Anna Behlmer To Receive Cinema Audio Society's 2018 Career Achievement Award

Re-recording mixer Anna Behlmer will receive the Cinema Audio Society’s highest accolade, the CAS Career Achievement Award at the 54th CAS Awards.  The award date is set for Saturday, February 24, 2018, at the Omni Los Angeles Hotel at California.

“It’s truly an honor to announce the selection of Anna Behlmer by the CAS for our Career Achievement award at this year’s 54^th Annual CAS Awards,” said CAS President Mark Ulano.  “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”

Behlmer, who grew up in Hollywood not far from Glen Glenn and Todd O-A, is a first-generation American, the daughter of Italian immigrants. Although she enjoyed watching films as a child, she had no desires to pursue a career in the industry.  She dated a sound engineer while in college and would help him load dubbers.  The crew in the studio suggested she pursue obtaining her union card.

“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,” recalled Behlmer.

Her career began on Laverne and Shirley and Happy Days and followed with a number of television projects first as a Y-15 loader then as a recordist.   She enrolled in a mixing program in 1989, and, after graduating, became one of the first female mixers.   JR Delang, Chris Jenkins, and Bourgeois, Behlmer joined the program.   She worked at Todd -AO and with Richard Portman for several years, then embarked in an almost 20-year collaboration with Andy Nelson which started at Todd-AO in 1993 an ended at Fox in 2012.   In 1996, Behlmer became the first woman to be nominated for an Academy Award in the Sound Mixing category for her work on Braveheart.   The following year she received her second Oscar® nomination for Evita.

Behlmer moved over to Fox where she mixed for the next 14 years. During that time, she earned 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. Additionally, she’s received six BAFTA nominations (with three wins), 12 CAS nominations and five Satellite Award nominations.

In 2012 a new and exciting opportunity came her way, 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, and that engineer she was dating is Curt - her husband of 33 years.

Behlmer is a long-time member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences and has served several terms on the Sound Branch Executive Committee. She resides in Studio City and is an avid runner, skier and golfer.