He conceived the story based on Ferrante & Teicher, a piano duo he had grown up watching perform on The Ed Sullivan Show, which inspired him to write a film about working class musicians who are also siblings.

While Frank dutifully serves as the duo's manager, Jack has grown weary of the hackneyed material they have come to perform over the years, but his complacency leaves him uninspired to pursue his talents further.

Taking advantage of his absence to contemporize their setlist, Susie and Jack deliver a sultry performance of "Makin' Whoopee" during the hotel's New Year's Eve festivities, after which they finally succumb to their feelings and sleep together.

After spending another night with Jack, Susie tells him she has received a lucrative job offer to record television jingles for cat food, which would require her to leave the group.

Having opted to offer piano lessons from his home, Frank accepts Jack's decision to pursue a solo career and explains he thought he was helping his younger brother live a carefree life, of which he was sometimes jealous.

Screenwriter Steve Kloves was inspired to write The Fabulous Baker Boys based on Ferrante & Teicher, a piano duo he had grown up watching perform on The Ed Sullivan Show during the 1960s.

"[3] Remembering that during his childhood parents typically enrolled their children in piano lessons simply to "give them culture", he decided to write a story about piano-playing brothers, citing familial dysfunction as a common theme among his work.

[3] Although he felt a story about a waning piano act would provide strong material for a feature-length film, some of Kloves's peers warned him "it was a completely bizarre, terrible idea for a movie",[3] expressing concerns that its dark subject matter and frequent arguments would not translate well on screen.

The way my mind tripped off on it was that this guy's parents gave him piano lessons to improve his life and give him an opening into culture and there he was, 20 years later, at a Holiday Inn playing 'Feelings'.

[7] Kloves's experience writing his previous film, Racing with the Moon (1984), motivated him to direct The Fabulous Baker Boys himself because the final version of the former "wasn't what I saw in my head".

[12] When casting The Fabulous Baker Boys began, Kloves recalled that while studio executives often dismissed his script as "dreary and depressing", most actors considered for the film found it "funny and moving".

[7] The studio had also considered casting Murray's Saturday Night Live castmate, comedian Chevy Chase, as either Jack or Frank Baker, despite both actors having little musical experience.

[3] Both Jeff and Beau had piano keyboards in their dressing rooms and spent several months learning to play the film's songs during pre-production, specifically studying how their musical performances should appear to onlookers.

[49] Kloves told cinematographer Michael Ballhaus that, aesthetically, he had envisioned the film as an Edward Hopper painting: "I always saw the movie in terms of the burnished red of the booths, a kind of dark crimson with amber light and a slightly threadbare quality, like the surroundings are all going to seed a bit.

[3] Having developed a reputation for filming women,[55] Ballhaus incorporated his signature 360-degree camera rotation into Pfeiffer's scene,[54][56] which he had envisioned upon first reading the script due to its sexually suggestive nature.

[24] The score largely consists of jazz music and pop standards,[59] most of which were performed by Grusin on keyboards with tenor saxophonist Ernie Watts, guitarist Lee Ritenour, trumpeter Sal Marquez, bassist Brian Bromberg, and drummer Harvey Mason.

[24] The actress was mostly unfamiliar with The Fabulous Baker Boys' selection of Tin Pan Alley standards, thus she studied the works of jazz singers Sarah Vaughan, Dinah Washington, Rickie Lee Jones, Billie Holiday, and Helen Merrill for inspiration.

"[85] While Macdonald considered Seattle to be as much of a main character as the film's cast,[42] Calvillo argues that the city "could be any cold metropolis, and with the exception of cars, hairstyles, and fashion, there's really no telling when the movie actually takes place.

[87] Describing The Fabulous Baker Boys as potentially "the loneliest mainstream American movie since In a Lonely Place", Bowen credits the director with "fashioning something that's conscious of its artistic heritage without scanning as self-conscious, like most neo-noirs.

[91] Despite its mediocre box office performance,[92][93] the film proved to be a major top-seller once released on home video,[92] for a period trailing behind the Back to the Future franchise in terms of popularity.

[97] The website's critical consensus reads: "Its story is nothing special, but The Fabulous Baker Boys glows beneath luminous performances from its perfectly cast stars.

[102] Praising its performances, Ballhaus' camera work and Grusin's score, Jonathan Rosenbaum of the Chicago Reader wrote that the film demonstrates "plenty of old-fashioned virtues".

"[104] The New York Times' Janet Maslin described The Fabulous Baker Boys as a "film specializing in smoky, down-at-the-heels glamour, and in the kind of smart, slangy dialogue that sounds right without necessarily having much to say".

[1] Praising its cast, musical numbers and cinematography, Maslin felt the familiarity of its characters "does nothing to make them less dazzlingly attractive", despite finding some scenes and plotlines unnecessary.

[1] Film critic Roger Ebert labeled The Fabulous Baker Boys "one of the movies they will use as a document, years from now, when they begin to trace the steps by which Pfeiffer became a great star ...

[115] Maslin felt Beau was provided with his own "chance to shine", embodying "the seniority Frank needs to keep the unruly, undependable Jack in line",[1] while Kempley declared Jeff's performance the best of his career.

[110] Despite feeling the film is "hardly original", Time Out described the Bridges as "a superb double act", writing Jeff particularly "manages with very sparse dialogue to convey a wealth of information about a less than sympathetic character".

[145][146] According to Robert Cettl, author of Sensational Movie Monologues, critics appreciated The Fabulous Baker Boys at the time of its release as an example of dedicated "small picture" filmmaking which they felt Hollywood had abandoned in favor of blockbuster films with high budgets.

[25] Writing for Den of Geek, novelist Aliya Whiteley believes the scene "immediately entered into filmic language", observing its influence on subsequent films such as Pretty Woman (1990).

[163] A 1992 episode of The Golden Girls features actress Rue McClanahan singing "I Wanna Be Loved By You" on top of a grand piano in a performance based on Pfeffer's.