It’s one of the most important markers for a glossy Hollywood ceremony. But where does the red carpet actually come from?
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
Laid out on the floor was a 45m 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.
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,” 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 Olive’s exclusive Academy Red. The 13,930sq m rug was installed outside the Dolby Theater in Los Angeles on Tuesday, in preparation for the ceremony this weekend.
What sets 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. (Olive declined to disclose the cost of the job.)
Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.“He’s like a drive-thru window,” 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, California, then a tiny town of about 15,000 that is around 30km southeast of downtown Los Angeles, Olive never thought he would leave the state. His parents worked 14-hour shifts in a bottling factory to support four children, with Olive being the youngest.
After he graduated from high school, an opportunity arose to work as the bodyguard for 1980s acts like Mötley Crüe, George Michael and the Thompson Twins. Olive, a 1.88m (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 start immediately,” he said. “I was like, ‘I’m in’.”
But after an admittedly sheltered adolescence, life on tour, 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, travelling across Europe and Asia. But he was ready to do something – anything – to get out of that job.
Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.“It was quite gross at times,” he said of the environment he encountered while taking care of bands.
His brother-in-law, Clyne, who had been installing tents around the country, saw a need for a company that specialised in event flooring. He asked Olive if he would be interested in starting one with him.
In the beginning, Olive said, they were a hustle-fuelled 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, 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 capitalise 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, 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’
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 theatre-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, Georgia, 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,” 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, Olive said, possibly beginning life anew as wall insulation or carpet padding.
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 theatres.” (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 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 know a man who will do whatever it takes,” said 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 colours 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 Olive, who said this year’s trendy colours 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 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 10am with 20 rolls of black carpet?’” Olive said. “And we’ll be there.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Sarah Bahr
Photographs by: Jennelle Fong
©2025 THE NEW YORK TIMES
More on Hollywood and film
From red carpet glamour to local festivals.
Oscars 2024: These Were The Most Interesting Looks On The Red Carpet. The Viva team lend their definitive analysis to the looks they loved the most.
Bookworm: Costume Designer Jaindra Watson On Working With Ant Timpson & Battling The Elements. Costume designer Jaindra Watson speaks to Madeleine Crutchley about the making of the family-friendly adventure and how Elijah Wood escaped wearing a fedora.
In Tinā, The Film’s Samoan Costumes Shine Against A Backdrop Of Canterbury Conservatism. In celebration of today’s nationwide release of director Miki Magasiva’s film Tinā, Dan Ahwa talks to its celebrated costume designer Sacha Teuila Young about the film’s distinctive use of wardrobe to tell the story of grief, dignity, and hope. Spoilers ahead.
Director Sasha Rainbow On The Gory Horrors Of Beauty Standards & Filming ‘Grafted’. Madeleine Crutchley speaks to director Sasha Rainbow about why intense body horror was right to explore Grafted’s scary tale.
How I Make It Work: Film Is Both Craft & Calling For Brandon Te Moananui. Image-making is a lifelong passion for Brandon Te Moananui, and he’s built a career from that childhood love of film. In a notoriously demanding field, how does he build balance?
Māoriland Film Festival 2025: Mana & Magic In Ōtaki For The World’s Biggest Indigenous Cinema Celebration. With a packed programme and staunch kaupapa, Māoriland returns to the Kāpiti Coast from March 26-30.
