The Cool and the Crazy is a 1958 motion picture that was distributed by American-International Pictures. The producer of the film, Elmer Rhoden Jr., was president of the Kansas City, Missouri-based Commonwealth Theaters chain, a prominent chain of motion picture theaters with stretched through Missouri, Kansas, Arkansas, Iowa, Nebraska, and South Dakota. Back in 1956, Rhoden Jr. had seen that teenagers were the best new audience for films (as television was drawing most adults out of theaters), and had come up with the idea of starting his own small film complex in Kansas City to produce low-budget teen exploitation films for these audiences, primarily for showing in drive-in theaters. Already, such teen films as Rebel Without a Cause, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, I Was a Teenage Werewolf, and Rock Around the Clock had been huge successes. It was the glory years of the independent regional filmmaker, and with $45,000 raised with the help of local businessmen, Rhoden Jr. hired Kansas City filmmaker Robert Altman, just starting out back then, to make the juvenile delinquency melodrama The Delinquents, which was sold to United Artists and released in 1957, grossing $1,000,000 and also firmly establishing Altman as a film director.

The success of The Delinquents encouraged Rhoden Jr. to put up even more money (about $170,000) for a second delinquency film in Kansas City. Rhoden Jr. began with thinking up a title and nothing else (The Cool and the Crazy) and, because Robert Altman was directing television shows in Hollywood, Rhoden Jr. hired Kansas City writer and a friend of Altman's - Richard C. Sarafian - to write the screenplay for the film. Sarafian went on to direct television shows and films in California during the 1960s and 1970s.