Stuart Margolin performed a number of duties on this production. Margolin was a supporting actor, a producer, music composer and the film's director. Margolin and lead actor James Garner had had a tremendous body of work together in television including Nichols (1971), Bret Maverick (1981) and The Rockford Files (1974).
Despite being a TV movie, which premiered on HBO in the US, the film was released theatrically in Australia and the UK.
This movie was made and released about three years after its source novel of the same name by novelist Joseph Wambaugh was first published in 1981. The book was Wambaugh's sixth novel and considered one of his most controversial.
"The Glitter Dome" of the film and source novel's title refers to a glamorous Hollywood bar where the story's Hollywood cops, who work at the Hollywood Police Division, hang-out. "The Glitter Dome" also functions as a slang reference to and metaphor for Hollywood. In the movie, "The Glitter Dome" is also slangly dubbed a "pig pen", 'pig' being a slang word for a 'cop' and 'pen' literally meaning an enclosure for muddy pigs (as with the literal meaning of a pigpen); alas "pig-pen" is a dirty place for off-duty policemen.
Writer Joseph Wambaugh was a California policeman for fourteen years. At the age of 30 he began to write novels about the police force.