Awards Daily talks to supervising sound editor Steve Giammaria, sound mixer Scott D. Smith, and dialogue editor Evan Benjamin about their Emmy-nominated work on FX on Hulu’s The Bear and the riveting episode “Review.”
It’s only a 20-minute episode, but boy, is it a doozy. Episode 7, Season 1 of FX on Hulu’s The Bear is filmed in one continuous shot, just as the restaurant is 20 minutes from opening after a positive review in a local Chicago paper. It sounds simple enough as a premise, but as the minutes tick by, tension builds among the staff, and the sonic environment—featuring music and restaurant bustle—intensifies.
“The cast is so big, you want to get what someone is saying in the back of the set/restaurant, even if the camera isn’t trained on them,” says dialogue editor Evan Benjamin. “That’s not always the case. The boom guy can only get to a few people. If there’s somebody in the back yelling something and we want something later, it’s great that we have all the stuff.”
Everyone is at the top of their game in “Review,” but the MVP is the ticket printer, a point of contention between Sydney (Ayo Edebiri), Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), and Carmy (Jeremy Allen White). So much of the tension within the episode exists because of the “sound stew” stirring in the background, including that insistent, buzzing machine.
“There’s a song that runs through most of it, and then the ticket printer was a huge portion,” says supervising sound editor Steve Giammaria. “Then we added more ticket printer, more ticket printer. That was a sound cue for them. All hell’s breaking loose, more pots and pans. Chris [Storer] had a great vision for the whole thing. It was just about adding more and more layers and more and more chaos.”
“That ticket printer is probably gonna get a SAG nomination,” laughs sound mixer Scott D. Smith.
I had a really fun chat with the sound team about their collaboration process, how the cast maneuvered in such tight quarters, and whether the increase in music might (unintentionally) reveal Carmy’s own anxieties. Watch the interview below!
