If he wasn’t on a watch list before, 11.22.63 prop master Jim Murray is convinced that simultaneously buying a dozen vintage slaughterhouse sledgehammers on eBay was probably the last straw.

“I’m on the list for sure. I buy a lot of creepy, weird stuff online for work,” jokes Murray, who worked on The Expanse, The Strain, and the Saw franchise before collecting ’60s-era tools for Hulu’s limited series about a time-traveling teacher attempting to stop the Kennedy assassination, which is based on Stephen King’s bestseller. “You do what you gotta do to get the props you need to be accurate to the story you are telling and the timeframe within which it takes place. You don’t want to be the props guy who gets it wrong, because people notice and they call you on it.”

The sledgehammers also raised some eyebrows on set. Murray says, “At 12 pounds or more, they are not light to ship, and they looked almost identical to each other [except for] the different weights and patinas. So I was questioned about why I was buying so many.”

Turns out he had a good answer for that too. “Period pieces are easier to do because there is a historical reference for what stuff looks like, and the bulk of the stuff you need, basics like cars or furniture, can be rented through local vendors. If we can’t find a certain item, the director doesn’t like the examples we did find, or you need something to look like it is described in the script, then we turn to scratch building or modifying an existing item. I went through the scripts and picked out items that were important or would be focused on to do more research on whether it would need to be found or created. Some things are obvious, like I knew we would have to make Al’s notebooks because that was something Stephen King made up, and we needed them to say certain things.

Related: ‘11.22.63’: Stephen King Answers 4 Burning Questions

“Ordinary things are where you really have to be on your game when making a period piece. It’s easy to take things like that for granted, and that’s usually when you make a mistake. When I read sledgehammer in the first kill scene, an image immediately popped in my head of the kind I could drive down to Home Depot and pick up. We could have just gotten one of those and everyone watching would have said, ‘OK, a sledgehammer.’ But I tweaked on it, so I Googled ‘1960 slaughterhouse sledgehammer’ to be sure. Turns out it wasn’t the same, and that’s when I realized I had to flush every little thing out to make sure we were using accurate items for the decade. The sledgehammer experience set the tone for how I handled this project from then on.”

Over in the costume department, Roland Sanchez (Lost, Revolution) also placed the utmost importance on getting everything right, especially when it came to outfitting the presidential duo for their ill-fated drive. “I knew from the title that we were going to get to that day, and I put off those costumes as long as I could, just to have as much time as possible to find the perfect fabrics and study the pictures and do the research,” the costume designer explains. “You just can’t get that pink suit wrong. It is one of the most recognizable outfits of all time.”

He spent about a month and a half prior to shooting researching ’60s style, examining old photos from that day in Dallas, dissecting the Zapruder film frame by frame, shopping rental houses and vintage boutiques, sketching, perusing swatches, and crafting looks for the fictional characters, like James Franco’s time traveler, Jake Epping, as well as recreating clothes straight out of the history books. “Then you continue developing the look and the research process throughout the shoot. We went all out to make sure the costumes were as accurate as possible. We owe it to history,” says Sanchez, adding that working on ’50s-set Pleasantville under three-time Academy Award-nominated costume designer Judianna Makovsky early in his career was “good preparation for 11.22.63” and a “valuable lesson” on period pieces. “That period in fashion is not as chaotic or visually assaulting as clothes today. There is an attention to detail and quality, and everyone dressed up. Wearing yoga pants to the grocery store or ripped jeans to dinner would never happen. It was such a fulfilling experience to get to visit that era for six months as a designer.”

Related: ‘11.22.63’ Review: James Franco and Stephen King Try to Save JFK

And ultimately, the props and costumes did exactly what executive producer/writer Bridget Carpenter needed them to do. “They gave life and depth to this entertainment experience. They made an important historical event, which I am too young to have witnessed personally, much more real for me and I hope for anyone who watches the show,” Carpenter tells Yahoo TV in a December interview about the Hulu miniseries. “I think that everybody who stepped onto one of our sets or locations took a deep breath and they were in the past, thanks to all the sets, costumes, and props. It was downright eerie sometimes.”

Franco concurred in an interview with Yahoo TV back in December. “When we recreated large spaces like the auditoriums where JFK gave speeches, the Cuban restaurants of old Dallas, or Jack Ruby’s nightclubs, it was like we truly traveled back in time. It was magical.”

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YELLOW CARD

On top of doing right by history and the decade, Murray felt an obligation to be accurate to King’s book. “We wanted to tip our hat visually as much as we could to his book because including those little details is a reward to his dedicated fanbase. It was great to work closely with the writing department because we could throw ideas back and forth to bring those little book details more alive on screen.”

