Warren Miller is undeniably history’s most prolific and enduring ski film maker, still today pretty much the same impressive six-two, two-ten husky fellow with quick-draw blue eyes and a forehead like big surf over a low reef of hair. And, as always, he has an obsession about winning in whatever game he’s currently involved: his prime competition at the moment is rising above the consequences of being 81 years of age, in October, 2005.

As an antidote, Warren is generating the whirl of activity that includes reigning as Director of Skiing at the Yellowstone Club in Montana, writing Warren’s World for every issue of Ski, and publishing his Ski Bums/Warren’s World column in newspapers across the nation, as well as more recently, completing a book called What Are You Doing For the Rest of Your Life? about the attitudes of aging.

All this would be extraordinary at 50 or 60. At 81, it is phenomenal. It is hard to believe that it was two generations ago that Warren put together his first annual ski lecture film and fans are now out-skiing their parents, and grandchildren/fans are out-skiing their grandfolks!

Warren’s personal fame stands alone as the pioneer and the totem of the golden age of ski film but stands up very well. The secret could be that success through striving is the best medicine. Journalist Dick Dorworth writing in Ski twenty-five years ago noted that "Miller is a success story in the classic American mold to affluence via that Puritan work ethic." Warren identifies deeply with that ethic. He is first of all a serous businessman. He long ago won the filmmaker- enduring - fame contest, having rolled out more ski films, over 100, than any man on the planet (as well as a total of nearly 400 more marketing films). To have skied during the last half century is to come within range of that deep ironic
tone issuing from the sound track of the Warren Miller ski films of old.

But that is certainly not all there is. Warren loves skiing for its own sake; he has a strong feeling for life in the mountains and has a truly keen delight in the history of the sport. The last allows him to compose nostalgic accounts. Let’s take this one on the early days at Sun Valley: "When you got on the River Run chairlift, you hunkered down as you glided silently above the gently gurgling river. You knew it was below zero when the water was steaming and it was indeed a magical entry for me every morning into the unbelievable skiing on Baldy. With only three single chairlifts carrying people to the top, there was sometimes powder snow from one storm until the next. I definitely miss that."

Warren began skiing at 13 when it was a blessed escape from a family whose failure to function in a healthy manner, so Warren says, spurred him to become an overachiever.

"I can easily remember my first trip to the snow with skis," Warren writes. "I had found a pair of $2 skis in a garage near where I lived in Hollywood. They were Spalding pine skis, with a mortised slot under the toe that had a leather strap through it that buckled up over the toe of my hiking boots. My hiking boots went almost to my knees and had a slot to keep my knife…so that I’d be prepared if I ran into a snake. Right, in the middle of winter. My red-topped wool socks were turned down over the top of the boots and my Levis were tucked into them. I wore a hooded sweatshirt over my pajamas and my thirty-five cent cotton gloves had been dipped in melted paraffin the night before to make them waterproof and keep my hands warm.”

"My Boy Scout patrol leader transported us up to the snow. Johnny had an Otto Lang ski technique book that we sat and read before we hiked up in the corn snow. When I got up high enough to where I was scared (about 50 vertical feet higher), I slid my boots into the toe straps and pushed off across the hill. When I tried to go into a snowplow so I could turn according to the technique outlined in the book, my boots hung out over the outside of the skis while the skis continued to go straight. Before the day was over, however, I was finally able to complete about 62% of one turn before I once again crashed. "

He took his camera along skiing with friends and sold photos he’d taken to pay for film, finding the true path for his life: audiences willing to pay for same.

Warren graduated in the high school class of 1941, the year John Jay, with America’s first national ski lecture film, “Ski America North and South" was being shown across the country, inventing the first vehicle for Warren’s professional life.

Unlike Jay, Warren had a resource outside the ski film: he developed early as a commercial artist after taking a commercial art class in high school and turning out some snazzy posters. Then, in the fall of 1941, he entered the University of Southern California and took a life art class but had more interest in drawing cartoons alongside his drawing of the nude lady on his easel.

In October 1942 when he was 18 and the nation was ten months into World War II, Warren left USC for the V-12 Naval Officer’s Training Program in Chicago. The immediate result was not so much to convert Warren into a military man as to inspire his first book, The Navy Goes to College. It was a cartoon book about life of the Officer Candidate and cost 21 cents a copy to print while Warren sold it for a dollar.

His business resume reads, "Warren developed marketing and business acumen early and successfully honed and refined his system over the years as it applied to every aspect of his business activities."

It is notable however that in spite of his love of the deal, Warren’s natural temperament is irreverent rather than corporate and his unerring sense of any and all logical disconnects of any situation.

