The film was to make its HBO debut on March 16, 2002, but was pushed forward a week when NBC scheduled The Matthew Shepard Story (2002) for the same day.

Members of the Tectonic company who originally conducted the interviews in Laramie are featured in the movie.

In one scene, Rebecca Hillicker (Camryn Manheim) is directing a rehearsal of a play that Moisés Kaufman (Nestor Carbonell) says he "never gets tired of" (and Hillicker responds, "Yeah, well, try directing it fifty times."). The play is "Our Town" by Thornton Wilder, which won the 1938 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and has been a staple of community, college, and high school theaters ever since. Like "The Laramie Project", "Our Town" is a play about a typical American small town and the impact on that town's citizens of the death of a beloved young person.

The Jedadiah Schultz character (played by Jeremy Davies) talks about winning a competition by performing a scene from the play "Angels in America" by Tony Kushner. Kathleen Chalfant, another member of the "Laramie Project" cast, played Hannah Porter Pitt, Ethel Rosenberg, and other roles in the original Broadway production of "Angels in America".

Michael Emerson, who plays a homophobic reverend here, had also starred in a previous Moisés Kaufman production, the off-Broadway play "Gross Indecency: The Trials of Oscar Wilde." In that, Emerson played the gay Irish playwright Oscar Wilde, who was prosecuted and imprisoned for his homosexuality (which was an illegal offense in England until the late 1960s).