A new true crime TV drama about the Mendendez brothers has cast its first big name: Courtney Love. The Hollywood Reporter reveals that Love will play Kitty Menendez, the mother of Lyle and Erik Menendez, who infamously murdered their parents in 1989 — the same year Love formed Hole. The Lifetime project is still looking for its murderous male leads, but Love isn’t the only exciting name lined up so far. Lyle and Erik will be helmed by transgressive director duo Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato of 2003 cult-favorite Club Kids murder movie Party Monster, starring Macaulay Culkin and Chloë Sevigny.
Lifetime says the Menendez movie will reveal the “extreme abuse the brothers endured at their father’s hands, while their mother looked the other way.” The project’s official description seems to stick to the gruesome facts: Lyle and Erik Menendez murdered their parents and spent the inheritance lavishly, before Erik was eventually consumed by guilt and confessed to his psychologist, leading to both the brothers’ arrests. They remain in prison today.
Lifetime has been owning the true crime game in recent months, even leading some to question whether the network had gone too far with its chilling 2016 telepic about the mysterious murder of child beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey. Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey featured a particularly unsettling narration meant to sound like the voice of the six-year-old victim herself. But when Party Monster first sickened and seduced audiences, it would be over a decade before Making a Murderer and People v. O.J. Simpson had proven the genre a viable moneymaker. Its stars were certainly pioneers of the reality generation. “The particular genius of Michael Alig and the Club Kids was that they were foreshadowing this social media era, where everyone is their own celebrity and their own brand, and it’s all about selfies,” Bailey and Barbato — whose TV credits include RuPaul’s Drag Race — said in 2014. Production on Lyle and Erik will start this month.
Credits
Text Hannah Ongley
Photography David LaChapelle
Styling Patti Wilson
Hair James Brown
Make-up Mally Roncal
[i-D, The Insider Issue, No. 236. October 2003]