Most of the individuals involved in the production of Poor Pretty Eddie were, at the time, nominally employed in the world of adult films, with the picture representing an opportunity to "go straight." According to the DVD's extensive liner notes, they secured backing from Michael Thevis, a notorious Atlanta-based businessman commonly known as “The King of Pornography”[3] whose other interests included a chain of sex shops, a record company, and the manufacture of peep show booths.[4] Further motivating Thevis was a desire to launder money he had made through dealings with various Mafia figures, which had attracted the attention of the FBI.[4] Shortly after the film's production, Thevis was jailed on an assortment of charges and, following a prison escape in 1978, was placed on the FBI’s most-wanted list.

The movie's script, loosely based on the Jean Genet play The Balcony, was the work of consummate television writer B. W. Sandefur, who also wrote for such shows as Barnaby Jones, Little House on The Prairie and Charlie's Angels.[5]

The film was shot on location in and around Athens, Georgia in 1973. The film’s biggest star, Shelley Winters, was flown in on a private plane that nearly crashed upon landing.[4]

Contemporary reviews for the film were almost unanimously negative, owing to the film's dark racial undercurrents and repeated depictions of rape. One Georgia-based film writer concluded: “Upon leaving the theater, I quite honestly felt nauseous.”[3]

Over the course of its 10-year run at drive-ins and grindhouse theaters, the film was distributed under several different titles, each intended to market the film as belonging to different genres in an attempt to appeal to a variety of demographics: It was retitled "Black Vengeance" for distribution as a blaxploitation film, The Victim as a vigilante thriller in the vein of Death Wish, and Redneck County and Redneck County Rape for distribution in the American south as a "hicksploitation" film. Unusually, a wholly alternate version of the film was exhibited under the name "Heartbreak Motel." This version—featuring voiceover narration by Eddie—is edited to present the movie as something resembling a filmed play: numerous action scenes are edited out in favor of lengthy dialogue pieces not present in any other versions, while the film's climactic gun battle is replaced by a sequence in which Eddie obtains a recording contract and leaves Georgia for Nashville. Although the "Heartbreak Motel" version is noticeably less violent than any other version, and omits most of the film's rape sequences, it also incorporates an anal sex scene between Eddie and Bertha missing from "Poor Pretty Eddie," set to an unknown bluegrass group to a song that seems to be called "You Don't Have To Say You Love Me In The Morning".