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Steve Olive was my white whale.
I tried to write a profile from Mr. for two years. Olive, the co-founder of Event Carpet Pros, the company based in California that is responsible for customizing the colorful, although not always red, carpets for thousands of film premières, The Golden Globes, The Grammy Awards, The Super Bowl and, since 1997, the Academy Awards.
I learned about Mr Olive in 2023, while reporting an article about why the Oscars organizers rolled out a champagne-colored carpet that year. My editor, Katie van Syckle, and I had found the website of the carpet products event and we called in the turn of the stated number in an attempt to reach someone. Finally, Katie connected contact with Mr. Olive and interviewed him briefly.
But this mysterious, sober, withheld man in the heart of the glitter and the glamor of the Awards season that is stuck in my mind. I wanted to know more about him. How do you become a carpet man? What did he have wanted to be when he grew up? Had he ever attended an award show?
Last year, when the Oscars returned to a classic red carpet, Katie and I again agreed that I a story about Mr. Olive had to pursue, but he was hesitant. But this year, with the encouragement of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, he agreed. It took three weeks for the ceremony.
Mission: Steve, as I called it, had officially started.
I sent a barrage of hectic texts and placed several calls to Brooke Blumberg, a publicist for the academy, in an attempt to capture when the carpet, which was made in a mill in Dalton, would arrive at the warehouse of the company in La Mirada, a city in Los Angeles County.
My goal was to be there when the approximately 30 roles, each weighing 630 pounds, were unloaded on the case of carpet professional, from a truck that had been driven around 35 hours, from Dalton. I thought the scene would be related to the arrival of the Christmas tree of the Rockefeller Center in New York City.
Despite my persistent overtures, Mrs. Blumberg told me that I had missed my chance. The truck had arrived in the warehouse the afternoon before I planned to fly to Los Angeles.
“Oh damn!” I texted her. “Hopefully we can get the installation!” (The week before the ceremony, the 50,000 square feet carpet is rolled into place by a crew of 20-smells of employees on Hollywood Boulevard.)
My next priority was meeting Mr. Olive at his office. But he had the flu, so I was told that the interview might have to happen during a video call. Yet Katie and I thought I had to go to California to catch the scene. And I wanted to meet his colleagues, as well as talking to the person who is the red carpet for the Oscars of Mr. Olive orders every year.
When I finally made the decision to get on a plane, there was a chance that I might not have had a chance to personally with Mr. Neither Olive nor to see the red carpet. But I bought a chair on a Wednesday afternoon flight and hoped for the best.
On my first day in La Mirada I explored the Tapijtpro warehouse event, a white structure of 36,000 square base hidden under palm trees. Then, on Thursday evening, I interviewed Joe Lewis, a producer for the Oscars who for the past 16 years the red carpet of the Awards Show of Mr. Olive has ordered.
On Friday morning, Face Mask on as a precautionary measure, I visited Mr. OLIVE – Now energetic, his fight with the flu apparently a distant memory – at his office in the warehouse.
I had an idea of him in my head for two years and I was curious if it matched the man. On 6-foot-2, bald and completely dressed in black, he was somehow exactly as I had thought. He was, I learned, a former bodyguard for Mötley Crüe.
He had entered the red carpet company in 1992, with his brother -in -law, which installed tents throughout the country. I met Mr.'s 26-year-old son. Olive, Nick, and his colleagues, who all told me the same thing: this is a man who does not want or needs the spotlight; He is just happy that he makes other people happy.
“I am not good at this,” said Mr Olive, trying awkward to follow the instructions of our photographer, Jennelle Fong, on what his very first photo shoot must have been, while he was on the red carpet of Oscars.
A little media shy, it took him some time to open. And he never really wanted to discuss himself or his days as a bodyguard, for some of the most popular bands from the 80s. “I am not interesting,” he told me.
But I noticed that he felt more at ease when the conversation turned to his lifeline: carpets. He loved talking about his favorite collaborations over the years – all carefully documented on the Instagram account of the company that he took in 2013 – and sharing photos of his dog, Olive.
“You make me look good, right?” He asked an hour and a half later, while we separated. I promised him to send a copy of the article after it was published.
During the weekend it was a hectic clausing to write my article. I didn't just want the personality of Mr. Capturing Olive, but also the scope and scale of the modern 'red carpet', not only as a platform for fashion, but as a personal brand option for celebrities. I wanted people to understand why what Mr. Olive was doing, did it.
I submitted my article on Monday morning; Mrs Fong photographed the installation of the red carpet on Hollywood Boulevard on Tuesday; And we had the story ready to go for Wednesday afternoon, if the carpet were rolled out.
I didn't get my Rockefeller Center Christmas tree arrival moment. But I witnessed something even better: a modest man who neither needed neither wanted nor recognition and shared his joy about his decades of passion.
