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[birds chirping]
[slow music]
[Warren] I was telling stories one night,
in our place on Orcas Island...
and somebody said, "Do you know, Warren, maybe, maybe there's some people...
who would like to come and hear you talk about the old days."
And I said, "Well, how far back should I go?"
And they said, "Why don't you go back to
the start of the whole thing?"
[interviewer] Welcome.
-Where do I get to sit? -[interviewer] That's here.
-Is this for me? -[interviewer] Yes.
[Warren] It's really a fancy tripod.
[interviewer] Yeah, so it's a Dana Dolly, right?
Really nice, looking big budget production.
[interviewer] No, it's not, tape is cheap here, [chuckles] times have changed.
Oh, boy, have they?
[slow upbeat music]
When I first saw a Warren Miller movie, I was blown away that,
that level of skiing existed.
[Kristen] I don't think that people would have really understood
how magnificent the skiing lifestyle actually is,
without him capturing it in cinema.
[Jonny] Warren was able to package that up
and sell it to the world.
If skiing ever had a chief marketing guy, it was Warren Miller.
[Brian] He shot it, edited it marketed it,
took it out on the road.
Every year it was like Christmas morning
going to see the Warren Miller film.
[Greg] I got to step through that magical looking glass
and they were in this fantasy world that Warren created.
Warren Miller is skiing, was his recipe. All the staff in his films said,
"Everybody's so pumped up
and so excited for the coming season."
[Dan] I always think the mistake they made is,
they're thinking they're going to watch a movie.
You know, a Warren Miller film is an experience.
That 90 minutes in that theater, you got taken away.
[Warren] Always portrayed my life as perfect.
And according to any skiers in the world that I want to do... and did.
And why try to convince the audience of anything different?
Let them have this... kind of fantasy thing
about this wonderful life I led.
One of the questions I get asked the most is,
"Where did you start skiing and how was it?"
When I first started there were two chairlifts in California,
one the Sugar Bowl and Mount Waterman
which was only 50 miles from where I lived in Hollywood.
[slow upbeat music]
I was really active in the Boy Scouts
that's how I went the first time, I was, uh--
Oh, boy, 13 or 14?
When you put on a pair of skis, and it can to go from A to B
with absolutely zero physical exercise,
it was a different sensation and I responded to it, and...
it really opens all the gates to freedom.
[narrator] The exhilaration of controlled flight
through a world of snow, it's an end in itself.
Yet this is only part of the story.
[Warren] As a kid I lived these two different lives.
One on the weekends with the Boy Scouts,
and during the week with my parents.
My father, he never really paid too much attention to myself,
and the attention he paid it all was to my two sisters.
[Andy] Warren grew up in a dysfunctional family,
even though they had bits of success here and there,
he-- his father actually was a fairly famous radio announcer
who had his career derailed by the great depression.
After the depression everything was different.
With my father drinking the way he drank,
it was-- I would do anything to get out of the house.
He'd spend a dollar and a half or two dollars a day on alcohol,
and come home, you know, reasonably intoxicated.
He never knew when he was going to blow up,
that was the hard part.
I played partially basketball for three years in high school,
and never saw me shoot a basket
or write a surfboard or turn a pair of skis.
Nobody in my family ever saw me.
My mother never saw me, my sisters never saw me.
You know, they were completely disinterested in anything I was doing.
I was really a renegade...
I was different than the four of them.
[piano music]
I was never home on weekends, I was always somewhere else.
I could ride my bicycle down to San Pedro
or Malibu in the morning.
[Ward] In our surfers, way back,
he had the worst surfboard I ever saw in my life.
[laughs]
[Warren] I met Ward Baker one day at Manhattan beach
because he lived five or six blocks from the pier,
and we started surfing together.
[Ward] It was straight on break.
So we didn't get really good shape wave...
surfing and I can't believe I surfed [laughs] all those years.
[announcer] Today's army is the most mechanized
freedom force ever assembled
into your army recruiters office.
[Warren] The day that you turned 18 you had to register.
If you didn't register, you'd get drafted.
And I didn't want to sleep in a wet foxhole.
So I enlisted in the Navy.
[Ward] It was not fun [chuckles] going down
to some God awful office in Los Angeles.
[Warren] The Navy, you don't have two minutes to yourself.
They tell you what time to get up, what time to brush your teeth,
what time to fall out and do your early morning exercises.
And I really resented that loss of freedom.
[car engine roaring]
So I made up for it when I got out.
[slow music]
[Ward] He said, "Let's go skiing!"
So what the hell's that?
It's no good, take the skis here and
put them on a flat weight [mumbles] no fun.
Hell I know, I'm a beach boy.
Anyway, he talked me into it. [laughs]
[rock music]
We would just go up two skiers up in the mountains here.
And he said, "It's good, I've been there."
