The pianist's unusual surname, "Orient", came about because Nora Johnson based the character on Oscar Levant, a real-life concert pianist, raconteur, and film actor on whom she had a crush as a teenager. Since the word "levant" means Orient in French (literally the direction from which the sun rises), the name is a play on words. In the film, several allusions to the pianist's unusual name occur when his two teenage fans put on Chinese conical hats, address their idol as "Oriental Henry," kowtow to an Asian-style altar, and adopt vaguely Japanese-sounding names for themselves.