Supervising sound editor Renee Tondelli earned Oscar and BAFTA Award nominations in 2017 for her work on Deepwater Horizon. Now she is again in the awards season conversation for her contributions to The Trial of the Chicago 7 (Netflix), a feature written and directed by Aaron Sorkin, a three-time Oscar nominated screenwriter who won for The Social Network in 2011, and was a nominee for Moneyball in 2012 and Molly’s Game in 2017. Sorkin made his feature directorial debut with Molly’s Game. The Trial of the Chicago 7 is Sorkin’s second turn as a director.

Chicago 7 is based on the 1969 trial of seven defendants charged by the federal government with conspiracy and more, arising from anti-Vietnam War protests which turned violent as demonstrators clashed with police during the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. While Sorkin’s film was in an on-again, off-again mode over the years, it came together and wound up debuting last October on Netflix--at a time when it’s subject matter spanning such issues as police brutality and social justice had become all the more relevant as protestors gathered across the country in 2020 after George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis. Floyd died while in the custody of a police officer (Derek Chauvin) whose knee was on Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes. Floyd was handcuffed face down in the street, pleading that he couldn’t breathe.

The Trial of the Chicago 7 has a stellar cast including Jeremy Strong and Sacha Baron-Cohen, respectively, as revolutionary counterculture activists Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, Eddie Redmayne as Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis as Alex Sharp (Hayden and Sharp were members of Students for a Democratic Society), John Carroll Lynch as conscientious objector David Dellinger, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Black Panthers co-founder Bobby Seale, Joseph Gordon-Levitt as lead prosecutor Richard Schultz, Mark Rylance as defense attorney William Kunstler, Frank Langella as Judge Julius Hoffman, and John Doman as Richard Nixon’s Attorney General John Mitchell.

When Tondelli heard about Chicago 7, she was immediately interested in becoming involved in the film. She’s from Chicago, was familiar with the riots and sought out the movie’s editor, Alan Baumgarten, ACE, a friend and prior collaborator on such films as the Jay Roach-directed Meet the Fockers and a pair of David O. Russell films, Joy and American Hustle. The latter garnered Tondelli one of her eight Golden Reel Award nominations from the Motion Picture Sound Editors, an honor for which she was on the winning team in 2006 for Memoirs of a Geisha.  Baumgarten initially informed her that Chicago 7 was going to be done in New York, which ruled her out at the time. But nine months later, plans changed and Baumgarten reached out to Tondelli to see if she were still interested. She was and found herself quickly thrust into the picture as there was the pressing goal of getting Chicago 7 out prior to the 2020 Presidential election. The results speak for themselves as the film has garnered assorted accolades; among the latest being Tondelli’s eighth Golden Reel nomination.

Also drawing Tondelli to Chicago 7 was the opportunity to work with Sorkin. She’s had a penchant for teaming with writers/directors throughout her career. She found Sorkin to be both collaborative and encouraging, providing guidance but affording her the freedom to do her job. Sorkin, for example, didn’t want to get too mired in the 1960s as he saw the events of that time having great relevance today. He wanted to do justice to that relevance, not wanting it undermined by too nostalgic a sentiment. Tondelli added that Sorkin also wanted audiences to feel the heavy-handed authoritarianism of the federal government in the film. The courtroom represents just that, with Judge Hoffman’s voice being the one with the most gravitas in the cavernous setting--while everyone else’s voice is minimized. Adding to the weight of the judge was a reverb quality given to his voice and gavel, helping him to dominate the room. Tondelli’s sound approach muffled the will of the people in the courtroom but by contrast reflected the people’s points of view elsewhere. Sorkin wanted people to have their voices in scenes outside the courtroom and Tondelli facilitated that aurally.

The protest scenes had their own emotional arc, evolving from innocence to violence with Tondelli having to give some semblance of balance to the chaos--reflecting the mayhem yet making situations accessible for viewers. Tondelli made the sounds visceral and real. A key means to that end was requiring her crew to watch Haskell Wexler’s seminal 1969 cinema verite film Medium Cool in which actors were placed in Grant Park as tumultuous events unfolded all around them. Medium Cool gave Tondelli and her audio compatriots a documentary record chronicling what actually happened, helping the sound artisans to capture that Medium Cool reality in Sorkin’s film. Tondelli personally recalled a Medium Cool scene in which a female protestor screamed as she was being beaten by police. This terror was etched in Tondelli’s memory and she made every effort to capture that, while maintaining the right overall tone between what would be considered too much and not enough. The chaos had to be conveyed but with an undercurrent--while unnerving--that was not too over the top. Going too far would only serve to “trivialize,” she said, the seriousness of what was happening. The audience had to feel both a connection to and intimacy with the protestors.

Tondelli also had to contend with the special circumstances created by the COVID-19 pandemic. “The COVID challenge was that we couldn’t record sound the way I wanted to. We couldn’t have hundreds of people on the Warner Brothers backlot. Instead we had to record everyone separately in their homes. We sent instruction sheets to each actor about setting up mics.” 