[Warren] I was able to borrow the car from my sisters
to tow the little Teardrop trailer.
What else did we need?
[Ward] There was no heat,
we had a little cook stove out in the back.
[Warren] We didn't even buy a chairlift ticket because we didn't have enough money
to last us the whole time.
So we just climbed, skied down, climb up again, skiing down.
We just had a good time, I couldn't believe it.
[Ward] We stayed the whole damn winter.
I thought they'd throw us out but they didn't.
[slow music]
[Warren] There's one way from Southern California weather,
I think the coldest we ever saw was 32 below.
I think it took a certain degree of stupidity to do all that.
If you weren't as stupid as he and I were,
you couldn't ski all winter long.
You've left the city to go to the mountains.
That's when you're assumed to be a Ski Bum.
I was doodling one day in my trailer when I created that,
it was the year after Squaw Valley.
It was very personal,
oversize pack that didn't fit, skis that were too short
was my perception of me.
In Squaw Valley we wore light blue packers
and had not just figured the red was a better
fit for a cartoon and that's the way it turned out.
[Dan] A Bum is sort of living in the moment, you know,
sort of is willing to sacrifice something
for his own personal greater or good.
[Brad] Warren is the ultimate Ski Bum.
You know, he always stuck to what he had a passion for it.
And not many people do that in this world.
You know, Warren Miller was at Sun Valley
living in a trailer shooting rabbits
and making rabbit stew with Ward Baker.
[Warren] Ward was skinning them in the shower
and I was cutting them in the wash basins of the scare charlotte.
And there was blood and guts everywhere,
and they thought that somebody
had been murdered in the bathroom.
We went back to our trailer and put the rabbits to freeze underneath that night,
and the next night we had them for dinner...
it worked.
[Greg] You did what you had to,
to stay on the hill and get on the lift.
[John] You'll take any job, any low paying job
and you'll never really amount to much,
except you'll probably be a pretty good skier.
[Brian] We found a way to make a living in the industry,
whatever it took. My first job as a 14-year old was cleaning bathrooms
just to get a season pass.
[Colby] I think it has become a little derogatory
where people think, "Oh, you're just a Bum, you don't care about anything."
It's just someone who's so passionate and perfectly happy
with the thing that they want to do that they just
do it, even if they're poor and broke
and starving and cold and alone.
I like being a Ski Bum.
[Dan] People have said to me, "You have so much more than a Ski Bum."
And I just say, "No, that's the essence of it
because it's, it's a lifestyle, it's a choice."
And those choices have almost killed me and they've saved me.
[Warren] Just by living in the parking lot, I was different than everybody
that was paying $30 a night in the lodge.
I always felt I had more fun than anybody else.
[Dan] When you're free of materialistic things
and you're chasing a passion or a dream,
then been a Ski Bum isn't derogatory,
it's, it's more a state of mind.
[Warren] Eventually you end up skiing
at every resort from Denver West.
There weren't very many in those days,
California had two chairlifts.
Colorado had Aspen and Arapaho basin
that was winter park that was about it.
It was a long way, expensive.
We finally got a job at the Snowpine Lodge at Alta.
[Ward] They always needed ski instructors.
So I was a ski instructor in the first year I was skiing.
[chuckles] You tell me how I did that.
[Warren] They gave us 25 cents an hour,
and all the hamburgers we could eat.
We put a couple of hamburgers in our pocket for lunch
when we weren't working there.
That's all we wanted to do, we just wanted to be better skiers and ski more places.
I could mingled with the people
living in their backyard in a trailer,
it was a different world.
I could put on a bow tie and a tweed suit
and go to the lodge dining room
with anybody that would buy my dinner.
I couldn't afford to go do it myself,
so I was seen occasionally on the lodge dining room
where I'd go to dinner a couple of high school girls
[stutters] were there for learning to ski a week
and we had been teaching them
and they bought our dinners for us.
One night when I was sleeping and somebody...
makes my shoulder and I didn't know
who the hell it was, in the middle of the night!
[mumbles] There is this good looking blonde saying,
"I need some place to sleep."
I said, "Oh, yeah, why here take mine.
It's dirty as hell, but you can sleep, there's no problem."
She didn't want to sleep. [laughs]
I don't know what happened to her.
[camera shuttering]
[Warren] I got a little eight millimeter camera
to see how we skied
and I saw movies of myself skiing that he had taken
and I saw some of him that I had taken.
I just got hooked, I got hooked on shooting a movie.
[slow music]
As a boy I wonder if you could ever make a living at this...
but getting that good is not a simple task.
I remember seeing a John Jay movie in Sun Valley when we went up up there,
there was probably 30 people there.
Everybody except Ward and I had paid money to watch him.
We snuck in the back way.
[announcer] Buddy, I have a problem, they got out of camera range
then you take your well roll camera out.
They said next year equally well one cheek
and take off after your subject on skiing.
