Warren Miller: The Godfather of Holy Sh*t

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Outside Magazine November 2004

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Warren Miller
The Godfather of Holy Sh*t (cont.)

WITH UPWARDS 570 FILMS bearing his name for the big screen, television, private companies, and ski resorts, Warren Miller is the most prolific sports cinematographer of all time, and an instigator of our culture's endless fascination with extreme. He's championed the stoked life in nine books, in countless newspaper and magazine columns, on the speaking circuit, and from his favorite pulpit—the chairlift. If you're ever lucky enough to spend ten minutes riding with him up a high-speed quad, you'll hop off and head directly for the steepest chute or most bodacious jump you can find.

"Go get your freak on!" Miller will likely say. "Whatever it is you want to do, you have to do it now!"

Miller has lived by his own mantra—he's tried just about every thrill sport there is. In his (slightly) younger days, he won amateur ski races all over the American West, became a crack sailor, and surfed many a righteous California break on a 100-pound redwood board. In 1968, he out-skied an erupting volcano while filming Jean-Claude Killy in New Zealand. Just a few years ago, he windsurfed from Maui to Molokai, having taken up that sport at the ripe young age of 60.

"I've been a little out of the box my whole life," Miller quips.

He was born in 1924 on the kitchen table in the middle of a party at his parents' house in Hollywood, California. His father, an architect, lost everything during the Depression and slowly drank himself to death. Miller's mother sewed quilts for the Work Projects Administration. As a child, Miller was hungry for part of every day, and he slept in a closet until he was 13.

In third grade, he sold stink bombs to his classmates so that he could buy his first still camera, a Bakelite Univex, for 39 cents. He took it along on Boy Scout expeditions to Mount San Jacinto, where he learned to turn $2 army surplus skis. After graduating from high school in 1942, Miller entered the Naval Officers Training Program at the University of Southern California, where he studied astrophysics, played basketball, and drew cartoons. In 1945, Ensign Miller served in the Pacific on a subchaser that sank in 60-foot waves near Guadalcanal. After his 1946 discharge, Miller spent his bonus on an eight-millimeter movie camera. He launched his film career that winter from the ski-resort parking lot at Sun Valley, Idaho, where he and his surfing-and-skiing buddy Ward Baker lived out of a four-by-eight-foot camping trailer.

Miller and Baker made ski-bum history that season—managing to eat, sleep, and ski on a total of $18 apiece. By day they poached crackers and ketchup from the cafeteria to make a lame imitation of tomato soup; by night they scarfed jackrabbits they'd shot with a rifle. They became ski instructors, and to earn a few extra bucks, Miller took photos and drew cartoons of wealthy skiers he met on the slopes. "If it was a picture of the guy with his wife and family, I'd sell it for a dollar," Miller commonly jokes. "If I had a shot of a fella with his mistress, it was $10, negatives included."

Through two ski seasons, Miller and Baker photographed each other and the pantheon of celebrities drawn to Sun Valley—people like Groucho Marx, Ernest Hemingway, the Shah of Iran, and Gary Cooper. In 1949, free talent was indispensable in producing Miller's first ski film, Deep and Light, shot in Squaw Valley, California, on a $427 budget, using a 16-millimeter camera on loan from two Bell & Howell executives Miller had instructed.

Extreme skiing was born on the reel in 1954, when Miller filmed Olympian Stein Eriksen doing a front flip. Audiences were stunned, and sponsors like Head Skis, Ford Motor Company, and Old Crow Whiskey signed on, enabling Miller to shoot in exotic locations all over the world.

Three decades later, in 1983, a young skier named Scot Schmidt changed everything when he hucked off a 75-foot cliff into neck-high powder at Squaw Valley. Ever since, Miller's movies have steadily ratcheted up the adrenalized snowmanship, inspiring generations of skiers and sparking the rapid growth of the ski industry. Today, in the snow-sports category alone, dozens of companies are making movies, and films like Touching the Void and Riding Giants wouldn't be playing in your neighborhood theater if not for Miller's persistent trailblazing.

"Warren Miller is the man who made the snowball that created the whole industry," says Dirk Collins, 34, cofounder of Wyoming-based Teton Gravity Research, a production company known for films like High Life and The Prophecy. Collins sees a direct lineage from Warren Miller Entertainment to TGR and the flock of young companies that followed Miller's lead.

Like Miller, he says, "we're all just living out our dreams—and figuring out how to get paid for it."

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