California Doubling: Though the film is set in Mississippi, the era's racial and political climate necessitated filming in Illinois. Specifically, Sidney Poitier refused to shoot south of the Mason-Dixon line. Why? Because of an unpleasant experience some months earlier involving himself, Harry Belafonte, and a group of Klansmen. (A few scenes were, however, shot in Tennessee — most notably Endicott's cotton field, which Illinois couldn't provide.)
Dawson Casting: Quentin Dean was twenty-two when she played the sixteen-year-old Delores Purdy.
Fake American: Ulam, the mortician they wake up so Tibbs can examine Colbert's body, is played by English actor Arthur Malet.
Irony as She Is Cast: Warren Oates and Lee Grant were among Hollywood's group of actors and actresses who played racist roles, or were in racism-centric films, but were themselves up front and vocal in support of the civil rights movement at the same time.
Method Acting: Rod Steiger spoke in the Southern dialect consistently for the duration of filming.
Throw It In!: The scene that took place at the sheriff's house featured dialog that came out of improvisations between Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger.
Wag the Director: Tibbs' retaliation slap to Endicott was not in the original script nor in the novel on which the film is based. Sidney Poitier insisted that Tibbs slap Endicott back and wanted a guarantee that the scene would appear in all prints of the film. According to Stirling Silliphant, the slap was in the original script though not in the novel.
Alan Smithee: Carroll O'Connor was also the series's Story Editor, using the pseudonym Matt Harris.
California Doubling: The TV series was still set in Mississippi but was filmed in Louisiana for the first season and then in Covington, Georgia for seasons 2-6.
Enforced Method Acting: Denise Nicholas (Harriet DeLong) channeled her grief over her Real Life sister's unsolved murder into the storyline which had her character dealing with the same thing. Carroll O'Connor was actually completely unaware of this when he wrote the storyline and offered to nix it, but she decided to go ahead as a way of dealing with her grief.
Recycled Script: The plot of the season 3 episode "Rape" has many similarities to the All in the Family episode "Edith's 50th Birthday". Athena fights off the rapist in her kitchen during the episode's climax in a very similar fashion to the way Edith Bunker did, with Chief Gillespie delivering a "The Reason You Suck" Speech to the rapist's wife over the way she's putting other women in harm's way by providing him with a bogus alibi that's very similar to the speech Gloria gives Edith when she expresses reluctance towards going to the police about the incident.
Recycled: The Series: Same basic premise and characters as the movie, though set twenty years later.
What Could Have Been: NBC originally wanted O. J. Simpson to play Detective Tibbs on the series before Howard Rollins was brought in for the part (though Simpson would appear as a guest star in Season 2's "Walkout"), which would have made for an extremely awkward situation when Simpson was charged with the murders of ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and friend Ronald Goldman; especially since the arrests came just over a month after the final episode as a regular series airednote the series concluded with four 2-hour television movies that served as an ad-hoc Season 8
Written by Cast Member: Denise Nicholas (Harriet DeLong) wrote six episodes, and Carroll O'Connor (Gillespie) wrote 27.