[Warren] I can remember very vividly
I was walking back to our trailer
in the parking lot that night.
I said, "You know what? If that guy can make a living
with that quality of photography, somebody else can too."
That's when the pathway opened for me
to become a ski filmmaker and I owned my skills
taking pictures of guys making turns on mountains.
[slow dramatic music]
I analyzed everything he did, his advertising and his promotion.
I sent a letter of inquiry to him on a fictitious name
and saw how he operated.
[Greg] Rumor has it that Warren
portrayed himself as, you know, an innocent bystander,
but he was really there to do a reconnaissance
on how to do his own skiing movies.
[Warren] I figured if he was getting $400,
I could find some business at half that price.
I'm not surprised, I did the same thing to Warren. [chuckles]
[slow upbeat music]
The weather melted all the snow and my mother said,
"You need to get a life [chuckles] and a job."
I was fading away from making movies
and Warren was getting into it more.
But then I'd taken about 25 rolls, so I had $250 invested.
[camera shuttering]
[Warren] You never thought about how expensive it was to produce a movie,
but I took four guys and each loaning me a hundred dollars
that $400 loan, uh, fed the whole crew.
The first year when I was showing it around
and trying to drum up a show,
I had nine people turn me down and they all said the same thing,
"We'll put your show on if you get somebody else to narrate it."
Didn't want to do it, I just instinctively felt that I could tell a better story.
And I could understand it I was an unproven product,
there was no reason for them to put it on.
First time I showed up at it,
didn't know whether I should narrate,
by the projector or down on the stage.
And it turned out I narrated it up by the projector
and I introduced the show
and then had to run up and start my tape recorder.
I had no idea whether it was going to work or not
because I'd never done it before.
I didn't know my films were any good, I had no idea.
I measured my success by occasional applause, a lot of laughter
on areas and I knew it was the successes that
the sponsors that put the show on,
rebooked at the following year.
[audience cheering]
Life was good.
I fell in love with a young lady.
I met her skiing at Mammoth.
It was one of those love at first sight things.
She was tall, thin brunette,
she could ski really well, I skied over there the next day
and on Tuesday night I took her on our first real date...
and everything just sort of fit together.
And after Scott was born,
we had planned a trip to Europe together,
and her back got to hurting so much she couldn't go with me.
It was at her insistence that I went to Europe
for two and a half or three weeks,
and made the first European photography
that I had ever done.
Everything I saw was a brand new experience.
[slow music]
And her mother called and said, "You've got to get home as quick as you can,
this is really important, I'm not going to tell you why,
but I just want you here."
I went back to New York and jumped in my truck and drove,
drove virtually nonstop back to Los Angeles.
I found out the day I got there when I saw the doctor.
He said, "I don't know how to tell you this,
but your wife is going to die within six months.
No doctor in the world can save her life, period.
It's going to end with cancer of the spine."
[piano music]
Her father bought a little tiny tract house...
three small bedrooms, I think all house had a
1,000 square feet in it,
three bedrooms and her sister moved in with us,
and took care of her while I was working
as a ditch digger and carpenter.
Banged a lot of nails for him to know houses,
I built frame houses and then I would...
sleep on the floor under her bed...
I'd edit film until she fell asleep.
We would talk about our next trip here.
The next trip to Europe we'll leave the two of us...
we'll go together...
Never happened.
[piano music]
I, I didn't call her parents at 2:30 in the morning
because there was nothing they could have done.
So I-- who do you call?
I don't know what to do when somebody dies.
They came and drove away with her, and that's the last time I ever saw her.
She was gone.
[piano music]
I had a brand new son, I had a film career
that I was trying to establish, was not easy.
However I could pour...
all of my emotional annexed into the film,
and do a better job with it.
I would take my anger and my happiness
and put it in the movie.
Keep your mind occupied...
because you can't worry if your mind is busy,
you just shouldered your way through it,
and tried to set it aside
when you're setting at an editing bench.
[Andy] He was unwavering, he was unyielding
in his pursuit of what was his life passion.
As Warren was getting his business off the ground,
the last thing he was thinking about was opening the mail
and depositing checks into
really doing accounting of any kind
and it was only a natural fit
that he hired his mother part time
and then his sister as well to help run his business.
I think he hoped for the best.
[Warren] I figured out very simply
that the whole world works eight hours a day
and the only way you can get ahead of the whole world is to work nine or more.
Back in the day, Warren did everybody's job.
He was the guy who produced the film, shot the film,
edited the film, found the music, narrated the film.
[Kurt] He was a one man band.
He worked all winter to shoot it, all summer to make it,
and then he went on the road,
and my father traveled 250 days a year.
And the last 90 days that is doing a show
every night to a large audience.
All of the excitement and the anticipation in the room
before it, the Warren Miller films about to go on,
it's just-- it's off the chart.
[announcer] Welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends.
