When Richard Gere accepted a small role, he broke taboos about the subject, and major movie stars taking small parts in television productions. Subsequently, Steve Martin, Alan Alda, Phil Collins, and Anjelica Huston were willing to appear.
Although the name of Richard Gere's character is never revealed throughout the movie, he is Michael Bennett, the famous choreographer and creator of A Chorus Line and Dreamgirls (among others musicals), who died of AIDS in 1987. The real Bennett is commemorated during the closing montage of famous AIDS victims.
NBC spent two years adapting the book for television, but ultimately withdrew from the project in 1989, allowing HBO to pick up the rights. Contrary to popular belief, NBC dropped the project, not because of its controversial subject matter, but because the book's structure didn't work as a four-hour, two-night mini-series. In March 1994, six months after its debut on HBO, NBC re-ran it, edited to fit a two-hour time slot.
In one scene, Don Francis (Matthew Modine) mentions that Dr. Robert Gallo would win a Nobel Prize, if his retrovirus research turned out to be successful in finding what causes AIDS. That statement almost happened in reality, but in 2008, Gallo was excluded among the winners for such work, and the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was given to Luc Montagnier and Françoise Barré-Sinoussi (played by Patrick Bauchau and Nathalie Baye, respectively) for their work on the discovery of HIV.
This movie, like the Randy Shilts book on which it was based, presents as fact the idea that a single man (the French-Canadian airline steward Gaetan Dugas) was heavily or solely responsible for the introduction of HIV into the United States as well as the speed of its subsequent spread. Shilts was largely responsible for promulgating this idea, and he was the first author to supply Dugas's name to the general public (before Shilts's writings, Dugas was known only as "Patient Zero"). However, a 2016 paper published in Nature: The International Journal of Science "recovered the HIV-1 genome from the individual known as 'Patient 0' [Dugas] and found neither biological nor historical evidence that he was the primary case in the US." Furthermore, that paper and other publications in the years since Shilts's book have also debunked the title of "Patient Zero," another source of the notion that Dugas was the disease's origin point and/or primary vector; Erin Blakemore's October 2016 Smithsonian Magazine article explains, "It turns out that a tragic misreading fueled Dugas's reputation as 'Patient Zero.' Despite being initially identified as the CDC's 57th case of the then-mysterious disease, writes [the Los Angeles Times' Deborah] Netburn, at some point he was tagged with the letter 'O' in a CDC AIDS study that identified him as a patient 'outside of California.' That O was read as a number at some point, and Shilts, feeling the idea of a patient zero was 'catchy,' identified Dugas in his book."