In July 1945, Warren’s sense of the silly must have been lost for a moment or two at the point where Ensign Miller’s wooden-hulled sub-chaser developed a leak while thrashing through sixty-foot-high, hurricane waves off Guadalcanal in the South Pacific. Luckily, two other sub-chaser’s were in the vicinity so there was some safety in a very hairy rescue operation. Warren was not at all subdued by having a ship sink from under him. He charged ashore on his subsequently granted, "survival leave" during Christmas 1945 and spent it skiing. He bivouacked six weeks in a heated tent for a dollar a night, at California’s largest ski resort at the time, Badger Pass/Yosemite, and luxuriated in his first chance to ski all day, every day.

The director of recreation, a young skier named Bill Janns, gave Warren his first lesson (some twenty years before Janns bought Sun Valley). Warren, lest he lose his grip, spent après-skiing time drawing and selling ski cartoons inspired by scenes at Yosemite. He would pin penciled cartoons for sale on the encampment bulletin board. (He’s still asking a standard fee for those same cartoons of sixty years ago…though the price has gone up.)

Some six months later on the very day that Warren was honorably separated from the Navy, he bought an 8mm-movie camera with a profitable use in mind. He and his friends could film themselves skiing and work on improving their technique.

At the time there were, besides John Jay, filmmakers making lecture films around the country, including Frank Howard, Sverre Engen, Sidney Shurcliff, Victor Coty, and Hans Thorner. Though Warren didn’t know who he was yet, everybody who saw the films wanted to be John Jay (just as 50 some odd years later, everyone wants to be Warren Miller) Warren, however much he might have liked to have joined the ranks, did not have the start up money for a career of film lecturing.

But he did have a resource that would keep him skiing. He cashed in his war bonds to finance his second cartoon book, featuring dead-on ski cartoons he’d drawn at Yosemite. The book, which also had an irreverent running text of anecdotes, was entitled "Are My Skis on Straight?"  Now a classic, it is a precious record of, well, not exactly an official view of the sport.

Warren’s hilarious irreverence about almost any, even slightly deceptive view made it highly unofficial. This is something that has never changed. Take a recent sample: a bit from Warren’s column in the May 2002 issue of Ski: "Boyne Mountain was only 402 feet high, but it has magically grown to more than 500 feet.  That’s because there is a sign painter in nearby Petoski who earns a season pass every year by repainting the altitude sign. Every year he adds a few feet to the height of the mountain."

Back in 1946, Warren’s business plan was to push the book at every resort west of Denver. His friend Ward Baker came along and the two estimated they could travel on almost no money by living in a trailer four feet wide and eight feet long, and scavenging or hunting for food. (They started the trip with their sleeping bags full of frozen mackerel which Ward had caught off the coast and frozen goats shot on Catalina…enough to get them started until they found rabbits and ducks they could shoot along the way. They had a natural deep freeze in the snow banks for any excess food.) The trip was a roaring success. Warren sold out his first ski cartoon book. The trip provided material for a second ski cartoon book. And the trip later served as the loose plot and anecdotal text that comprised the deathless Wine, Women, Warren & Skis.

This now-notorious 1947 trip began by stopping to sell books and draw cartoons to order at Yosemite and Alta, then got sidetracked for three months in the parking lot at the jewel of the West, Sun Valley. The powder was so terrific and the access to the lifts so cheap: day-tickets of the right color and holding a thumb over the expired date (and later more refined methods of counterfeit.) The two knew a lifetime opportunity when it presented itself.

They ensconced car and trailer in a personal spot at the far end of the Sun Valley Lodge parking lot where they stayed for more than three months while the two rubbed parkas with the rich and famous in the lift lines and swam with them more or less intimately in the famous lodge pool, all the while subsisting on an average of eighteen cents a day. The cost-savings were mostly gained by hunting and roasting the indigenous Sun Valley rabbit, ducks, porcupine and awful-tasting birds.

The two disposed of garbage from these unseemly meals by digging it down into the snow. After the first month, they were asked to move their trailer temporarily so the lot could be plowed. As Miller recalls in Wine, Women, Warren & Skis, "The rotary snowplow came roaring through our encampment, spraying snow, milk cartons, old rabbit carcasses, bread wrappers, tin cans and pink paper napkins all over the trees behind our camp site. From then on if anyone who wanted to find our place, we just told them to go the parking lot and look for the tree with the rabbit carcasses hanging from the top."

Miller drew cartoons for guests at a dollar each, enough to buy film and shoot a number of 50 foot reels with his 8mm camera, learning the basics of ski filming by having one hand and one eyebrow repeatedly frozen to the metal of the camera.