-Ladies and gentlemen, Warren Miller! -[audience cheering]
[Chris] He loved being there,
and he would never break live.
[Warren] It doesn't really matter who's jumping off the cliff.
You kind of look at the mountain and wonder
if his IQ matches his waistline,
-which sometimes it does. -[audience laughing]
[Dan] If you think of Springsteen,
if you think of, you know, some of the great rock stars
and of course Warren Miller,
it's not about a polished voice.
It's about character in the voice,
the voice that brings a depth to what they're doing.
It's not about pitch, you know,
it's not about tone, it's about authenticity.
[Warren] This winter we'll find that perfect snow
on that perfect mountain once again.
We'll really get it together, you and I,
will feel those giggly butterflies in our stomach
when we can look back up that hill and say, "Wow,"
I hadn't run only cost $843 and 71 cents.
He has kind of a laid back lackadaisical voice,
which is kind of the epitome of what a Ski Bum is,
is a laid back lackadaisical person.
And so I think that his voice
just really captures the essence of skiing.
I was about 12 years old,
he was in Northern Michigan at Cadillac high school,
I sat down in my seat and I felt like
this guy was talking directly to me.
[Warren] Chances are sometime on the way down,
you'll let out a long loud cry.
That's essentially a cry of love and life.
[Mark] Yeah, his voice really made me
feel comfortable and like at home.
It wasn't like Warren Miller the ski movie narrator guy,
he was the narrator for everything.
[Warren] You should do it too, do it now
because if you don't, it'll be one year older when you do.
[Jonny] But then he would pack everything up, get in his car,
he would drive, he gets to sleep at two in the morning,
wake up and do it all over again.
In order to sell anything,
you almost have to interact with every person one at a time,
to build something that's new
and Warren did that. [laughs]
He literally crisscross the country.
Not that many people skied, people thought you were crazy
if you went out strapped a couple of boards on your feet and slid down the hill.
[Andy] The skiing industry really
took shape after World War II.
Warren was there to capture
the boom in the '50s and '60s.
Skiing was pretty exclusive back then,
it's pretty exclusive today.
And, uh, you know, I have no doubt that his blue collar
way of going about things
made a lot of folks who grew up in the Midwest
and Michigan like I did think, "Hey, we can do this too."
[Warren] The first time I showed in Pasadena, I gave my introductory speech
and all I did was talking about living in the parking lot
and shooting rabbits, so the audience laughed.
And when it was all over, we had had
almost 800 people paid a buck to see the show.
I got my $320 which was in those days, uh,
four weeks pay as a carpenter.
And, uh, I thought that I'd died and gone to heaven.
[Greg] He was the pied piper of skiing.
Now The Beatles didn't invent Rock and Roll,
but the Beatles certainly took it to this other level
where we were all like, "Wow, this is brand new."
Warren was the Beatles of the ski movies.
[interviewer] Is the podium back there?
The podium is here, so...
this podium back here...
um, used to travel around with Warren,
and he would narrate his film was live, uh, using this podium.
Uh, there used to be a light and a mic that would sit up here.
He'd put his script down here
and re-narrate live to the audiences.
So this here is an old, um, reel to reel
that Warren used to take around with him,
and are used to play some of the audio.
I probably open it up...
see, let's see if it has some of the old...
uh, places he used to hold all the old sequences.
[Warren] The longest days I put in were 18, 19 hours.
You got to get a little sleep somewhere, even though it's, uh,
a pillow on the carpet of your office
if you have a carpet.
I didn't know anything else, there's that old saying,
"Nobody never give you nothing, you have to earn it."
[Chris] About a year after Jean passed away,
my father met my mother.
If I was to describe my mother, Dotty,
she, first of all, is beautiful.
Poised, consummate, hostess, my mom loved to ski.
They met at Santanophany when he asked her
to be on a Tandem surf contest with them.
So she was an adventurer too.
They found each other out there not in the city.
[Warren] And all told there was over a hundred photographers there,
one a little partial to is my wife Dotty.
She runs a Bell and Howell camera for me,
helps film these races,
one reason we put this shot of her in,
just to help substantiate our income tax deduction.
[dramatic music]
[Chris] When we were young, we traveled in our station wagon full of camera gear,
all over the United States and it was a family adventure.
[Warren] While we're on the subject of children
I'd like to take a couple of minutes out
and introduce you to my three.
We have a young son named Kirk.
He's two, doesn't ski yet.
Our daughter Chrissy is five.
She'd rather throw rocks, snowballs and ski.
Our son, Scott is nine going on 17.
And he's a junior lifeguard in the summer,
and he used to just ski quite a bit in the winter with us.
[Chris] I remember one time we were like antsy little kids,
my dad said, he goes,
"If you don't pipe down back there
I'm stopping the car and letting you out."
And we're like "What, yeah, whatever you're going to do this."
