Catalog the ways in which Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette could have gone wrong, and the tally might rival a Thanksgiving grocery list. Pressure on capturing the tragic couple and their time period was high enough before early test photos sent devotees of Bessette’s style into a tizzy and a legion of paparazzi to the FX limited series’ Manhattan shoot. But Love Story ultimately prevailed, commandeering online discourse for its nine-episode run and fetching seven Emmy nominations — including top limited series, one for lead actress Sarah Pidgeon and, shutting down any sartorial naysayers, outstanding period costumes. Power producing duo Nina Jacobson and Brad Simpson know they could make things easier on themselves, but, like with their previous historic collaborations with Ryan Murphy, the fun is in trying to capture a feeling on camera that’s no longer found in real life.
Each true story brings a different minefield to navigate in terms of what’s verifiable information, what’s unknown and the varying public sentiments. Which needle was the most difficult to thread on Love Story?
NINA JACOBSON It’s about understanding both what was known about them and what was not known for so many people. Because, when we were growing up, they were like American royalty. They were icons. But with the subsequent generations, what we found is that people knew her so much better than they knew him. She had become a posthumous influencer. Yet, as much as people knew of her, it was only visual. It didn’t really have anything to do with who she was as a person.
BRAD SIMPSON There were lots of recordings of him. He’d get tons of interviews. He was very public. We had to find her voice based on descriptions. And we just knew from all the research that, even though she presented as this WASP ideal and a sort of distant figure, she was incredibly warm and funny. Bringing that to life was one of our biggest challenges.
Were you aware of how substantial the Carolyn fan accounts on Instagram and TikTok were?
SIMPSON No, but we did know that she’d become this avatar for quiet luxury. Often, when we would get costume designers presenting us styles for actresses in our movies and TV shows, she would appear again and again on wardrobe boards. And we did know that there was a lot on TikTok about her, but we didn’t know how fevered it was when those early photos leaked and the world rained down saying it was going to be a disaster. It showed us the depth of the reach to people who weren’t even alive when she was around.
I think you’ve been vindicated by a lot of the aesthetics. How did you capture ’90s New York without going wildly over budget?
SIMPSON New York has changed so much more than we’d realized since the 1990s. It’s much easier to shoot period in L.A. New York has huge glass skyscrapers everywhere. There are bike lanes in the streets. It was a city that always stayed the same, and now it looks very different. Luckily, the places that were our main locations, Tribeca and the Upper East Side, had really stayed the same.
I recognized quite a few restaurants, too.
SIMPSON We were lucky that some of the iconic restaurants that they visited — Indochine, The Odeon, Bubby’s — are still there. We managed to shoot the last surviving restaurant of Sixth Street’s India row [Panna II], which has now been swarmed with people. We were lucky in that some of those places just have that same great aesthetic, but [our production designer] Alex DiGerlando worked really hard with our locations department to find places that looked right and gave us a sense of New York during that time. On a show like The Shards, we’re doing an interpretation of 1981. People wanted Love Story to evoke a well-photographed time.
From what I’ve seen of The Shards, it looks very 1980s. Do you two ever do anything that’s just contemporary and easy?
SIMPSON Back on [The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story], we didn’t understand. When we got into TV, we were naive. Our first script of O.J. had 110 scenes in it, and I remember the first visual production executive was like, “This is unshootable. There are no standing sets.” You’d think we would’ve learned that lesson by now, which is to write to standing sets and not have so many scenes, but we tend to gravitate toward stories that are a little bit historical and feel cinematic.
JACOBSON We came to television as feature producers. So, on the one hand, we’ve learned along the way that a TV show is not just a long movie. There are some tricks to the trade. But at the same time, partly because we tend to alternate between books and historic stories, there’s an ambition to try to capture a feeling. You can never make a book adaptation feel just like the book, but evoking the feeling you had when you read the book or the feeling you had about real people or time, that is our north star. We like having something to try to honor, preserve, capture, embody and get right as an organizing principle in a way that feels honest, even when you take the liberties you have to take in order to tell any story.
Looking at each of the eight episodes of Love Story, which was the hardest one to pull off — either logistically or tonally? SIMPSON Everything’s difficult. Even a show that doesn’t work is difficult to pull off. (Laughs.) But one challenging one was episode eight, “Exit Strategy,” which is just the two of them in a loft as their marriage is falling apart. Ryan had always had an idea to do a bottle episode to show the tensions in the marriage. But that episode proved to be a real challenge — in a great way because we were stripped of all the clothes and other characters. It had to move us through their relationship. The writers, Connor Hines and Juli Weiner, treated it as if it was a play. We rehearsed the actors on weekends and constantly rewrote. Logistically, the hardest episode to pull off was “The Wedding.” We had to live up to the romance and re-create Georgia. And then, of course, the finale. There was the question of how much to show the plane crash, of how to be respectful while giving people the information they need and honoring what the characters went through.
It’s been a few months now since the series aired. Has any feedback trickled to you from anyone surrounding the Kennedy camp?
JACOBSON No, the Kennedys have not called recently. (Laughs.)
SIMPSON So much has been written about them. They’ve been documented in so many ways. We fell in love with all these characters and wanted to be respectful and make something that was a tribute. As a family, it must be hard to live in a public life. It’s part of what our show is about. But no, nothing has trickled back to us.
Looking at a lot of your collaborations with Ryan — Crime Story, Sports Story and Love Story — how do you approach them at this point? How actively are you trying to identify stories that would fit in those franchises?
JACOBSON We’re always looking. We’re like truffle pigs, constantly sniffing to find the next thing. What we tend to do is identify a few, put them into the works and wait for something to be good enough to be worth making. That doesn’t always happen at the rate at which we would like.
SIMPSON I look at the way we produce as if we’re curating our own magazine. I grew up with Tina Brown’s Vanity Fair. I can imagine Crazy Rich Asians as an article about the rise of Chinese money and the culture of Singapore. You can imagine Pose as a feature about the trans ballroom scene. Every American Crime Story would obviously would fit in. I almost think of ourselves as editors, hoping stories come in well as journalists try to crack them.
This story first appeared in an August stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