The great Sun Valley adventure ended shortly after the spring runoff flooded the parking lot. The return trip was via Jackson Hole and Aspen to unload the last of the books. Warren has been traveling the resorts of the west ever since, selling his past and current books. His wife refuses to sleep in a trailer, however.

Back in LA, Miller dug ditches by day, eventually working up to union carpenter (no holding him down in any situation) and by night editing 8mm footage into a novice semblance of film sequences. He also rammed out another set of cartoons published in the fall as a book under the title "Nice Try, George," all about skiing’s humorous side in Sun Valley. More important to his future, he showed his 45-minute 8mm starter of a ski film when he was invited to a party in LA and, as he says, "Some of the shooting wasn’t so good, so I made joking remarks about the film that was running." Soon Warren was being invited here and there, just bring the film. He was on his way.

By late fall, he was hearing the siren call of Sun Valley.  Warren showed up, eager for his second winter with his new book to sell. He further underpinned his economy by sharing a rented garage in nearby Ketchum, sleeping on the floor with roommates Ed Scott, later inventor-to-be known as, with Peter Kennedy, of the aluminum ski pole and Klaus Obermeyer, inventor-to-be of a double boot. But of the three, Warren was the veteran entrepreneur and beat his roommates into the equipment field with his own product that very season, as he notes: "A friend of mine was in the fabric business. I bought a $21 roll of nylon parachute shroud from him, and I cut it up, burned the ends, dyed them, made shoe laces out of them, and sold them to Pete Lane (then the premier Sun Valley ski shop). We used to have all-night parties where we’d sit up burning ends. I gave a penny a shoelace and the material cost me two cents. I was charging Pete Lane 35 cents and he was selling them for 50. I took my $21 and bankrolled it into $5,000 by spring." Warren adds, "I guaranteed my ski boot laces for an entire winter. I just didn’t guarantee that they would stay tied for more than an hour, and they didn’t."

Warren found a focus for his daytime hours by taking up ski racing. In a single season, he rose from unclassified to Class A, won the 1948 Far West Ski Association Championship and competed in the U.S. Nationals, both at Sun Valley. He could possibly have become our first male Olympic medalist had racing not been under such draconian rules, barring endorsements and personal appearances and even showing the logos on one’s skis to the camera. Warren opted out, leveraging his racing status into a slot in the next season’s famous Sun Valley Ski School.

At the beginning of the 1948-49 winter, Warren was indoctrinated in the Arlberg system by ski school director, Otto Lang whose book on Arlberg had shown Warren how to make his first turn twelve seasons earlier. Warren was not, however, so grateful that he remained entirely faithful. He was seduced by visiting instructor Emile Allais, the glamorous prewar, triple world champion whom Lang had invited over from France. Allais had invented the all-parallel system of teaching and Warren was fascinated by it. After skiing with Allais, he surreptitiously tried the Allais approach on his beginners, a trial that terminated abruptly when Otto caught him at it.

Recalling those days recently, Miller wrote. "I do not miss my seven-foot-six-inch, stiff, laminated, hickory skis with the metal edges that were fastened on with screws. Within a week or two of getting a new pair of skis, the screws would start to fall out. Eventually, you had to drill completely through the wooden ski and fasten the edges on permanently with copper rivets." This sort of authentic detail carries readers painlessly back to the heroic past of the sport.

He saw his first John Jay film, when Jay arrived to show it in the Duchin Room. He thought, "Hey, I can do that." By the end of the season, Warren, not surprisingly, managed to parlay his ski teaching into another step up the ladder. He had gotten friendly with two of his more distinguished Sun Valley pupils.

Their company was the manufacturer of the world’s best-known 16-mm movie camera, so rugged it was used during World War II to film combat. Warren convinced them to provide him a Bell and Howell 16-mm film camera on credit. Warren’s real life began.

He shot his first 16mm footage during his second year teaching after switching to the ski school at the brand-new Squaw Valley, where he was welcomed by Emile Allais, the resort’s first ski school director. Squaw at the time had only one chairlift and two rope tows. Nevertheless, there was plenty of powder , within reach. By season’s end, Warren had a 16-mm powder epic in the can that he later titled Deep and Light financing his purchase of film stock by selling still photos he took of guests, raking in $600 for the season on that alone, as well as taking out a loan with a local bank on the pink slip of his truck.

That spring of 1950, Warren borrowed $100 from each of four friends to underwrite traveling to twelve paid dates for Deep and Light. He also made 40 free dates to advertise his wares. Warren lectured in Los Angeles, Seattle, Vancouver and Sun Valley, driving and living in an old Chevy panel truck, charging $1 a head for his films. He returned with enough in pocket to begin making his second film.

