After being hired to work as the production designer on the new Paramount+ mob-themed series “Tulsa King” starring Sylvester Stallone in his first-ever television series project, Todd Jeffery quickly realized that — like the Brooklyn-born gangster played by Stallone — he was about to work in a state (Oklahoma) that he had never before visited. In the freshman series that was renewed for a second season, Stallone portrays Dwight Manfredi, a Mafia capo who is released from prison after serving a 25-year sentence and finds himself unceremoniously exiled to Tulsa, OK to set up shop and build a new base of criminal operations. He’s the ultimate fish out of water. And so was Jeffery, a native of Northern California. Watch the exclusive video interview above.
No sooner had Jeffery landed in the state than he was scouting locations in Oklahoma City and Tulsa a few hours up the road. The unpredictable climate for designing exteriors proved an immediate challenge. “It snowed a lot during the prep period,” he recalls, “which really kind of changed the landscape for us. It was difficult to see what the locations were going to look like with snow on the ground. I’m not sure I ever got used to the weather because it changed so rapidly, the shifts from hot to cold, snow to sun, and then into tornado season, and then some pretty extreme heat. We had to change our approach to many of the production elements due to that heat.”
At the same time, Jeffery adds, “It was really nice to be in a place where the location we’re filming in actually matches what’s in the script. Usually I’m tasked with making Atlanta feel like San Francisco or New Orleans feel like Dade County in North Miami.”
As the show’s production designer, Jeffery was tasked with capturing the grittier and seamier elements of modern-day Tulsa, “not to show it in a bad light but more as a reflection of the part of the world that Dwight inhabits.” That meant grubby strip clubs and dive bars and rundown motels and all variety of faded glory, metaphorically matching that of Stallone’s character. “Part of it is that Dwight is reluctant to be back in this world,” Jeffery stresses. “He thought he was gonna be on the mob family retirement program and set up in a condo in West Palm Beach. Instead, he’s back full-on in the mob and hanging out with the criminal enterprise and kind of off the grid. That means abandoned steel mills and small dive bars and that sort of thing.”
Jeffery had a lot of fun exercising his tacky/downscale chops on the dismally colorful “Tulsa King” design. It included transforming a boarded-up old Texaco gas station, its windows sealed with concrete cinderblocks, into a weed dispensary called The Higher Plane. “It’s one of my favorite sets,” Jeffery notes. “My idea was to reestablish something that looks the part of a functioning store and gas service station during the Route 66 era.” He noted that the store “never had any real cannabis. The fake cannabis we use is actually quite expensive.”
Another fun project was establishing a place called the Bred2Buck Saloon, which becomes the headquarters for Dwight’s fledgling criminal enterprise. “Its origin story was that the Bred2Buck had quite a heyday,” Jeffery says. “In order to feel that, we gave it a large footprint and a lot of depth, allowing the opportunity for light to fall off in the corner and certain areas to feel darker. It has a relic salad bar that no one has used for years. We give the impression that once it was a packed place with the best ribs in town. They still are the best, but whereas there used to be 100 people in there and a line out the door, now there may be 10 or 12 people.”
Season 1 of “Tulsa King” streams on Paramount+.
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