>Most of the advance press coverage of the making of Bye Bye Birdie focused on the 22-year-old Ann-Margret who had so completely captivated director George Sidney that he restructured the musical around her character, reducing Janet Leigh's part as Rosie to a supporting character and deleting her key musical number, "Spanish Rose," from the film. Ann-Margret, on the other hand, ended up performing five songs as opposed to her original two. Among these were a prologue and epilogue created in post-production through Sidney's insistence in which the young actress performs the theme song while advancing and retreating against a blue screen background.

>For Janet Leigh, however, Bye Bye Birdie would be a major disappointment, coming at a difficult time in her life (she was in the process of a marital split from Tony Curtis). In her earlier days at MGM, Sidney had been a great friend to her, effectively showcasing her talents in The Red Danube (1949) and Scaramouche (1952) but that was when the studio system was at its height. The movie business was in transition and every studio was affected including Columbia where Bye Bye Birdie was produced. In her autobiography, There Really Was a Hollywood, Leigh remarked, "Columbia had changed since Harry Cohn died in 1958. I missed his central force, that focus toward a goal, whatever guises he used to achieve it. He was sometimes right, sometimes wrong, but his single-mindedness had created undiffused motion pictures. George had changed as well. I couldn't exactly define the difference. It might be accredited to the transference of his Svengali attitude from me to the new and young Ann-Margret. He saw, perhaps, an opportunity to mold another budding career. I was 'old hat' after the numerous pictures and tests we had made together. His dismissing behavior wreaked havoc with my already precarious stability. But in its place other support structures grew. Dick Van Dyke and his wife Margie, Onna [White, the choreographer]...Paul Lynde, Maureen Stapleton, and I developed a bond, a union, that helped cushion my rocky road."

>The film adaptation of Bye Bye Birdie garnered two Academy Award nominations, one for Best Adapted Musical Score, and the other for Best Sound.