And... sure enough he pulled off the side of the road,
bright daylight and he, "Everybody out."
And he drove off with my mom...
and I looked at my older brother and he goes,
"I think we have to start walking."
And we got to the end of the curve in the road
and my mom and dad were sitting there having lunch, laughing,
and they go, "Whoa, I told you so."
They've had their eyes on us the whole time...
and they taught us a lesson like, you're either on our team or you don't get to play.
[Warren] Last year we logged 20,000 miles
traveling around the Western United States
in search of powder snow and sunshine.
For example, we took a long weekend in May,
left Los Angeles drove 1500 miles North to Timberline Lodge.
[Chris] It was like, don't stay home, take your kids,
put them in the cars and go see the world.
That was his motto, we got to participate in that.
And that's why we were in the movies in those years.
I really think our family,
we were kind of the guinea pigs of this idea.
[slow music]
What else would you want to do in your childhood, really?
I mean, I had this amazing, amazing childhood.
[slow music]
[Greg] Warren developed a format that worked
and, you know, if it ain't broke, don't fix it, right?
You know, so he stuck with what was working and what he knew,
what he was comfortable with, and what he was great at.
[Kurt] Like anything we can relate to a recipe.
And my dad in the early years
had a recipe of what should be in the film.
[Warren] You have to have humor, you have to have adventure,
you have to go to resorts
that you have never gone to before with your camera.
Here's a place you've never been before,
here's a place you can ski all day every day,
and why don't you? What's keeping you in the city?
[rock music]
You know, they were all excited and he would, you know, blast them with this opening montage,
and would, you know, throw everybody up in the field.
[rock music]
I was like, "Hey, great, I need my fix, give me this stuff."
He would take all the extreme skiing,
all of the action that's going to be in the film
and put it in the first three minutes.
So you're seeing a highlight reel.
[rock music]
♪ Skiing is the living
♪ Living in the you
♪ Skiing in the living
♪ In above walking through
♪ Skiing in the living
♪ In the power
♪ In you
The cool thing about Warren's film is,
he always brought humor into it.
[slow music]
[Warren] This guy worked at a satellite tracking station
and his clothes got magnetized.
[John] Somehow his cameraman found
people wearing the craziest outfits...
doing the silliest things on rope toes.
[Warren] Yup, a lot of strange things happened in August.
These are very serious racers.
This one had his ear on crooked.
There's just always these classic lines,
him showing beginners really struggling to get off the lift,
and the lift attendants being so frustrated.
And there's Warren saying, "Yeah, you want your ski? Go get it."
[Warren] You want your ski, go get it,
you want your skis, go get it.
The other one too.
"You want your skis?"
[Warren] Go get it.
Here's a kick in the butt.
[skis crackling]
Humor is man's inhumanity to man.
And I was pretty inhuman on those charlotte sequences.
[Warren] Now watch the guy on the left,
better yet watch his friends.
They're all members of AA with a weekend off.
[symphony music]
Let's see, right, left.
"It's okay, he's my friend."
[Kristen] I don't think that we would let most people
get away with some of the things that he says but,
the way he, he says things...
There's two theories about arguing with women.
Neither one of them works.
[instructor] Can we say that?
I don't know why not, I just said it.
[Warren] On this trip, I hired an Italian midget
and drove while I slept all the way out to California.
Yep, this whole thing's for real, a real bummer.
[Kristen] Even if they're super inappropriate,
like, you don't really take offense to it somehow,
I don't know why.
[Warren] Skiers are a unique group of people.
They'll buy packers that are four inches thick
and pants that are one six of an inch thick.
And these are two of Australia's top bottom watchers.
[Kurt] The formula true,
is we can entertain them for 80% of the time...
you've done great. I mean, at the end he would say...
[Warren] Warren Miller here, hope to see you next year same time,
same place, same time, same place.
Warren Miller here, hope to see you next year same time, same place.
Thank you and good night.
[Kurt] So, you know, you have a balance and recipe,
you start out with the recipe and if you're a good chef,
you mix it up a little bit.
[symphony music]
[Warren] I had a young man from San Francisco who was
hundred percent blind, he couldn't see a thing.
When he was scanned to giant humongous moguls,
and I just couldn't imagine how he could do that.
And I featured him in that first film.
I waited till I just showed two or three shots
of what a good skiing was,
and it was sort of, "Oh, by the way, he was totally blind."
You're skiing along POV of the camera
and the screen goes black.
[skis screeching]
You have 3000 people sitting in a room
and it's just, and it's just the sound of the snow.
[snow chattering]
It's an amazing thing that, you know--
and that kind of put people on like,
"God, how lucky we are to have what we do,
and care for what we have."
[Warren] There'd be a long silence in the audience,
which is a programmed response.
They had to relate to that blind guy.
[Andy] There's no question that he always liked the underdog.