Warren was up against stiff competition. In 1951, John Jay, went on tour with his eighth lecture film, Skis Against Time,  featuring the 1950 FIS World Championship races at Aspen, starring the personality-plus Italian, Zeno Colo. And of course since Squaw had just opened, John Jay came over from Aspen to shoot footage and show a film in Warren’s backyard. Warren took copious mental notes. His approach was going to be deliberately more muscular than Jay’s, more focus on rugged skiing with a somewhat cornier narration aimed at the young skier.

There followed the hungry part of Warren’s film career. Warren would save pennies by mailing correspondence without a stamp, inserting as a return address the address of the intended recipient so that the post office would "return" the letter to the person Warren intended it for.

Warren invented the layered airline baggage weigh-in. This involved sending with one person, the first group of bags for the total number of tickets in the traveling party. One of the party who held everyone’s tickets in hand, would put the baggage through well ahead of departure. The scene would be repeated with the second load of baggage with someone else holding all the tickets. Miller and his crew traveled hundreds of thousands of air miles without paying for as much as a pound of overweight.

In 1958, he realized that he had a ready readership right there in his audiences. He sat down to write Wine, Women, Warren & Skis, a tale of ultimate ski bumming, the Don Quixote of ski literature, a rendering of the Man from La Mancha staged in the ski world. You could almost hear humming through the text the theme "To Dream the Impossible Dream," in this case, the dream of endless turns belt deep in new powder. The funniest book ever written about skiing, incidentally now in its seventeenth or twenty-second printing (Warren has lost track), and having sold over 250,000 copies at Miller’s lecture appearances.

By 1958 Warren had arrived at John Jay stature and in fact was getting more bookings than he could be present to fulfill. He began to make recorded-narration version of his annual film for the dates he could not make in person. He continued to narrate a full schedule of showings in person for a number of presentations over the next thirty years. He loved his audiences and the time he took on stage to personally introduce the film.

By 1966, Warren was in a class by himself. The writer, visiting Warren in his California lair, found him up to the neck in work, exhibiting "a restless manner occasioned by things like overhead, and laboratory bills for six or seven ongoing ski film productions, and a hundred thousand dollar, continually re-mortgaged house in Hermosa Beach where beachfront does not come cheap."  He had a permanent business manger, and a fulltime cameraman, Don Brolin, an editing room and a storeroom for films being sent out. Warren had made it, certainly and yet "in his head, he was still burning parachute cord ends to meet monstrous, newly contracted debts: sums to be invested in still more films so that he wouldn’t have to be a ski bum." But truly, living the life of the ultimate ski bum is what he really relishes, says his wife.

It was a great benefit for skiing that Warren had reached the top. John Jay was by then making his third from last new film and cutting back on appearances. Warren was more than taking up the slack, leading the cause of enlistment in the sport, that most important contribution that a good annual ski film makes. Some large percentage of the annual 20 per cent growth of alpine skiing each year back then came through the persuasive power of ski films. 

By 1974, according to Dick Dorworth’s interview with Warren for Ski, the statistics on Warren had become even more impressive. He was showing film to 300,000 moviegoers every season, and had produced over 100 films about skiing by the dint of traveling a total of two million miles. He was told once that his films had spurred on a huge percentage of those who later became skiers, a considerable importance to the sport.

His influence and interests widened with the flow of the 20th Century. In the last ten years, Warren became involved in a good deal of charity and foundation work, including the establishment of the Mammoth Lakes Foundation College by his old friend Dave McCoy. And Warren was the prime mover in the establishment of the Mammoth Lakes Foundation Museum that will house the skiing art and literature collected by ISHA’s founder Mason Beekley and as well, of course, Dave McCoy memorabilia. And naturally stashed inside is a big library of film shot by American ski history’s most popular filmmaker, you-know-who.

Warren moved from living in trailers and back of trucks to Sun Valley, and then after meeting his wife in Sun Valley in 1984, to Vail and Maui. They have finally settled in the San Juan Islands of Washington State as well as at the Yellowstone Club in Montana where Warren is the Honorary Director of Skiing (you can just hear him say, “whatever that is???”) at the private ski and golf club where everyone who is an aficionado of soft powder snow pines to ski.

He is now actively writing his book on the advantage of having a good attitude toward aging and supporting his wife and step-son in their efforts to develop and grow the Warren Miller Freedom Foundation to teach our youth ethical principles of business and entrepreneurship. What better way could there be to honor the original ski bum’s legacy than to help America’s future leaders turn their dreams into realities.

Thank you Warren, for the laughter, excitement, oooh’s, aaah’s and for your contributions to skiing and to all of us who you have entertained.

 

Mort Lund

Editor
International Ski Historical Association