Murray says the best example of that is the yellow card placed in the hat of a mysterious man who threatens Jake when he first travels back in time. “In the book, there are several colors of cards, but the writers focused in on one yellow-card-man character. It could have been easy. I could have bought some yellow card stock and cut it up, but we wanted to be deeper than that and tell more of a story without having to write anything. We sourced 15 different shades of yellow or different thicknesses and narrowed it down to three and then camera-tested those to find the perfect one. But we wanted to go farther. The director came up with the idea for a logo of a snake eating its tail to represent infinity. We designed the graphic and then had to figure out how we wanted to put it on the card. Just running it through a printer seemed boring. We ended up etching the design into the cards with a laser cutter. We did a medium burn, and then I glued two cards together to give it more depth and then we aged the card from there. So this little line in the script that read as a yellow card in his hat ended up taking me two to three weeks to finish.”

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Carpenter, who describes Murray as “one of the greatest artists I have ever worked with,” was so happy with the final product that she had two of the yellow cards framed as gifts for J.J. Abrams and King. “They are just so special, and Murray worked so hard on them, even though the detail will likely be lost onscreen. I looked at a dozen prototypes for the card alone. He is as meticulous as an artist working on a painting.”

Related: 10 Times 'Quantum Leap’ Leapt to the 1960s



AL’S RESEARCH

The file folders and notebooks full of facts, dates, observations, and sports stats given to Jake (Franco) by Al (Chris Cooper) to help him on his mission were also key props that had to be painstakingly created from scratch. “The first stage was finding a journal and file folders that were likely bought in 2015 but wouldn’t stand out as futuristic when he went through the closet.

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“Then we had to establish Al’s handwriting. Because the actors are not going to sit and write out the journals, we hired a company in Toronto. All they do is paperwork for TV and movies. They and the art department made all the clippings, drawings, photos, articles, and maps and came up with four handwriting samples. Those guys are artists, not just stunt hands. They want to know about the characters, if the actor is right-handed or left-handed. They read the books.

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“Once the producers and director signed off on those, we laid it out and generated all the various files that would be seen on camera and studied by James. We needed one full hero set and a backup set in case they spilled water on it or something. Then we needed a burned set for after the fire. So we had to start doing test burns until we got that just right. If the director decided he needed a different page at the last minute, we couldn’t just throw it in there. We’d have to go burn it specifically. It was a bit of a pain that way, but it also looked great.”

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JACKIE’S PINK SUIT, JFK’S TIE

As previously mentioned, dressing POTUS and FLOTUS (a legit fashion icon), for one of the most chilling, photographed, combed-over, investigated, and theorized about days in all of American history was angina-producing. Sanchez says, “It’s funny to think how much work the tailor and I did on those two looks, given that they were made for background artists with no lines.”

For the Dallas visit, Sanchez chose a bright pink, classic cardigan-style skirt and jacket with navy lapels, a Chanel pattern copy of a Chanel suit made by New York salon Chez Ninon that the first lady had worn on several other occasions. Sanchez says, “I have seen a lot of reproductions of that suit at the costume houses, and they just weren’t right, and I felt very strongly about getting that costume perfect. It is so iconic, especially because she chose to leave it on [when she traveled] back to Washington, caked in blood, despite everyone suggesting she change. That’s a powerful image.”

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(Credit: Getty Images)

He had to make do with pictures because the real thing has not been seen by the public since it was sent to the National Archives in 1964, with a request that it not be displayed. Following her death, her daughter deeded it, adding a provision that it not be viewed until 2103. Sanchez started with a fabric quest.

“We had people swatching pink bouclés in Toronto, New York, and L.A., and nothing. Eventually, my assistant went online and ordered one from London. It was stunning when it arrived. Turns out it was a Chanel fabric, so it was fate. We went over the pattern for a few weeks and made several samples before we nailed that. We even made handmade buttons just like Chanel does.”

For John F. Kennedy, the biggest complication was recreating his Dior tie. “We found a bit of pattern from that tie, and the art department tiled it to scale, and then we printed the fabric to recreate the tie. Details were important, even though you won’t even see that on TV probably. We don’t f–k around. I loved that Bridget and Bad Robot [Productions] supported that amount of detail.”

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JAMES FRANCO’S FAVORITES

It apparently pays to be a producer and director and to be featured in almost every scene of a project, because no one stops you from grabbing a few mementos, even if they weren’t yours to begin with. “I kept a bunch of the jackets. I even kept Josh Duhamel’s awesome jacket, even though it’s a little big [on me],” Franco admitted. Sanchez laughs when asked about the costume swap. “Josh is a tall, big guy, so none of the clothes we would have ever found vintage shopping would have fit him. We built this jacket out of a plaid wool and added black shearling-like collar, and it was just perfect for his manly, mean, blue-collar character. Josh looked fantastic in it, but something about it spoke to James. He harangued me and hounded me for the jacket for months literally, even though they aren’t the same size. Every time I saw him, he’d be like, ‘When am I getting that jacket?’ I was finally able to give it to him after we wrapped, and I just ran into a woman who works with him and she told me that he wears it all the time.”