He always saw himself relating to the little guy.
This is a guy who started out
in a trailer in the parking lot, and, you know,
look what you can do if he did it.
[Warren] Single most important thing is for a handicap skier,
regardless of his handicap,
is that he has the same opportunity
to stand at the top of the hill and make turns to the bottom.
And the audience reaction was so good
that I had a handicap person almost every film I ever did.
[symphony music]
[Warren] The real star of the day though, was a young lady named Tracy Taylor.
Tracey was born with sacral agenesis.
Her legs, they are about as big around as my thumb,
but her spirit just big as all outdoors.
When I found out she weighed less than my camera gear, I had an idea.
[Tracy] Mr. Miller skied down with me in his arms,
holding me like a camera, I felt disbelief.
[Warren] And with that one run, I fell in love with this little girl.
So now I've got Tracy on my arms and I'm holding her
and as we go through the gates she's smacking them with her arm.
[audience laughing]
She's 11 years old.
I took her back to her mother, and I called her home about a week later.
And I said, "Mrs. Taylor, I've made arrangements to take you
and your two sons and your daughter to winter park,
so she can learn how to ski with Hal O'Leary."
[piano music]
Mind you this little girl had no knees,
just stiff le-- stiff legs, size of your thumb.
He taught her how to move her hips over the outside ski
and actually turned.
And here she's turning freedom, right?
And I had a great camera crew covering it for me,
great sound man and a great editor.
And when the guy was editing it...
there's a great picture of Tracy and she's kind of ogling through the snow on her tummy,
pulling herself through the snow and the elbows
and the narration we put over Tracy said...
"God made me this way...
so that when anybody sees me doing anything...
they know that they can do anything they want to do with their life."
[slow music]
[Dan] It's not a ski movie that Warren has made,
it's inspirational moment, it's a family time,
it's a time that inspires, it's a time that questions,
it's a time that makes you think about your own life
and where you are in the world and what are you doing with it.
[Warren] One day, I was in Vermont,
just leaving for two or three weeks
went through the, uh, through the lecture tour.
I talked to my wife and she had a $25 check bounce.
In the bank account, I should have had $150,000.
I had to stay on the road for three weeks
before I could even investigate
where the money had disappeared to.
[plane engine whooshing]
Disappeared in my sister and my mother's from bank accounts.
[dramatic music]
And further they needed the money more than I did.
[Chris] They managed to take that hundred thousand dollars from him,
which was just about everything we had.
They eventually tracked it down and
discovered they had swindled them.
And it was just for stupid stuff
like clothing and just,
I don't know why, I mean, [stutters] never mix family and money.
[Warren] Really pulled the rug out of any security I had.
[piano music]
And finding your mother with all the missing money,
how far do you take it?
One day they came to work, and the door was locked,
and I wouldn't let them in.
The bottom line is that there was never any
police action taken against either his mother or his sister.
I never understood exactly how that could happen
when they had clearly taken the money.
[Warren] You're not going to change them,
so you just get on with your life,
and hope you can pay the bills.
I never saw either one of them again.
[native music]
[Dan] For me he's a guy that's lived without a net.
That he's walked the high wire, uh,
and he may have fallen off a few times,
but he's gotten back up and kept going, and I love that.
And I love that he shares that.
He's a guy that just can't keep it in.
[Jonny] Warren found something he loved
and he built his own industry around it
and at the same time, you know,
inspired tons of other people to get into it.
The real explosion of, of skiing in America
was the late '60s.
[Chris] The ski resort would decide to be built there,
and then my father would be called, come make a film,
we want people to know we're here,
give us the first man on-- at Snowbird,
it was the first man in Vale.
[Jonny] It's a chicken and egg thing, right?
I don't know which is first explosion of
skier is being built or was it
Warren Miller's movies that pushed?
I don't know, I know they both happened.
I will absolutely credit Warren Miller with 99.9%
of the growth of [chuckles], of skiing in that era.
[Andy] He was able to influence everybody.
And at the end of the day, you know,
it's the participant that you've really got to influence,
and Warren got that.
[Greg] Suddenly the general public
could be exposed to this wonderful thing,
how to snow in sunshine and, and, you know, sensuality and friendship,
and a thing that you could do with your family.
[Warren] For example 40 years ago,
they started plowing the snow off of a dirt road
that led to Mt. Bachelor.
Today they have six detachable high-speed lifts.
It went beyond skiing and the technical aspects.
Warren did a story on snow making, when it first came out.
[Warren] The snow they're skiing on is artificially made.
When the temperature is below 30 degrees,
the spray crystallizes and falls on the ground in the form of snowflakes.
And it costs about $20 to cover one acre with one inch.
And once Warren featured a story on snow making,
the other ski area operators,
they were obligated to figure out
what the heck is snow making?
We better get it because they've got it
and they heard about it in the Warren Miller movie.
