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26 S P R I N G 2 0 1 7 C A S Q U A R T E R L Y metal rods for O.J.'s golf bag in Episode 1. Not a common prop in most TV, so it worked perfectly for an older style bag of golf clubs and O.J. walks with them for a while in the episode in a relatively quiet scene, so it totally sold it well. How much time were you given to complete an episode? These episodes were given two days. One day for feet & cloth, one day for props. Who was on your team? The main team consisted of Nick Neutra as Foley supervisor, myself as Foley mixer, and Noel Vought as Foley artist. Jacob McNaughton (mixer) and Ginger Geary (artist) also worked on a couple episodes. JOE EARLE CAS: RE-RECORDING MIXER You and Doug have worked together for some time on a num- ber of Ryan Murphy projects. However, each one is very differ- ent from the other, Glee to American Horror Story to this. Do you meet with Ryan to discuss the tone of the project and how this one will be treated? [It was a] slow burn. The opening montage of The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story is a microcosm of what is to come. It starts very quietly, pulling you in (Rodney King being beat- en), then builds to a riotous explosive crescendo (LA riots) that ends with a whisper, and a legend, "Two Years Later" … and so it starts. A quiet night on Rockingham Avenue, O.J. Simpson emerges from his home and climbs into a limousine and tells the driver, "Sorry I'm late … had to take a shower." There are some filmmakers that believe that sound is some- thing that happens only as an afterthought. Ryan Murphy builds sound into the fabric of his scripts. Many of the shows that Doug and I have done for Ryan ask sound to compete with the storytelling. Making as bold a statement as the images. Pushing the dialogue, music, and sound design to propel the story along to leave that lasting impression. Glee would leap off the screen to grab your attention and then snap into musical fantasy only to snap back in time for a joke or a cry. American Horror Story has traditionally built design and musical elements to peak limits, seemingly to leave a permanent grotesque mark on its viewers. The opening chapter of O.J. Simpson is not like that at all. While in depth and seeming as if around every corner a secret to the case would be depicted, The People v. O..J. did retain a dramatic but neutral perspective. Did you find yourself work- ing with your mix partner to imply or misdirect the audience to keep this suspense and tension? Back to the burn. A neighbor, out walking his dog at night finds something. We don't even see what it is, but his reaction tells us it's frightening. The police arrive, their conversations are subdued, matter of fact. Three detectives go to the Rockingham Estate, meet Kato Kaelin, and have a subdued phone call informing O.J. of his wife's demise. No overblown score here, just a haunting tonal undercurrent. The discovery of the glove is even held back from the traditional big music sting. Slowly, the story takes shape. As we get introduced to more characters, the soundtrack builds, not in volume but in depth. Marcia Clark's home intro- duces us to her life and its chaos. Playful boys, intrusive car- toons, breakfast before school, all while taking the phone call from Van Atter describing the findings at Rockingham. The district attorney's office becomes even busier. Office activity, typical of most legal shows, but topped with very active group voices, phones, typewriters, and overlapping dialogue sets up the complexity of the things to come. Still we held back a bit not wanting to "show our hand" in the storytelling. Doug and I have worked very hard for years now to fill up the environments without intruding on the show. I had the pleasure of working with Elmo Ponsdomenech for years at Technicolor. He, like me, started mixing sound effects before moving to the dialogue chair. We did shows like Six Feet Under, True Blood, and Dexter, to name a few. We arrived at the same conclusion. There is always enough room for everything. I will often push for something I'm not hearing in the effects tracks just to fill in those missing frequencies. I will also ask for more space from Doug when I feel the dialogue is being masked. The more we work together, the better that understanding between us becomes. But like a song, we want to be able to hear every instrument as well as the vocal. From the outset, we tried to lead the viewer through the events as they unfolded without stepping into the experience. We stayed organic. We tried to stay "real." I hate when mixers show their hand. If I hear my fader move in a music cue, I back up and take another pass. Even in designed moments of height- ened reality we tried to use real elements as sonic accents. Our supervising editor, Gary Megregian, provided us with clean, grounded, elements that helped us stay in that real part of the storytelling. What was the most difficult scene to manage as far as produc- tion noise? Production mixer John Bauman did a great job on the set. He provided clean dialogue with as much separation as possible. This wasn't always easy given the free reign the actors had for overlapping dialogue to keep the real feel of the show. Having said that, the opportunity to work with Sarah Paulson, Cuba Gooding, Courtney Vance, Sterling Brown, John Travolta, Bruce Greenwood, and David Schwimmer to name a few, was a gift to us all. The performances were so good that many times all we had to do was stay out of the way. How did you approach the transitions from the sound of the familiar news footage of the events to the dramatic scenes? Did you employ any lo-fi treatments or compression/reverb treatment changes to help the audience move from one per- spective to the other? As the story progresses, the news footage does. Many times I was provided with original recordings of the newscasters and only had to clean them up a bit. Sometimes new ADR was pro- vided and had to be matched into a combined broadcast. A bit of filtering, compression, and eq would often make the match, or sometimes a trip through the Speakerphone plugin did the trick. Of course, if those failed, Gary was able to degrade the sound offline so that I could keep working. There is a sequence where O.J. is interviewed by police. The recording bounces