Several years into the sound era, Warner Brothers production chief Darryl F. Zanuck pushed to revive the then-flagging interest in movie musicals. The studio's first major foray into the field, the highly successful 42nd Street, proved he was on the right track.

Gold Diggers of 1933 is based on the play The Gold Diggers by Avery Hopwood, which ran for 282 performances on Broadway in 1919 and 1920. The play was made into a silent film by David Belasco, the producer of the Broadway show, as The Gold Diggers (1923), starring Hope Hampton and Wyndham Standing, and again as a talkie, directed by Roy Del Ruth, Gold Diggers of Broadway (1929). The film starred Nancy Welford and Conway Tearle and was a big box office hit. Both were released by Warner Brothers.

An early title for the film was "High Life."

The first drafts of the screenplay were more focused on the saucy comedy, with indications of where songs might be inserted. As 42nd Street took off at the box office, it was decided to put all effort into making this a full-blown musical.

According to Thomas Schatz in The Genius of the System (Pantheon, 1988), the first treatment of the script called for the picture to begin with a semi-documentary montage of closed theaters, empty ticket agencies, and deserted office buildings, but after a series of meetings in January 1933 with Warners production chief Darryl F. Zanuck, it was decided to open it with a production number in progress meant to convey the illusion that there was no depression, to be interrupted by a gang of sheriff's deputies dismantling the set and stripping the girls of their costumes to settle the producer's debts. Those ideas would become the famous "We're in the Money" number.

One of the studio's most reliable and successful directors at the time was Mervyn LeRoy. He had helmed the kind of movies that gave Warners its reputation for hard-edged, fast-moving urban films with crackling dialogue: Little Caesar (1931), Five Star Final (1931), Big City Blues (1932), the last of which starred Joan Blondell as a chorus girl. With this track record, the studio knew he could handle the snappy banter and Broadway milieu of Gold Diggers, as well as the elements of social commentary, even if they were enclosed in a musical-comedy context. In his autobiography, LeRoy said he knew that Hollywood was changing, that the public wanted fewer of the grimly realistic films the studio had been turning out and was looking for "something gayer, splashier, more lavish. I know I had the urge to make that kind of movie." Some sources have noted that LeRoy was supposed to have directed the breakthrough Warner Brothers musical 42nd Street but had to drop out because of illness; however, he doesn't mention that in his book.

Gold Diggers was also a chance to capitalize on the talents of another studio contractee, dance director-choreographer Busby Berkeley. The ambitious former stage director had done well with the musical numbers in 42nd Street, and he was pressing the studio to give him greater responsibility and control. He got it on this project, so much so that his stamp on the picture is remembered far more than that of director Mervyn LeRoy. Berkeley was given great latitude to create lavish set pieces that would outshine even those in the earlier musical.

Berkeley came to the production with the idea for the "Shadow Waltz" number already in his head. In the 1920s in New York, he had seen a performer at the Palace Theater do an elegant dance move while playing the violin and decided right then he would do that one day "with twelve girls or more."

Busby Berkeley was inspired by the May 1932 "Bonus March" on Washington at which about 17,000 veterans of World War I suffering unemployment and other grave hardships of the Depression demanded the government begin paying the pension promised to them after the war, scheduled to be administered in 1945. The sets and lighting for the resultant "Remember My Forgotten Man" number were also apparently heavily influenced by German Expressionism.

by Rob Nixon