He toured with his films to high school auditoriums,
to theaters, basically anywhere anybody would sit and listen
and watch and he did it with passion.
[Warren] One thing grew up on the other and pretty soon
I got, so I was doing a hundred different shows a winter.
[Jonny] In January, he starts in Santa Barbara,
and ends up in Waterville Maine.
How did he even get from there to there?
This is how you sell something,
that right there is incredible.
[Warren] That's how the whole thing grew.
One person told another and the show worked for the people
who came the first time and they came back the second,
third and 45th time.
[band music]
[Warren] When I fire out, why don't you folks relax a bit
and I'll change the reels.
[timer beeping]
[slow music]
[Kurt] Endless Summer is one of the most successful documentaries ever.
I don't know where it is on the box off return,
but I still tune into it.
It'll be Sunday on some channel somewhere.
[Warren] A lot of people came to me after Endless Summer
noticed a similarity between Bruce Brian and me.
I can't sit here and say I influenced him at all,
because I don't know whether I did.
All I liked his film, he was very successful with it.
The people that saw his film had never seen
a surfboard written before.
[slow music]
[Kurt] I think it's how you define success.
You know, and I think today when we look at the box office,
people define success as money.
[Andy] He did look at Bruce Brown
and he looked at Endless Summer and he thought, "Wow!
I wonder if I could go beyond my tour
to expand this to a, you know,
Hollywood type theatrical release."
His hope was that he was going to prove to the world that
he was a big Hollywood movie producer.
[slow music]
He recast the film a bit.
He added a segment with Jean Claude Killy,
and of course the film debuted
in New York city, it was in July.
It was a heat wave and it absolutely bombed.
Nobody came, nobody came to the theater,
it was panned and it was a disaster.
[Kurt] And no Warren Miller film was financially successful
as Endless Summer.
You know that they're not doing anything much different than you are,
but they get that huge success, it's got to hurt.
[Andy] Warren had agreed not to show his annual ski film
during the period that this was going to go
into theatrical release. So he was in a hole.
It was a, it was a horrible risky move and, uh,
and it didn't work out for Warren.
So he had some downtime and lo and behold,
he had an offer to do a 13 show series
on network TV about triple gold Olympic medalist,
Jean Claude Killy.
[Warren] I know it's a question that I will get asked early.
And that is who is the best skier we ever filmed?
His good name is Jean Claude Killy.
In 1968, he won 17 World Cup races,
including three Olympic gold medals.
That's a feat that has never been duplicated
when he was all through with that,
I got to spend the next six months with him
filming him all over the world.
[dramatic music]
But when we first went to New Zealand,
we got to a place called Mount Cook.
We had a helicopter arranged,
and the pilot was the best helicopter pilot I've ever flown with.
Now I flew up with Killy,
then he went back and got Leo Lacroix and Don
and we started filming and we filmed really hard,
harder than we'd ever done in our life.
[slow music]
And we were getting all set up for a shot,
and it got very dark suddenly.
And Mel, the pilot said,
"Warren, we got to get out of here
because down here in the winter,
in August the sun goes down, it's pitch dark in 30 minutes."
And I said, "Okay, let's go." And he said, "Well...
we're 12 miles from the hotel, there's four of you guys and me,
and if I take two of you back to the hotel
by the time I get back, it'll be dark,
we won't be able to find you and you'll be dead in the morning."
And I said, "What do we do?" And he said, "It's pretty simple.
Two of you can ride inside, two outside."
[audience laughing]
So what we did we put the skis on the skids turned them upside down,
and tied them on really tight, both sides.
And then we gave Killy and Lacroix
their choice of ride face up or face down.
[audience laughing]
We tied Killy and Lacroix and the outside--
Now this is a guy who won three gold medals in the Olympics.
[audience laughing]
Now I'm lashing him there like a dead deer.
[audience laughing]
And so Mel did whatever you do to get a helicopter off the ground.
He got it up about a foot.
And then pretty soon he's getting it up about two feet.
Then I noticed that he was kind of
doing little leapfrogs over this way.
And I said, "Mel, why are you going over there?"
"Just look over there. There's a great cliff
we're going to fall off and get air speed."
[audience laughing]
We climbed in the helicopter and then
he hit he hopped along until he got by the edge of the cliff,
and then he just fell off, and took us with him and we got a free ride home.
We made 13 television shows, which fortunately
nobody got to look at because they were broadcast
at the wrong time, up against an NFL Sunday afternoon game.
[Kurt] My dad had never done a TV series to understand
how difficult that is.
You're coordinating the next location where you're going,
the number of people it takes, the cameraman, the gear,
and when you're out there things happen, you know?
It's "Hey, we need to stay an extra day." Okay, that costs another day.
You're not on schedule, it costs more money.
My dad overspend on his budget and lost a lot of money.
