The Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, located in Hollywood across from the original Grauman Chinese Theatre, was this movie's hotel lobby interiors. The hotel check-in desk was positioned in the West side of the lobby, opposite the Hotel's actual main desk check-in. Primarily to provide little interruption, unnecessary actual hotel guest activity during the filming process. Set Decorator Donald J. Remacle switched and added furniture, tables, lamps and plants to the existing lobby. The hotel rooms and corridors were built on-stage at Universal Studios.
"Murder, She Wrote: South by Southwest (1997)," filmed after the series had been cancelled in April 1996, by Leslie Moonves CBS, fulfilled the first of the four contracted Movie of the Week "settlements" with Dame Angela Lansbury and Peter Shaw's "Corymore Productions." Not happy with CBS axing their twelve year "Murder, She Wrote (1984)" popular series, neither were the couple anxious to go into immediate production for another two-hour project. Plus each script proposal had to be approved by the network program division. CBS forced Corymore to fulfill the second "Movie of the Week" project after a two and a half years hiatus. Assembling the nucleus production team from the cancelled series, the crew were presented with the task of prepping the two hour movie within an extreme limited prep period of four weeks. Which included scouting locations, casting, costuming, designing, and for construction/painting of stage sets, to be built at "Universal Studios." Asking Production Designer Hub Braden "if it could be done?" His reply, "it just takes a blank check and an unlimited bank account full of money. Just give us a GO!"
Bill Layton had been the cameraman operating the master lens under the Director of Photography on Murder, She Wrote (1984), Mrs. Santa Claus (1996), and Murder, She Wrote: South by Southwest (1997). This was Bill Layton's first "Murder, She Wrote" credit as Director of Photography.
Goof, not a point of trivia. When F.B.I. Agent Mason Phillips (Robert Mailhouse) is questioning Patricia Williams (Kathryn Morris), he holds up a paper fingerprint card. He says, "On the left are fingerprints we took when we brought you in here. The fingerprints on the right were taken from a broken wine glass we found in Yuri's room." The fingerprint card is an ordinary one with spaces for one horizontal row of right hand rolled prints and the next horizontal row of left hand rolled prints. (The spaces at the bottom for "flat prints" are blank.) The first row on the Agent's card appeared to be rolls, the next row, (not divided left and right) appeared to be flat prints, the type you would leave at a crime scene. Though, prints taken from a crime scene would be on adhesive tape placed on card stock, the paper shown has prints inked directly onto the paper.
Steven Culp and Daniel Dae Kim appeared together in Season 3 of "Star Trek: Enterprise (2001)" as colleagues of the same unit.