‘Only Murders in the Building’ and ‘Beef’ re-recording mixers on accentuating Oliver’s Son of Sam game and perfecting ‘gross bone-crushing sounds’ [Exclusive Video Interview]

Joyce Eng
·4 min read
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There was double reasons to celebrate for Penny Harold and Andrew Lange on Emmy nominations day. The re-recording mixers earned two nominations for their work on “Only Murders in the Building” and “Beef.” “It was a barrage of texts and phone calls and emails from friends and colleagues and stuff. It was pretty fun,” Harold tells Gold Derby of when they learned of their nominations (watch the exclusive video interview above). “We were working that morning and we probably weren’t as productive as we could’ve been,” Lange quips. “A lotta texts to go through.”

Harold, who mixes music and dialogue, and Lange, who handles sound effects, joined “Only Murders” for its second season and have already won the Cinema Audio Society Award for the fifth episode, “The Tell,” for which they are Emmy-nominated. The episode opens with a flashback to Oliver’s (Martin Short) life in the ’70s and includes a party at Mabel’s (Selena Gomez) apartment, which morphs into a ’70s look after Oliver proposes they play his murder game, Son of Sam, to try to snuff out Bunny’s (Jayne Houdyshell) killer. The sequence includes a lot of music, a lengthy monologue by Oliver and a montage of people “dying.”

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“The Son of Sam game, in particular, was fun for sound effects,” Lange says. “He’s walking through the crowd and he’s hearing some design-y murder sounds, so just kind of weaving that all in, and there’s that montage-y moment too of ‘murdering’ people and the bodies fall and hitting the ground, so we had a lotta fun with that. Just letting the music lead and accentuate things with sound effects.”

SEE Watch interviews with 2023 Emmy nominees

The game starts with one key sound effect: Oliver walks into the apartment and yanks the speaker plug, abruptly stopping the music and causing a loud feedback screech. “That was Andy,” Harold states. “When we were mixing that, I was doing something a little different and he was like, ‘No, no, what if you do this with the music? I was like, ‘Yes!’ Because I was choosing to do the opposite and I really liked how it turned out too.”

For “Beef,” the duo is nominated for the penultimate episode, “The Great Fabricator,” an action-packed installment that features a shootout and Jordan’s (Maria Bello) gruesome death when she’s crushed by her panic room door. The sound does a lot — if not all — of the work here in conveying just how gross the death is. And that was exactly what creator and showrunner Lee Sung Jin wanted. “He was all about those gross bone-crushing sounds. We actually kept adding more. He was like, ‘More, more, more,'” Lange shares. “So that was fun. And finding the right balance so it wasn’t too crazy, but he was very specific about what he wanted it to sound like. That one was a tricky sequence. It took a little bit of time, but I think it turned out pretty great because all my friends watched it and it’s all they can talk about — those gross sounds. I think it worked.”

The episode concludes with a car chase between Amy (Ali Wong) and Danny (Steven Yeun), bookending the inciting incident in the premiere. This one is quite different from the first — in the dark on an empty road after they’ve each seemingly lost everything while Bjork’s “All Is Full of Love” plays before they drive over a cliff.

“It’s fun because the series starts with the car chase and notably no music under that car chase or very little,” Harold notes. “Sonny was always pushing to make everything sound as visceral as possible. The score is always composed in such a way that it’s very forward but never got in the way of what he needed to do with the dialogue, but that was a moment where music just really led, so we made the choices to bring some of that revving and the car engines down.”

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