Cast members Lee Patrick (Effie Perine) and Elisha Cook Jr. (Wilmer Cook) both reprised their roles from The Maltese Falcon (1941).
Before the film was released, The Burbank Studios/Warner Bros took the REAL Maltese Falcon statuette from the 1941 version and made a model of it. They cast it in plaster, painted it flat black, wrapped it in Chinese newspaper and burlap (as per the Bogart movie), and mailed it to press reviewers as a gimmicky press promotion.
They were all numbered and inscribed on the bottom, up to number 250, with EA-TBS (The Burbank Studios).
Then somebody made a model from THAT one and sold them in book and movie shops, but the detail was lost in the process.
Actress Stéphane Audran spoke about The Black Bird (1975)'s failure, stating: "I didn't understand what happened on the picture. Everyone was fighting: George Segal, the director and writer, David Giler, the producer, Ray Stark. It's so difficult to do a good film even if the people are getting along well. If you have fights every day, it can't help."
A novelization of the screenplay was written by Alexander Edwards and first published in December 1975 by publisher Warner Books according to an article in the 10th September 1975 issue of show-business trade-paper 'Variety'. The release date was scheduled as a movie-tie with the picture's theatrical season.