin. Studio executive Darryl F. Zanuck overheard her, and suggested she do it for real in the movie.
At 5:55 PM PST on March 10, 1933, the Long Beach earthquake hit southern California, measuring 6.4 on the Richter scale. When the earthquake hit, Busby Berkeley was filming the "Shadow Waltz" dance sequence on a sound stage on the Warner Brothers lot in Burbank. The earthquake caused a blackout on the sound stage and short-circuited some of the neon-tubed violins. Berkeley was almost thrown from a camera boom and dangled by one hand until he could pull himself back up. Since many of the chorus girls in the dance number were on a 30-foot-high scaffold, Berkeley yelled for them to sit down and wait until the stage hands and technicians could open the sound stage doors and let in some light.
According to "Sin in Soft Focus: Pre-Code Hollywood" by Mark A. Vieira (Harry N. Abrams, 1999), this was one of the first American films made and distributed with alternate footage in order to circumvent censorship problems. Various state censorship boards had their own standards to impose on motion pictures, so studios began filming slightly different versions of problematic scenes, which were then inserted into prints that were labeled to indicate which version would be sent to which state (or country). This picture, with risqué numbers like "Pettin' in the Park," had to make various adjustments to accommodate censors in different areas.
Various people, including director Mervyn LeRoy and choreographer Busby Berkeley, have claimed credit for Ginger Rogers' pig-Latin rendition of "We're in the Money". In her autobiography, Rogers gives the credit to then Warner Bros executive Darryl F. Zanuck.
One of the neon-outlined violins used in the Shadow Waltz number is on display in the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History in Washington, DC.