At one of the local Milagro stores where lawyer Charlie Bloom is dropping off his newspapers, a woman is shopping for Newman's Own salad dressing. The store owner tells her, that's no good, buy something else---an obvious in-joke in which director Robert Redford tweaks his longtime friend and two-time co-star Paul Newman.
After the movie was first released, The Milagro Beanfield War (1988)'s source novelist and co-screenwriter, John Nichols, wrote an essay entitled "Night of the Living Beanfield: How an Unsuccessful Cult Novel Became an Unsuccessful Cult Film in Only Fourteen Years, Eleven Nervous Breakdowns, and $20 Million."
A soundtrack for The Milagro Beanfield War (1988) has never been released despite the fact that the film won the Academy Award® for Best Music Score. Instead though, tracks from the film's score have been included on composer Dave Grusin's 1989 album entitled "Migration."
John Nichols' source novel "The Milagro Beanfield War" (1974) is the first book in his "New Mexico Trilogy" with the latter two parts being "The Magic Journey" (1978) and "The Nirvana Blues" (1981).
"One of the first American films to fall into the Latin American tradition of Magical Realism," according to the Moria---Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review website.