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AL’S KNIFE

“We needed a prop vehicle to tell a story when Jake is being interrogated by Kennedy’s security guards,” Murrays says. “The script had Jake’s wallet open on the table, and he is worried that they will notice that there are new and old $20 bills. But my problem with that was that most people wouldn’t notice the difference between the two, and I didn’t think it was going to tell the audience quickly enough that he was in danger of being found out. We knew we needed a knife for an earlier scene, and we thought, what if that knife was special to Al and he gave it to Jake, and what if it was a Vietnam knife that he got for serving in the war which had future dates on it. The existing knives have the dates on the blades, but that wouldn’t work for us because the knife wouldn’t be open, so we made a knife that had the dates printed on the handle. It was a great experience to collaborate with the writers to flesh that out. That isn’t always how it works. Some writers don’t like to work with other departments.”

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LEE HARVEY OSWALD’S GUN, PHOTO

Murray thought the most exciting prop to source was Lee Harvey Oswald’s Mannlicher Carcano rifle, the gun that killed Kennedy. “I knew if I got that one wrong, everyone would be all over me. So we had to find one and get it and then get the right sight for it, and we had a strap made. It was fun to do that research, because that is such a piece of history. And it led to me doing research on the photo of Oswald with the two newspapers that ended up on the cover of Life magazine. We have a scene where he comes down the stairs and his wife takes that famous photo. That meant I had to figure out and find what kind of camera she would have had. They found a camera at their house, but no one knows for sure. That is like finding a needle in a haystack. That’s the stuff that really lit me up. I went down to Dallas to shoot those scenes, and it was so cool to be at the actual house with the rifle, the camera, the newspapers and the actors in the clothes. It was surreal.”

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With Oswald also comes his mother, Marguerite, who in this case is portrayed by Cherry Jones. “She was another case where almost everyone has seen that image of her in the nurse’s uniform and cat-eye glasses, so we had to get it right,” Sanchez says. “And when Cherry put that on, she came alive as that character.”

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(Marguerite Oswald Photo Credit: Getty Images)

LICENSE PLATES & POLICE BADGES

Two of Murray’s earliest endeavors coincidentally revolved around metallurgy. He quickly decided his standard operating procedure for prop license plates wasn’t going to cut it. “We were going to be driving all over the states. I usually use a plastic license plate, but for this that wasn’t going to be right. They didn’t have enough weight to them. License plates in the ’60s were metal and heavy, so we had a company in Florida make all the license plates in metal. They looked right on the antique cars. They could bend and be scratched and dented. Nobody had protectors on their plates back then, so plates got very beat up.”

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He also knew there was going to be a tremendous demand for Dallas police badges when it came time to shoot the titular date in Dealey Plaza. ”Everyone can look up what those would have looked like. So I had to figure out what to do. Do we cheat it and rent badges that are close and hope for the best, or do we scratch build them? We ended up having them made so we could be as accurate as possible. Of course, we had to modify them for clearance purposes.”

ZAPRUDER WITNESSES

Carpenter said one of the most surreal moments of production was when the team landed in the real Dealey Plaza in downtown Dallas to shoot the presidential motorcade and assassination. She recalls, “That area hasn’t changed since that day. We didn’t have to do much of anything to ready the location except park some old cars and add 600 extras in period wear. Thanks to Roland’s pitch-perfect designs, it felt like we stepped into history, and it was an incredibly respectful and powerful replication.”

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Among the 600 extras were some familiar faces. Sanchez took frame grabs from the most famous 26 seconds of home video ever, the much-scrutinized conspiracy-inspiring Zapruder film, and set about bringing back to life its controversial characters, like the Babushka Lady, Umbrella Man, the three tramps (one of whom is allegedly actor Woody Harrelson’s father), a family, the woman in a red coat, and Zapruder himself. “The gang’s all there, and we made all of their clothes exactly how they are in the film, and everyone on the set had chills. When the procession of cars came down the street, it was even more chilling. It was insane.”

SARA GADON’S TEAL SUIT

As much as he liked helping history repeat itself one pillbox hat and tie bar at a time, Sanchez enjoyed the freedom that came with dressing fictional characters, like Franco’s love interest, Sadie (Sara Gadon). He enthuses, “I could spend the rest of my career making clothes for that actress. She is just perfection, and she embraced the process. She never complained. She even got into the period undergarments. The first thing I made for her was the teal-blue suit that she was wearing when she first meets James’s character. She totally reminded me of Tippi Hedren sitting on that park bench reading.”

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FINALE LOOKS

Sanchez drew inspiration from one of his favorite films for the last outfits worn by Franco and Gadon in the show. “North by Northwest was a huge influence. I modeled their clothes after the ones worn by Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint when they were running around Mount Rushmore. I just thought a nod to her rust-copper number would be perfect for when my girl was running around the streets of Dallas to save a president.”

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(Credit: Warner Bros.)

11.22.63 is available for streaming on Hulu; new episodes are released on Mondays.