Steve Maslow, a longtime go-to re-recording mixer who won Oscars for The Empire Strikes Back, Raiders of the Lost Ark and Speed and had four other career nominations during a prolific half-century career, has died. He was 81.
Cinema Audio Society confirmed to Deadline that Maslow died April 27 of cancer in West Hills, CA.
Along with his back-to-back Academy Awards for the 1980 Star Wars sequel and 1981’s Indiana Jones pic and 1994 Keanu Reeves-Sandra Bullock actioner, Maslow scored noms for Dune (1984), Waterworld (1995), Twister (1996) and U-571 (2000). His hundreds of others credits range from More American Graffiti, 10 and Best Picture Oscar winner Ordinary People to Poltergeist, Airplane II: The Sequel and Christine to Starman, Gremlins, Ferris Beuller’s Day Off and Children of a Lesser God to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Edward Scissorhands, Batman Returns, Twister and Waterworld, The Conjuring, Mad Max: Fury Road and many more.
Maslow also worked on several concert films and rock documentaries, starting with The Band’s The Last Waltz. He spent six months as a re-recording mixer of the Martin Scorsese-directed film that chronicled the revered group’s landmark 1976 farewell show, which hit theaters in 1978. He went on to do sound work on music pics including The Who’s The Kids Are Alright, Neil Young’s Rust Never Sleeps, No Nukes, This Is Elvis, Beatlemania, Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense, The Police: Synchrnicity Concert, Prince’s Sign o’ the Times and the music video Michael Jackson: Black or White.
He also worked on music-based pics including the Jerry Lee Lewis biopic Great Balls of Fire, Neil Diamond-led The Jazz Singer and the 1986 musical Little Shop of Horrors.
Maslow’s rock ‘n’ roll roots ran deep. Born on October 17, 1944, in L.A.’s San Fernando Valley, he was in college when he got a left-field job offer from a friend — who happened to be the keyboard player for “Incense and Peppermints” band Strawberry Alarm Clock.
“Everybody else had a goal but me,” he 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?’”
Maslow soon would quit school for the music business and became a recording engineer. Among his credits is the Four Seasons’ 1976 chart-topper “December, 1963 (Oh, What a Night)” and A Taste of Honey’s “Boogie Oogie Oogie,” which led to the disco group winning the Best New Artist Grammy over fellow nominees The Cars, Elvis Costello and Toto.
But by then, he told CineMontage, “That started to dry up for me.” So he got an IATSE card and made himself available for work. “Samuel Goldwyn Studio called me shortly thereafter,” he said in the interview. “I was there for almost 15 years.”
Along with Scorsese, Maslow would work with a litany of top-name filmmakers including Steven Spielberg, Robert Redford, John Carpenter, Tim Burton, Robert Wise, John Hughes, Blake Edwards and many others.
Survivors include Maslow’s wife Ronna and son Travis.