Steve Maslow Dies at 81 After Raiders Of The Lost Ark Oscar Win
Steve Maslow, the Oscar-winning re-recording mixer behind raiders of the lost ark, died Monday at a therapy facility in West Hills after a battle with cancer. He was 81.
Maslow leaves behind three Oscar wins from seven best-sound nominations, a career tally that reached more than 200 features. His credits ran from the late 1970s through 2015, and the work placed him among the most durable figures in studio-era sound mixing.
Oscar wins for two franchises
Maslow won Oscars for The Empire Strikes Back, Raiders of the Lost Ark and Speed, with Gregg Landaker sharing all but one of his nominations. The pairing worked on more than 130 films, a run that tied Maslow’s name to some of the biggest commercial soundtracks and effects-heavy releases of the era.
That award count matters because it puts him in the narrow group of mixers whose work translated across both franchise films and studio action pictures. The Oscar tally was not a single peak; it was spread across multiple decades, which is what made his career unusually long for a technician whose job depended on studio trust as much as audience recognition.
From Strawberry Alarm Clock to film
Maslow was born on Oct. 17, 1944, and got his start in the music business with the Strawberry Alarm Clock. He worked as a roadie for the group in 1969, and in 2017 he said, “That opened up the whole music industry for me.”
He also mixed “Oh What a Night (December 1963)” by Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons and “Boogie Oogie Oogie” by A Taste of Honey before moving into features. By 1979, he was working on More American Graffiti, then The Empire Strikes Back in 1980 and Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1981.
Those credits show the friction in Maslow’s career: he moved from music to major studio films, then stayed visible long enough to work with John Carpenter on Escape From New York, Halloween II, The Thing, Halloween III: Season of the Witch, Christine, Starman and Escape From L.A., and with Tim Burton on Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands and Batman Returns. Ronna Maslow survives him.
Gregg Landaker and West Hills
Maslow shared all of his Oscar nominations with Gregg Landaker except for Dune, which gives his awards record a very specific shape rather than a scattered list of credits. Monday’s death in West Hills closes the book on a mixer whose name sat inside the credits of major studio releases for decades, even when the audience never saw his work on screen.
