According to Paramount's Press Notes, six filmmakers said no to directing Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977). Intrigued by the sociological and documentary potential of the project, however, Richard Brooks wanted to present Theresa Dunn (Diane Keaton) as a “product of her times,” imagining that numerous contexts were in play:

Brooks's comment on trying to locate a form of social documentary within the storytelling is especially noteworthy given that the source of the film, Judith Rossner's bestselling 1975 novel by the same name, was based on the actual murder of Roseann Quinn, a teacher of deaf children in New York City, in 1973 (itself also the source for Closing Time: The True Story of the “Goodbar” Murder by Lacey Fosburgh [1977]). Having written and directed Looking for Mr. Goodbar, Brooks sets the film's opening credits to a montage approximating a documentary tone, with black-and- white stills featuring the characters in the film, as well as random denizens at crowded bars and on the city streets; at the same time, a splintered musical soundtrack suggests a theme of fragmentation and marks a cultural shift in urban nightlife from singles bars to disco clubs. In 1970, NYC mayor John Lindsay signed a bill prohibiting male-only bars in the city; the famed McSorleys was obliged to admit women; and Chicago (where Goodbar was filmed some years later) lifted a ban on female bartenders.

In the same year that the film Looking for Mr. Goodbar was released, Lacey Fosburgh published what she would call an “interpretive biography” of Roseann Quinn and John Wayne Wilson, the real victim and murderer in the 1973 crime. A journalist who wrote about the case after the killing, Fosburgh speculates on the characters of Katherine Cleary and Joe Willie Simpson (as Closing Time renames Quinn and Wilson), toggling back and forth between their stories and backgrounds, establishing a symmetry between them.