“On the Mindless Menace of Violence” is a speech given by United States Senator and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy. He delivered it in front of the City Club of Cleveland at the Sheraton-Cleveland Hotel on April 5, 1968, the day after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. With the speech, Kennedy sought to counter the King-related riots and disorder emerging in various cities, and address what he viewed as the growing problem of violence in American society.
At one point during the script development, after developing a case of what writer and director Emilio Estevez called "paralyzing writer's block", Estevez set the script aside. Later, he checked into a remote hotel on the Central California Coast, near Pismo Beach, to work on the script. When he checked in, the woman at the desk recognized him, and asked what he was doing there. "I'm writing a script about the night Bobby Kennedy was killed", he told her. Tears instantly welled in her eyes. "I was there", she replied. Estevez interviewed the woman, who had been a volunteer for Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. He turned her personal story, which included marrying a young man to keep him out of Vietnam, into the Diane Howser character. Estevez said, "She really helped me crack the spine of the story and give it a beating heart. After that, it just started to flow."
A few scenes were filmed at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, California, the real-life location of the Robert F. Kennedy assassination, during its demolition. The wing of the hotel they were using hadn't been touched by the demolition crew yet, in order to preserve items from the pantry where Kennedy was shot.