Tatum O'Neal was ten years old when she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in this movie, making her the youngest person ever to win an Oscar in a competitive category. As of 2023, she still holds this record. She was four years younger than her rival nominee, Linda Blair, in The Exorcist (1973).
The cigarettes used by Tatum O'Neal contained no tobacco. They were made out of lettuce, and they nauseated her.
Based on the book Addie Pray by Joe David Brown, published only two years earlier in 1971. Peter Bogdanovich didn't like the title of the novel "Addie Pray", but wasn't sure whether "Paper Moon" was good enough; so he asked his mentor Orson Welles what he thought about it. Welles replied, "That title is so good, you shouldn't even make the picture, just release the title!" After the film's release, the book's printed title was also updated to Paper Moon.
When Tatum O'Neal won her Oscar, Peter Bogdanovich admitted that she won for the wrong category. Most people think she should have won Best Actress In A Leading Role instead of Supporting Role.
In a 2020 episode of the Hollywood movie history podcast "You Must Remember This," the podcast's creator, Karina Longworth, reports that when the Oscar nominations for Paper Moon were announced, Tatum O'Neal was visiting her father, Ryan, on the London set of Barry Lyndon. Tatum told Longworth that as an adult she has no first-hand memory of how she heard about her nomination, but some years later she heard from Vivian Kubrick (daughter of Barry Lyndon's director Stanley Kubrick) that "Ryan O'Neal had been so upset that Tatum had been nominated, and he hadn't, that on hearing the news, Ryan had socked his daughter. Tatum had blocked that part out. When Tatum won the award, becoming at age ten the youngest person ever to win a competitive Oscar, neither of her parents were in attendance."