Although actors could hear each other on Zoom, they were still recording on their own. Hundreds of individual tracks had to be combined to make thousands for the riot. Tondelli equated the experience to creating a “symphony with everyone in their own room.” She also had to account for the dynamic of how a person performs without the benefit of being around others, explaining that a cellist plays differently when in a group of cellists. She had to adapt to that, all the while striving to attain a believability to advance the story. In some respects, being in a COVID-created situation in which there were no set answers, made Tondelli and her colleagues all the more creative, discovering as they went along. “It was like being back in film school,” she observed, digging into your inner resources and making the most of what was available to you.

The Climb
While the COVID-19 pandemic delayed the ascent of The Climb, the directorial debut of Michael Angelo Covino, momentum eventually built again for the film which was written and produced by Covino and Kyle Marvin and stars them as best friends, which they are in real life as well. The Climb follows two characters, Michael and Kyle, who share a deep friendship which endures despite much tumult including Mike sleeping with Kyle’s fiancee, one of many efforts on Mike’s part to thwart romance and commitment for Kyle with others. Theirs is a friendship filled with laughter, heartbreak and anger, making for a story that has elements of irony, psychological drama and comedy forged in the follies of a life-sustaining bromance.

The Climb made its world premiere at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, winning the Heart Prize in its Un Certain Regard track and then went on to garner a Best First Feature nomination from the 2020 Film Independent Spirit Awards. After its auspicious debut at Cannes, The Climb was picked up by Sony Pictures Classics for distribution. The film was set to hit theaters in March 2020, a plan that fell by the wayside when the pandemic shut cinemas down. The film wound up breaking into theaters on a limited basis in November 2020 and found an audience there and online. The Climb has enjoyed awards season buzz on varied fronts, including for its writing.

The launchpad for the feature was a short, also titled The Climb, in which Mike and Kyle are on bikes in mid-climb on a French country road. During this arduous ride, Mike incidentally mentions that he’s made love to Kyle’s fiancee, triggering an argument which doesn’t stop Mike from continuing to give uphill peddling instructions to Kyle. This offbeat, engaging slice of life, to which was added a road rage confrontation with another, becomes the opening vignette for the feature-length film, easing us into a strangely sweet, possibly toxic friendship which somehow still means the world to both characters.

The short--which played and was well received at Sundance in 2018--was shot, explained Covino, as a proof-of-concept for the feature, helping to establish “our comedic voice, our writing and acting together and for myself as a director, introducing the bigger story we wanted to tell.” That short generated backing for the feature, which in turn wound up screening at Sundance in 2020.

The working rapport between Covino and Marvin is built not just on their friendship but the experience of teaming for a stretch in commercialmaking and in indie feature production. This deep collaborative bond translated well into going off on their own to realize The Climb as both a short and a feature.

They also brought in other key artisans to bring their vision to fruition, ranging from a DP they had worked with before to an editor whom they were committing to for the first time. The former, cinematographer Zach Kuperstein, had teamed with Covino and Marvin on some short films and commercials over the years, as well as a feature they produced. “I have a shorthand with and a trust in Zach,” related Covino, citing the DP’s “great eye” and “intuitive problem solving.” Covino said of Kuperstein, “He would bring up ideas outside the language of what I would do. Sometimes it would work, sometimes not. But we pushed each other in that way, which is very healthy and productive.”

The alluded to first-time collaborator with Covino and Marvin was editor Sara Shaw. Marvin noted that Shaw’s contributions were invaluable, often working with long single takes and cutting in and out of different scenes, making for a complicated “jigsaw puzzle” of sorts. She made the scenes and performances fit in this puzzle, creating a positive ripple effect. Marvin observed that Shaw offered “a great perspective. She wasn’t there during the filming so she had a very objective view of the project, gave us a lot of insights.” Covino and Marvin were drawn to Shaw’s prior work. Covino added that he and Shaw had talked earlier about working together, had friends in common and had been trying to find the right project for them to come together on. The Climb turned out to be that fruitful collaboration.

The story unfolds in such a way that viewers too are collaborators in a sense, left to figure out each chapter in these two characters’ friendship marked by love, angst, dark humor, awkwardness, camaraderie, brutal honesty and other myriad emotions, with stretches that are both inexplicable and insightful at the same time. The story begins and ends with a bike ride, underscoring that some things don’t change over the years but a friendship can somehow evolve and grow, defying any easy explanation.

This is the 11th installment of a 16-part series with future installments of The Road To Oscar slated to run in the weekly SHOOT>e.dition, The SHOOT Dailies and on SHOOTonline.com, with select installments also in print issues. The series will appear weekly through the Academy Awards gala ceremony. Nominations for the 93rd Academy Awards will be announced on Monday, March 15, 2021. The 93rd Oscars will be held on Sunday, April 25, 2021.