The Cinema Audio Society has announced that they will honour multiple CAS and Oscar nominated Re-Recording Mixer Anna Behlmer with the CAS Career Achievement Award, to be presented at the 54th CAS Awards on Saturday, February 24, 2018, at the Omni Los Angeles Hotel, California. CAS President Mark Ulano told us...
Anna is a world-renowned re-recording mixer with a huge portfolio of iconic credits. Her long-time collaborations with filmmakers and her work on over 150 projects is a testament to her excellence and creativity. She’s been nominated a dozen times for the prestigious CAS award for her outstanding mixing work and is also multi-nominated by her peers at the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences and the British Academy as well, signifying the very high regard with she is held among her peers. She is a beloved figure and I take great pleasure in announcing the CAS’ recognition of Anna and her terrific body of work.
Anna grew up in Hollywood not far from Glen Glenn and Todd-AO. She loved movies from the Disney films of her childhood to the B movies of her teenage years. In college, she started dating a sound engineer who worked at Ryder Sound in Hollywood. Anna takes up the story....
I spent a lot of time there visiting him and, while I was there, I helped load dubbers and tried to help out any way I could. Gary Bourgeois was the mixer there at the time and he said to me ‘You should get yourself a union card’. Since I was a bit bored with school, I pursued getting in the union. I was advised to go to Glen Glenn Sound because they had two women working there, and a woman in charge of scheduling and hiring crews. I walked into Jan Olson’s office and asked her to help me, and she said yes.
She started off on the Paramount lot as a Y-15 loader, before moving onto the new Glen Glenn building on stage 2 mostly on TV. She was promoted to recordist working with Bourgeois when he came to Glen Glenn. Glen Glenn merged with Todd-AO and they developed a mixer training program and in 1989 Anna joined the program, with the encouragement of JR Delang, Chris Jenkins, and Gary Bourgeois. Anna explains...
I never looked back I found something that was fun, that I loved doing and that I had an aptitude for.
She stayed at Todd-AO and worked with the great Richard Portman for several years. Then began an almost 20-year collaboration with Andy Nelson starting at Todd-AO in 1993 and ending at Fox in 2012.
In 1996, Anna became the first woman to be nominated for an Academy Award in the Sound Mixing category for Braveheart with a second Oscar® nomination for Evita coming the following year.
In 1998 Anna moved over to Fox where she mixed for the next 14 years. During that time, she added eight more Oscar® nominations for L.A. Confidential, The Thin Red Line, Moulin Rouge!, Seabiscuit, The Last Samurai, War of the Worlds, Blood Diamond and Star Trek. During this time, she also received six BAFTA nominations (with three wins), 12 CAS nominations and five Satellite Award nominations.
In 2012 she took an exciting opportunity to be involved with the new Technicolor facility at Paramount. She now works about 50 feet from the place where she had her first call on Laverne and Shirley and Happy Days. She has come full circle, in more ways than one, with the engineer, she was dating back then being Curt – her husband of 33 years.
Anna will join an illustrious group of past CAS Career Achievement Honorees that includes: Don Rogers, Walter Murch, Les Fresholtz, Tomlinson Holman, Richard Portman, Jim Webb, Charles Wilborn, Gary Rydstrom, Willie Burton, Mike Minkler, Ed Greene, Dennis Sands, Randy Thom, Jeffrey S. Wexler, Scott Millan, Chris Newman, Andy Nelson, David Macmillan, Doc Kane and John Pritchett.