Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
The art of a good opening credits sequence is one that’s quickly being lost in the age of binge-watching. Thankfully, just as FEUD: Bette and Joan is reigniting the public’s interest in old Hollywood, Ryan Murphy’s latest anthology series is embracing the fading art of the TV title sequence.
FEUD’s story is an undisputedly complicated one. The rivalry surrounding Bette Davis and Joan Crawford on the set of What Every Happened to Baby Jane? dealt with institutional ageism and sexism, fading youth, jealousy, deep personal insecurities, and a studio system that was happy to throw out the stars it raised the second they stopped being profitable. There’s a good reason why FEUD’s story is eight hours long. However, this complexity is what makes FEUD’s opening credits so impressive.
In little over a minute, the Saul Bass-inspired animation is able to capture many of the series’ main themes, from catty fighting to studio manipulation, all while treating viewers to some of Baby Jane’s most iconic moments. Much like the show it introduces, its a dense opening sequence that lends its subject the proper amount of weight while being a delightful watch. To see what went into creating this underrated work of art, Decider spoke to series composer Mac Quayle, executive producer Alexis Martin Woodall, and title sequence director and designer Kyle Cooper.
According to Woodall, who has received three Emmy nominations for her work, Murphy knew early on that he wanted the opening sequence to be animated. Unlike other opening sequences, it was important to FEUD’s team that the music and animation were created in alignment with each other. The project started with Murphy and Woodall working with Cooper to created a storyboard and style for the credits.
“It started by [Ryan Murphy] saying … ‘I want to do something that is sort of an homage to these classic film titles from this period. And I want it to be silhouettes and very graphic with very bold colors, and I want the story to be about the annoyances and the pinpricks and the harassment that occurs between these two women,’” Cooper said about the initial ideas and storyboards for the opening credits.
“Basically, Ryan knew that he kind of wanted to start in one world and get to another world,” Woodall said of the larger idea. “So start within the world of the movie with the abuse that went on between the two women and the back and forth, and he wanted to take to a broader realm of … the fantasy of what they would do to each other.”
“It was very much grounded in how these two women treated each other in reality and how we can heighten it,” she said.
After about 120 storyboard images were created, they were sent to composer Mac Quayle, who turned the images into a video for his own creative process. Ultimately, the storyboard that was sent to Quayle would eventually be rebuilt in a different order, but these initial images allowed Quayle to better see what he was creating.
“There were some conversations with Ryan and his team about what the show might sound like,” Quayle said. “We talked about music of that period, certain scores and composers — Bernard Herrmann and John Barry and Henry Mancini, maybe some John Williams. We talked about a lot of these ideas and also the underlying emotion that would go through the show — this tension between the two women and also a sadness.” The musical tone of the show as a whole and the opening title uses an orchestral palette, with the clarinet, flute and strings primarily carrying the opening credits’ melody.
Another influence was the composer behind What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?’s soundtrack, Frank De Vol. According to both Woodall and Quayle, it was important for the opening credits and music to establish that FEUD is a period piece instead of a modern adaptation of Crawford and Davis’ story.
“The score to Baby Jane, I think, is a very interesting score. Overall, the tone of it was not appropriate to be a central sound for FEUD, but definitely there were bits of it that I was able to use as an influence,” Quayle said. According to the composer, Baby Jane’s score influenced the dramatic build up and timpani in the opening credits.
Quayle has worked with Murphy since American Horror Story: Freak Show and is responsible for some of modern TV’s greatest musical scores, including the music of Mr. Robot. “It always begins with a conversation with the creators about what they think the music should do to help them tell their story,” Quayle said about his creative process. “From there, we go back and forth until we’ve got a body of music, maybe a handful of cues even, that start to represent what the musical universe of the show is going to be.”
However, in FEUD’s case, the show’s opening sequence helped to define the show’s overall musical tone. “It was really kind of a nice way to work, and I think that the marriage between the music and the visuals is very strong because of that,” he said.
For the credits’ visuals, it was important for Woodall, Cooper, and Murphy to include many of the elements of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? For example, Murphy was adamant about including a reference to Baby Jane’s iconic rat scene. Much like in the movie, when the cut-out of Joan Crawford unveils the rat, the opening credits take a sharp tonal shift. “In the movie, you know, that’s the kind of final straw, and everything goes downhill after that,” Cooper said. “That’s why we have this vortex. The madness has kicked in when she sees the rat.”
One of the biggest debates in the project had to do with the opening credits’ ever-present hearts. “Ryan was really emphatic about the emotion of the moment, and he hadn’t quite nailed what he wanted the logo to be. He was talking about how we want to feel the emotion and the weight of these two women because it’s such a tragedy,” Woodall said.
Because Murphy and his team had used heart in their 2014 film The Normal Heart, both Woodall and Murphy were weary to use the image again. However, when Cooper presented a version of the heart logo with a dagger in the middle — a split heart that references the central themes of the series, the iron wrought gate in Baby Jane, and Baby Jane’s iconic beauty mark — the team decided to go with the heart logo.
From the beginning, Murphy wanted the credits to end with these women crying as they walked away from each other. “That’s one of the great moments of synthesis [on this project],” Woodall said. “Then Kyle and his team came back, and I loved it because it was the simplicity of being a moment when you could just read the credits clearly, and you had the gulls, which I think are so gorgeous to listen to and so eerie. They set sort of a melancholy tone at the very end.”
“I think the ending was hard because Ryan was trying to communicate a lot of these themes,” Cooper said. “Like if they weren’t so competitive, if they weren’t so desperate for the validation of the other, you know, maybe they could have been friends. There’s the idea that jealousy and these kinds of things are born out of a desire for love. All these conversations took place, and I’m just sitting there thinking how am I going to show that metaphorically?”
Cooper summed up the complexities of the project nicely when he joked, “It wasn’t ‘Make the dagger cut the heart in half.’ It was ‘Suggest that they could have been friends.’ It was a tall order in a way.” It may have been an ambitious project, but it resulted in one of the most beautiful and cohesive opening credits sequences currently on the air.
You can watch new episodes of FEUD: Bette and Joan on FX and FXNOW Sundays at 10 p.m. ET / 7 p.m. PT.
