On a recent weekday morning in La Mirada, a suburb outside Los Angeles, Steve Olive, 58, walked among hundreds of carpet rolls in red, green and lavender in a white, sun-drenched, 36,000-square-foot warehouse.
Laid out on the floor was a 150-foot stretch of rug, delivered by truck from Georgia a few days before, in the custom shade of Academy Red that is only available for the Oscars.
Mr. Olive himself may not be famous, but celebrities have strolled the plush craftsmanship of his carpet for nearly three decades.
His company, Event Carpet Pros, has supplied carpets for the Oscars, Golden Globes, Grammys and Emmys, as well as for Disney, Marvel and Warner Bros. movie premieres and the Super Bowl.
And, at a moment when carpets have moved beyond the classic red and become splashier and more intricate, his handiwork has become more prominent. He has crafted custom designs like a shimmering, sunlit pool carpet for the 2023 “Barbie” world premiere and a green-and-black ectoplasm drip carpet for the “Ghostbusters” world premiere in 2016 that took a month to create.
“I haven’t come across anything that we couldn’t do,” Mr. Olive, who founded the company with his brother-in-law, Walter Clyne, in 1992, said in an interview.
But this week — after a brief dalliance with a champagne shade two years ago — the Oscars opted for tradition and returned to a carpet in Mr. Olive’s exclusive Academy Red. The 50,000 square-foot rug was installed outside of the Dolby Theater in Los Angeles on Tuesday, in preparation for the ceremony this weekend.
What sets Mr. Olive apart in a chaotic, high-stakes industry is his reliability, said Joe Lewis, a producer for the Oscars who has ordered the awards show’s red carpet from him for the past 16 years. (Mr. Olive declined to disclose the cost of the job.)
“He’s like a drive-through window,” Mr. Lewis said. “You place your order, you pull around and it’s ready for you. That’s what we like about Steve.”
Word of Mouth
Growing up in Cerritos, Calif., then a tiny town of about 15,000 about 20 miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles, Mr. Olive never thought he would leave the state. His parents worked 14-hour shifts in a bottling factory to support four children, with Mr. Olive being the youngest.
After graduating from high school, an opportunity arose to work as the bodyguard for 1980s acts like Mötley Crüe, George Michael and the Thompson Twins. Mr. Olive, a 6-foot-2 former linebacker, did not think twice.
He was working local security backstage at a Thompson Twins concert, he said, when he got a lucky break. “The band bodyguard had to fly back to England, and they asked me if I could started immediately,” he said. “I was like, ‘I’m in.’”
But after an admittedly sheltered adolescence, life on tour, Mr. Olive said, proved to be a shock to the system.
“It wasn’t a pretty picture, with the drugs and the groupies,” he said. “It was very difficult for me.”
Regardless, he was on the road for about five years, traveling across Europe and Asia. But he was ready to do something — anything — to get out of that job. “It was quite gross at times,” he said of the environment he encountered while taking care of bands.
His brother-in-law, Mr. Clyne, who had been installing tents around the country, saw a need for a company that specialized in event flooring. He asked Mr. Olive if he would be interested in starting one with him.
In the beginning, Mr. Olive said, they were a hustle-fueled operation, putting rolls of AstroTurf under tents at small events to hide the ground and enlisting friends to help with installs.
“It was a word of mouth thing, like, ‘Hey, who’d you use for your carpet?’” he said. “And it just spread.”
They pitched themselves to events that might be interested in their services. Soon, Mr. Clyne set his sights on one of the biggest events of all: the Academy Awards.
“We got involved from reaching out to the academy, and other vendors and contacts we had in the business that referred us,” he said.
It’s hard to imagine, but the modern awards show red carpet did not always exist. What is now considered a prime opportunity to capitalize on the relationship between fashion and celebrity, not to mention the publicity a designer receives when a star models their wares on one of Hollywood’s biggest stages, was once a much more subdued affair. Before 1961, stars walked directly into the venue without a designated spot to take photographs.
Once the current red carpet made its debut, though, it became a premium platform for not only fashion, but also personal branding, life announcements like pregnancies and engagements, and, of course, must-see pop culture candy.
And, Mr. Clyne argued, Event Carpet Pros, with its scrappy team and “anything is possible” mentality, could provide the floor for that world stage faster and more efficiently — and, in 1997, the Oscars bit.
‘He’s old school’
Mr. Olive works out of an airy office in a corner of the La Mirada warehouse, with a brown leather sofa, a large flat-screen TV — recently tuned to a Los Angeles Dodgers game — and a movie theater-size poster of Al Pacino from the 1983 drama “Scarface.”
On his desk are a dry-erase computer pad, an oversize monitor, a magnifying glass and square, black-rimmed spectacles. The rush of traffic filtering in from Alondra Boulevard becomes like white noise after a while.
The business has fully stocked warehouses on both coasts, including a second location it opened in Dalton, Ga., in 2015, where the carpets are manufactured.
In addition to marquee events like the Screen Actors Guild Awards, the Country Music Association Awards and the MTV Video Music Awards, the company also handles orders for weddings, birthday parties, corporate events and golf tournaments. (“Georgia is big for those,” Mr. Olive said.)
With approximately 70 employees, Event Carpet Pros handles as many as 30 orders and 10 installs per day during awards season, completing a total of more than 30,000 projects each year. The carpets are made from recycled materials and are recycled after the events, Mr. Olive said, possibly beginning life anew as wall insulation or carpet padding.
Mr. Olive used to go to the premieres, he said, but he now lets other members of his staff handle the on-site work.
“I haven’t been much of a film person, but I used to be,” he said. “Since Covid happened, I got away from the films, because you had to go to movie theaters.” (He does, however, profess to be a fan of country music, specifically of Chris Stapleton.)
One of the company’s most frequent customers is Craig Waldman, the president and chief creative officer at 1540, an event production company based in California whose clients include Marvel, Disney, Netflix and Apple.
Over more than 30 years, he and Mr. Olive have worked on thousands of events together, including the “Captain America: Brave New World” and “Bad Boys: Ride or Die” world premieres.
“To know him is to do a man who will do whatever it takes,” said Mr. Waldman, adding that his longtime collaborator was now more like family. “He’s old school in the best way — someone who values relationships, craftsmanship and getting the job done right.”
In Hollywood, “whatever it takes” has always been a tall order, but in the past 20 years, it’s become even more demanding, as studios have asked for different carpet colors to stand out among a sea of red on social media, in addition to logos, prints, glitter and more.
“It’s turned into just an extravaganza,” said Mr. Olive, who said this year’s trendy colors so far had been fluorescent green and champagne. Red carpets are still the most popular, he said, followed by white and black.
But there is yet to be a custom design, he said, that his company has not been able to pull off.
“We’re always able to find some way to get it done,” said Mr. Olive, who keeps an Instagram archive of some of his favorite creations going back more than a decade, including an “Aladdin” print carpet, a runway-pattern rug for the “Planes” movie premiere and the red-and-yellow carpet for the “Deadpool & Wolverine” premiere at Lincoln Center in New York last year.
While a large portion of the company’s orders involve custom dye requests, it also keeps a stock of carpet in 30 colors on hand.
“I’ll get a call at midnight, and someone will say, ‘We forgot to order carpet for our event tomorrow. Can you show up by 10 a.m. with 20 rolls of black carpet?’” Mr. Olive said. “And we’ll be there.”
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