Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1532010
18 S P R I N G 2 0 2 5 I C A S Q U A R T E R L Y I once heard that you wanted to become a marine biologist. I grew up on Long Island, New York. When I was around 7 years old, my family moved to a town called Massapequa and our backyard was the Great South Bay. I would spend every moment I could on my boat poking around and discovering new things from spring to late fall. When the bay froze over back then, you could walk on the ice for hundreds of yards. The bay was much more of a wild and natural place when I was young; it was full of life. People throughout my neighborhood were good at digging for clams, some hunted ducks. Every kid I knew spent an enormous amount of time learning to fish or sail. It was kind of an aquatic childhood. We were always on a boat or at the beach. So, in my mind, I felt that when I grow up, anything having to do with this way of life was going to be for me. At this point, we all know that your life went a bit differently from studying the ocean. The Maitland family is known as a "Sound" family. Your father started his career working on live television for Jackie Gleason and Ed Sullivan, siblings Dennis Jr., Dean, and Kim have a ton of credits in film and television. What happened with going toward the water? Surprisingly, my father rarely took us to the sets he worked on. However, the summer when I was around 16 and was working at either a gas station or a furniture store, my father asked me if I wanted to help out on a film he was mixing called An Unmarried Woman [1978], which was directed by Paul Mazursky. I went for two weeks helping the sound department out. I was an additional third, I guess you could say. My older brother, Dennis Jr., was the boom operator and this really was my first taste of the "Sound" world that my family was known for. To me, the money was a plus, but I still wanted to finish college. I graduated from Alfred State College in 1977, and afterward I did a stint as a traveling encyclopedia salesman. A group of us went around the south knocking on doors selling these book subscriptions. After all the train riding and rambling around the country, I went back home and that's when Dennis said that he was going to hire me as a boom operator on an upcoming show. I kind of just said, "Sure, why not?" THE CAS CAREER ACHIEVEMENT AWARD RECIPIENT: Production Mixer TOD A. MAITLAND CAS b y J e r r y Y u e n T his February, the Cinema Audio Society's Career Achievement Award will be bestowed upon production mixer Tod A. Maitland CAS. His life in sound began much earlier than some of us could possibly imagine. Born into a "Sound" family, his father, Dennis Maitland Sr., was the recipient of the CAS Career Achievement Award in 2009, while his siblings, Dennis Jr. and Kim, also have established sound careers in film and television. Presently, his nephew, Terence McCormack Maitland, has become part of the team. Tod's work spans five decades, garnering six Academy Award nominations, a BAFTA sound win, and a recent 2024 Emmy nomination. Tod has had the opportunity to record sound for many renowned directors, including Oliver Stone, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, and Spike Lee. In his work, Tod has been recognized as an innovator of sound recording techniques for music-based films such as The Doors [1991], West Side Story [2021], and the recently nominated A Complete Unknown. Tod continues this legacy of sound craft by teaching at New York University's Graduate Film School and sharing his work experiences with future filmmakers. I've had the pleasure of working with Tod for the past 20 years, and I'm happy to share our conversation of how it all began, where it's going, and the honor of receiving the award. Tod A. Maitland CAS with his father, Dennis Maitland Sr., on a set circa 2010.