Something strange happens when you’re working on a series, “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story” production designer Matthew Flood Ferguson told IndieWire. “The characters sort of come to life and tell you what their world is,” he said.
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Much of the production design of Ryan Murphy’s Netflix series is a meticulous recreation of the Menendez’s home , aided by crime scene photos. But a few design choices weren’t pictured just felt right. “In Jose and Kitty’s bedroom. I decided to use a very bold red carpet,” Ferguson said. “It was a strong choice, but it lent itself to an uneasy feeling, and it was slightly garish. And I also thought of it as a foreshadowing for what was to happen. With every decision, you’re concerned, like, ‘Is this the right decision, am I making a mistake?’ Later on, when we were filming, somebody came up and showed me a picture that I had not seen, and it was Jose laying on the floor and it was a red carpet in his bedroom. So that made me feel good.”
Happy accidents like that are always “fun to get,” Ferguson said, but they’re no match for careful, detail-oriented preparation. In a series that is as much a true-crime show as it is a glimpse into the materialism of the era, a lot of thought and research went into the most important status symbols of Los Angeles: the cars.
Ferguson knew that he would need to find exact replicas of six cars for the show: Jose Menendez’s 1988 300 SEO Mercedes, Kitty’s Mercedes convertible, Erik’s tan Ford Escort GT, Lyle’s Alfa Romeo, and the Porsche and Jeep Wrangler the brothers bought after shooting their parents. Of all the cars, the Ford Escort was the most difficult to obtain — and it was the most important, because it was part of the murders.
“You would think that would be one of the easier ones, but we could not find it,” Ferguson said. Finally, the series’ transportation picture car vehicle coordinator Randy Wolf found one in a town near the Mexican border that didn’t run and boasted a shredded interior and a banged-up exterior. “He bought it, brought it back to L.A., and rebuilt it so that we could drive it and film in it,” Ferguson said. Not only that, but the car then required special outfitting for its star moment when the brothers arrive at the house the night of the murders and share a scene sitting in the front seats. “Jason McCormick, our cinematographer, wanted to get a shot from the back of the car,” Flood said. “So after we rebuilt the car, we had to gut the trunk so that Jason could get back with his camera to shoot it. And then we built a false bottom, re-carpeted it, and, when we needed to film the trunk, we put it back together.”
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Likewise, the production team had to cobble together the Menendez house from three different locations. Integral to the story and the murder at its center, the house had very specific requirements that no one location could meet — including a surprisingly hard-to-source tennis court.
I think in 2004, the National Tennis Association changed the color of the tennis court,” Ferguson said. They used to be green, but now they’re all blue. So finding a green tennis court was also not very easy. That tennis court actually belonged to a house in the valley.”
That attention to real-life detail extended to every aspect of the shoot, including moments when it seemed even stranger than fiction. Ferguson pointed out the court stenographer’s desk during the trial scenes: “She had like a little flower arrangement, family pictures, a porcelain cat,” he said. “And so we got a porcelain cat. Sometimes you look at it like, ‘Nobody would believe that.’ But I’ve got the picture to prove it!”
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