‘The Bear’ Has Perfected Its Editing Recipe — for Both Comedy and Drama
Good editing, like a good joke, is all about rhythm. It guides you through a story with a sense of build-up and payoff, sometimes almost invisibly and sometimes in such a way that seeing the structure is part of what makes it so funny. Editor Joanna Naugle can speak to both modes, having edited all kinds of series — and comedy specials, too; she happens to be Emmy nominated this year for both her work on “The Bear” (specifically the extended, hour-long Christmas from hell that is Season 2’s “Fishes”) and on Ramy Youssef’s comedy special “More Feelings.”
Those two very different hours of streaming TV are a strange but very fun back-to-back watch; you can start to sense Naugle’s sensibility and her sympathy for her protagonists at work. It helps that “More Feelings” was also directed by “The Bear” showrunner Christopher Storer and shot by “The Bear” DP Andrew Wehde; meanwhile, Youssef directed Episode 4 of Season 2, “Honeydew,” which Naugle co-edited with Adam Epstein. Core crew members of “The Bear,” including Naugle, worked on “Ramy,” too. But the crossover isn’t just in personnel. Naugle is great about finding not just the right takes but the right moments to get drawn in for maximum feelings, whether they’re funny or not.
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“In Ramy’s first special, ‘Feelings,’ there were a lot of really long camera movements. We hold on stuff for a really long time. And [‘More Feelings’] was supposed to be very much him a little bit in the void,” Naugle told IndieWire. The place for us to go, visually, is closer to his eyes, and we get drawn into the interlocking stories Youssef tells; Naugle has to manage that journey while stitching together the best performances from three different nights.
“You’re choosing the best angle and making sure it all flows together, but there’s also some things that are just tricky about [editing comedy specials], where you want to make it feel seamless, and that can always be a little bit harder when it’s least expected,” Naugle said. “No one knows better than Ramy. He’s like, ‘Oh I messed this joke up.’ And I wouldn’t have noticed but yeah, I guess you did word it slightly differently here.”
It’s always the small details that are important, whether in a solo special or in a chaotic crowd scene that the edit (somehow) has to organize for comedy value. Naugle said that the great gift on “Fishes” was the b-roll that the production shot of the tchotchkes and knickknacks in Donna’s (Jamie Lee Curtis) house.
“I think the best thing that you can do in production is get your editor a ton of b-roll because I think it almost always ends up being used, and it creates such a fuller idea of the space and your characters and just says so much,” Naugle said. “The thing that Chris and I talked about is that you should just feel like this house is overflowing. There’s no surface that’s clear.”
The sense of being overstuffed is true of the sound design on “The Bear” as well, part of the reason Naugle has done so much temp sound work while editing it. “It’s tough to show someone a scene and be like, ‘OK, also imagine it’s really loud and there’s a lot going on.’ You’re missing a huge chunk of the tools we have as editors,” Naugle said.
Building in temp effects allows those inescapable zoom-ins on Donna’s timers to feel like the jump scares that they are, which in turn helps Naugle adjust the rest of the cooking sequences in “Fishes” and the cacophony surrounding them. “And then the people at Sound Lounge just make it infinitely better,” Naugle said. “It’s just making you feel like you can’t relax anywhere and it’s just this claustrophobic experience.”
The beautiful thing is the way “The Bear” bends that experience to be claustrophobic in a fun way — in many respects, Naugle said, the thing in “Fishes” that took the most finessing was where and how to put the instances of Faks-related improv throughout the episode — or in a way that’s anything but fun. So much of that interplay is, again, about our level of closeness relative to the characters and how much the world is intruding on them.
“I love that [Storer] really tries to dial in the performance on the close-up because that’s really where our show lives,” Naugle said. “Like there are certain scenes where you can tell he knows exactly what he’s going for and then when the footage comes to me, it feels like he’s speaking to me through the footage: ‘This is such a great moment to cut to a closeup, or this is the payoff in the scene.’”
Paraphrasing Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) in the episode that follows “Fishes,” that really is what it’s all about with editing: Finding the payoff in the scene and making every second on the timeline count.
“If I’m reading a script, I’m always trying to figure out what is going to be the moment of change in the scene? What is going to be the moment [where there’s] either a surprise or a change in emotion or more information is revealed?” Naugle said. “Choosing when to change your coverage is the biggest tool you have as an editor, basically, because you get so used to seeing, like, a medium shot and then a medium shot… when you choose that moment to get closer to someone, you’ve got to make sure it really is an emotionally powerful moment.”
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