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.)


	The Original Ski Bum: Miller in 1947, checking his wax in Sun Valley, Idaho (Warren Miller private collection at www.warrenmiller.net)

ALTHOUGH MILLER HAS SKIED the world, Mammoth remains one of his favorite places. "It's 72 degrees and there's still 17 feet of snow—let's go skiing!" he pleads, looking covetously up at his mountain arcadia. It's a sunny afternoon the last week of March, and we're trolling the slopes for more scenes.

Most of the aerial action at Mammoth takes place at Unbound, an über–terrain park with 30 acres of rails, jumps, and the headline feature, the superpipe, where everyone is either pointing a video camera or vamping for one. Miller and McCoy are here to interact on film with some of the crazier denizens of the park.

Traffic is dense in the stunt ditch. There's a constant swirl of kids throwing corked 360's and dinner-roll sevens. Emily Thomas, 26, an Australian snowboarder, pops off the lip of the quarterpipe, rotates, and drops back down the wall. Her husband is filming her for an Australian TV show. As McCoy whistles appreciatively, Thomas carves a sweeping arc and pulls up beside me.

"Is that Warren Miller?" she asks incredulously. "He's the guru of ski films! I work eight months a year in Sydney so I can travel to the places in his films. My parents say, 'Get a real job.' And I'm like, 'People make a living out of this. Look at Warren Miller!' "

Miller loves being the jolly ski Svengali. "I feel like I've been selling an illegal substance," he says. "People tell me how I've messed up their lives, because their kids are jumping higher, farther, faster. But if you don't scare yourself at least a few times every time you ski, you're doing something wrong."

Suddenly,

"People tell me how I've messed up their lives, because their kids are jumping higher, farther, faster," Miller says. "But if you don't scare yourself every time you ski, you're doing something wrong."

a pair of young snowboarders on the lift recognize him. "Warren Miller rocks!" they yell in unison. Miller raises his hand in laconic acknowledgment, then turns back to McCoy, a smile crinkling his pale blue eyes. Matty Smith, a member of the film crew, interrupts the moment with a little razzing.

"What's that, Warren?" he asks, pointing at a lift ticket clipped to Miller's pants.

"They wouldn't let me on the lift, 'cause I didn't have a ticket!" Miller says in mock outrage. "I said I'd left it on my other pants. That worked for about three runs, then I had to go buy one."

"I want that ticket," Smith says, turning to me. "That may be the only one Warren's ever paid for."

Despite being a millionaire, Miller is a strict practitioner of the ski-bum ethos, which dictates that all good truants must at least try to scam a lift ticket. "Wherever you go skiing," he's fond of saying, "spare no expense to make your trip as cheap as possible."

As we're about to get on the lift, a skier named Dennis Agee slips into the instructors-only chute and sits beside me. A former racer and U.S. Ski Team coach who starred in Warren Miller films in the 1960s, Agee knows a bit about Miller's legendary frugality.

"Warren paid really well in those days," he says facetiously. "You worked your tail off for three days—hiked cornices over and over so the cameraman could get his shot, skied terrain you had no business going down when you were that tired. And at the end, you got a Warren Miller pin!"

Agee laughs. "But it was an honor just to be asked," he says. "That pin was the most prestigious thing you could wear. It was like an Oscar or an Olympic medal. You were a member of the most exclusive ski club in the world."

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