Steve Maslow, one of Hollywood's most decorated re-recording mixers, died April 27 of cancer in West Hills, California. He was 81. The Cinema Audio Society confirmed his death to Deadline.
Maslow won three Academy Awards over a career that stretched more than fifty years, collecting back-to-back Oscars for The Empire Strikes Back in 1980 and Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1981, then adding a third for Speed in 1994. He received four additional nominations, for Dune (1984), Waterworld (1995), Twister (1996), and U-571 (2000).
His filmography reads like a catalog of American cinema's most recognizable titles. Credits include Poltergeist, Gremlins, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Edward Scissorhands, Batman Returns, Children of a Lesser God, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Conjuring, and Mad Max: Fury Road. Early in his career he also worked on Ordinary People, the 1980 Best Picture Oscar winner. That breadth, across horror, action, comedy, and drama, reflected a mixer in constant demand.
Before Hollywood, Maslow's career started somewhere unexpected. Born October 17, 1944, in Los Angeles's San Fernando Valley, he was still in college when he got a call from a friend who happened to be the keyboard player for Strawberry Alarm Clock, the band behind the 1967 psychedelic hit "Incense and Peppermints."
"Everybody else had a goal but me," Maslow said in a 2018 interview with the Motion Picture Sound Editors' CineMontage. "I was in college because I thought it was the thing to do, and it kept me out of the draft. I went to a birthday party at the house of Mark Weitz, who asked me if I wanted to go on the road with them as their equipment roadie. I said, 'Sure, why not?'"
He quit school, became a recording engineer, and built a résumé in music before pivoting to film. His recording credits include the Four Seasons' 1976 hit "December, 1963 (Oh, What a Night)" and A Taste of Honey's "Boogie Oogie Oogie," the latter earning the disco group a Best New Artist Grammy over The Cars, Elvis Costello, and Toto. When that work began to dry up, he obtained an IATSE card and got a call from Samuel Goldwyn Studio. He stayed for nearly 15 years.
Maslow also shaped the sound of some of rock's most celebrated concert films. He spent six months as re-recording mixer on Martin Scorsese's The Last Waltz, the 1978 document of The Band's 1976 farewell concert. He went on to work on The Who's The Kids Are Alright, Neil Young's Rust Never Sleeps, Talking Heads' Stop Making Sense, The Police: Synchronicity Concert, Prince's Sign o' the Times, and Michael Jackson's Black or White music video. His music-adjacent film credits also included the Jerry Lee Lewis biopic Great Balls of Fire and the 1986 musical Little Shop of Horrors.
Over his career Maslow worked alongside directors including Steven Spielberg and scores of other major filmmakers, leaving his fingerprints on films that collectively shaped how audiences heard cinema across generations.
