Wylie Stateman (born November 20, 1957) is an American sound director, supervising sound editor, sound designer, and post production media entrepreneur. Stateman has supervised over 150 sound projects, resulting in 9 Academy Award nominations, 6 BAFTA Awards, 3 Primetime Emmy Awards, and over 30 Motion Picture Sound Editor Awards. He also received a Science Technology award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1994 for Audio Track’s Advanced Data Encoding (ADE) System. In 2021 he won an Emmy Award for his sound design in Netflix’s original series The Queen's Gambit. His creative sound work has included multiple collaborations with Oliver Stone, John Hughes, Quentin Tarantino, Wolfgang Petersen, Herbert Ross, Cameron Crowe, Scott Frank, and Rob Marshall. Stateman was a co-founder of the post production sound services company Soundelux where he served in a senior executive management capacity involved in the overall operations. Stateman also served as Chairman of the Board for the Soundelux Entertainment Group, a holding company that oversaw 11 entities including The Hollywood Edge (sound effect libraries), Modern Music (music editorial for feature films and television), DMG (computer game design), Mind’s Eye/Jabberwocky (books on tape), and Soundelux Florida (editorial), as well as Soundelux Systems (location-based entertainment systems integrator and installer), and Showorks (original content creator), among others. Stateman went on to establish 247SND (twenty four seven sound), centered around a Dolby Atmos design studio in Topanga, CA.

Early career influences

1977-78: Professor Mort Rosenfelt was a University of Utah Film School professor who taught Stateman at the very beginning of his career in Park City, UT. When Rosenfelt took a sabbatical from Sunn Classic Pictures, the largest independent producer of content outside of Hollywood during its time, to set up Sunn Classic's post production department and mentored 20 young filmmakers on in-house post production systems. He taught Stateman post production theory and a rapid prototyping approach to problem-solving, whereby students were forced to completely rethink different angles to solve the same problem. In 1979, Lon Bender met Stateman at Warren Sound West in Hollywood, an early post production sound facility and recording studio. They worked together as young sound editors on a series of films including Coal Miner's Daughter, Wolfin, and Southern Comfort, while incubating their original idea for Soundelux. Their collaboration resulted in the successful development of many companies (identified below). 1982: Craig Harris was an early expert of the Synclavier manufactured by New England Digital Corporation. It was the very first digital synthesizer piano keyboard that performed computer digital audio sequencing. Harris introduced Stateman to the idea of doing digital sound design with music design tools. 1982: Harry Harris was a US importer who introduced to Hollywood the AMS (Advanced Music Systems) Audiofile, one of the first 16-bit hard disk based recording systems dedicated to post production. This tool was the first to move entire editorial works into the digital world. It enabled Stateman to apply his rapid prototyping curiosity and quickly transition from film-based analog creative to digital-based creative workflows on computer hard disks - an avant-garde concept at the time when the largest hard disk available was 180MB and had to be registered with the US government. 1982: Scott Gershin met Stateman during the post production period of Tron. Gershin introduced Stateman to a digital audio workstation called "ADAP", which ran on an Atari computer, a precursor to the personal computer. This exposure encouraged Stateman to further embrace digital audio as a means for creative audio exploration and solidified in his mind the mass market potential of these tools in reaching next generation PCs.

Noteworthy collaborators

Stateman has had multiple collaborations with some of the most prolific writer/directors in the motion picture and television industry including: Oliver Stone — Snowden, Savages, The Untold History of the United States, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, W., World Trade Center, Alexander, Any Given Sunday, Nixon, Natural Born Killers, Heaven & Earth, JFK, The Doors, Born on the Fourth of July, and Talk Radio. John Hughes — Dennis the Menace, Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, Curly Sue, Dutch, Only the Lonely, Home Alone, National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, Uncle Buck, She’s Having a Baby, Planes, Trains and Automobiles, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Quentin Tarantino — Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, The Hateful 8, Django Unchained, Inglourious Basterds, Grindhouse: Death Proof, Kill Bill: Vol. 1, and Kill Bill: Vol. 2. Wolfgang Petersen — Das Boot (American Director's Cut), The Perfect Storm, Air Force One, Outbreak, In the Line of Fire, Shattered, Troy, and Poseidon. Herbert Ross — Steel Magnolias, Footloose, Protocol, Secret of My Success, and Dancers. Cameron Crowe — Almost Famous and Jerry Maguire. Scott Frank — A Walk Among the Tombstones and Godless. Rob Marshall — Nine and Memoirs of a Geisha.

Awards and nominations

Wylie Stateman has been nominated for 9 Academy Awards, 6 BAFTA Awards (1 win), more than 30 Motion Picture Sound Editors Awards (4 wins), 2 Emmy Awards, and two Satellite Awards.

Academy Awards

BAFTA Awards

Motion Picture Sound Editors - Golden Reel Award

The Association of Motion Picture Sound (AMPS)

Emmy Awards

Satellite Awards

Entrepreneur

In addition to his creative work, Stateman has been an active entrepreneur in sound-related businesses having founded, purchased, merged and/or managed over 30 corporate entities spanning post production services; sound effects libraries publishing; music post production services; video game post production; cinema facilities design, production and distribution; entertainment park design and production; software development for digital delivery systems; and more. Many of his endeavors were co-founded with his long-time partner, Lon Bender, as well as managed and/or developed alongside a team of executives who continue to serve as leaders of major Hollywood studios and post production facilities today.