Mary Stuart Masterson wore an eight-pound sack of bird seed around her stomach to simulate being pregnant.
One film in a late 1980s Hollywood cycle of "baby pictures". The movies include Baby Boom (1987), For Keeps? (1988), Immediate Family (1989), Three Men and a Baby (1987) (which was based on the then recent French film Three Men and a Cradle (1985)), She's Having a Baby (1988), and Look Who's Talking (1989), with the latter followed early in the 1990s with Look Who's Talking Too (1990).
The film's production notes state: "Screenwriter Barbara Benedek was struck that so many of her friends who had waited until their mid-3Os to have children were encountering difficulties. Lawrence Kasdan, who had wanted to sponsor a solo Benedek screenplay since they worked together on The Big Chill (1983) script, agreed with Benedek that the concept of a professional couple struggling to have a child had great potential."
Tapped as producers of the film were Sarah Pillsbury and Midge Sanford. "We'd never been offered a picture before that we hadn't developed ourselves," said Sanford. "But when we read the screenplay and saw what it was about, we thought it was something we could actually have initiated on our own." Pillsbury said, "We were referred to as the crying producers because every time Barbara Benedek showed us a new scene, we cried. But the script is also very funny. Our feeling is, even in the most tragic moments, human beings are funny".
Producer Lawrence Kasdan, actress Glenn Close, and screenwriter Barbara Benedek, had all previously collaborated on The Big Chill (1983) around six years earlier. Immediate Family (1989) is the second and final [to date, July 2015] of each of their collaborations with one another.