
Who Makes the Red Carpet? Steve. Who Makes the Red Carpet? Steve.
The New York Times
Steve Olive, who has worked in the event carpet business for more than three decades, is the man the Academy trusts to get its iconic rug just right.
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.