[Warren] You got to pay the lab bills on a daily basis,
you got to pay your staff on a daily basis,
and I was borrowing money at the bank to pay them.
I finished filming each segment
in time to make it to the next broadcast.
When MTM didn't get paid, the guy who filmed for him said,
"well, you know, take me to court if you want some money."
I was beyond being bankrupt.
He ended up losing about $160,000 on the Killy TV series.
And it was a devastating blow for Warren.
He had to strip down his company,
he had to sell equipment.
[Kurt] Now that Killy was in his seventies,
so the accumulation now of the amount of travelers
doing on the relationship with my mother, you know, was just on the horizon.
So I bet that would probably be a very difficult time for my father.
You know, trying to make a living,
the relationship's not going good,
and you're hurting financially, that'd be hard.
In the wake of blind ambition,
often there's loved ones that are misunderstood,
left behind, hurt, don't understand the passion.
My mom is incredible, my dad's loving,
but I look at how hard I work in a relationship now
I can only imagine that as it went on,
he was working hard and doing more,
and it didn't have the free time to hey,
let me show you my family.
My father would film us while we were in Sun Valley Idaho, where we were together.
You will not find anything like that after the '70s.
There was no way, not involved in anything.
He quit, good question for my dad.
[Warren] The first thing you do is you buy three alarm clocks.
You put one by bed, you put one in the coldest place in the house,
bathroom floor and the third one, you put it in the shower.
And you set one for four, one for 4:15,
and one for 4:25 in the morning.
And if you're still in bed at 4:30,
you're never going to make it.
[slow music]
[Brian] Warren Miller is probably one of the hardest working people
I've ever been around.
And he sacrificed his life for his love
of the skiing industry.
His life suffered... a lot
because of his workaholic behavior his obsession.
[piano music]
[Warren] Stress was really tough,
it was tough on my family.
When you leave a wife and once your kids at home,
and you're spending a life of bachelorhood on the road...
what do you do?
[Andy] Warren did not have a very helpful role model
in the dysfunctional household that he grew up in.
And he probably didn't really know,
you know, what he could or should have done.
I don't think his dad was a hands-on father.
Warren will tell you that he was an alcoholic,
basically drank himself to death.
[Warren] That's something that you don't bother
because nobody can understand it.
They can't understand how I felt at the time,
because I didn't know any other alcoholics.
Three or four other kids in our Boy Scout troop
would borrow their parents, would load up their cars
and drive us all to Yosemite.
I could never depend on something like that.
Well, my father always said, "Yeah, I'll take you."
And then "Hey, we're all here, where are you?"
He wouldn't even show up.
[interviewer] Did you have to explain that to everybody else?
I use the old that he's sick.
"Well, I'm sorry, my dad got sick.
He's got the flu."
You could cover a lot with that, "he's got the flu" excuse.
[interviewer] Did you ever ask him where he was?
No, I mean, you know, why I ask him something when you already know the answer.
Anyway, he's who he was,
and kids don't change their parents very often.
It's the other way around.
I'm just glad I, I didn't take up any of his habits.
I'm glad of that.
Clearly it was easier and more natural
for Warren to go off and do his business
so he could support his family,
that's the way he was.
What he sacrificed was a life with his family.
In order to do that-- now he gave us, we got the rewards of living at the beach
and surfing and sailing and those types of things.
But if you look at the sacrifice, you know,
he wasn't there on my birthday.
He'd come home with Thanksgiving day Turkey,
but then he would leave and do a show.
He was not there when my sister was born... by choice.
[Chris] He was never satisfied... being home.
He always wanted to be going-- what's the next thing we're going to do
and where do we go?
He loved having a nice home, but it wasn't really his home.
His home is out there, out there in the world and
the bigger picture kind of, of "home."
[Andy] In some ways they gave up their father,
so their father could be the father of US skiing.
[Chris] As a kid, I didn't realize
whenever he would go away that he would be back.
In my mind he was going and I'd never see him again.
And so if there's a lot of memories
besides this photograph of me clinging onto his leg
as a toddler a little girl and don't leave.
I must've been like a year and a half old,
because I'm just a little thing.
Came up to his knee cap in the photograph...
that just sizes up my dad.
He's bigger than life to me even today. Um...
Anyway, I'm sorry. [cries]
[piano music]
[Dan] When you look at any kingpin in any industry,
there was a price to be paid for success.
What are you willing to pay?
What are you willing to give up? What are you willing to pursue?
It's a dream, it's a myth that you can have it all, right?
You can't.
If you can't give your wife what she wants,
she's going to find it somewhere else.
[piano music]
I wasn't there, she found somebody else...
that was the end of that whole thing.
[Chris] My mom was in her mid forties
and she was not only lonely but she was feeling like,
"Okay, my life is going by here,
and I don't have anyone to share it with."
And they separated after this short, short affair.
[snaps fingers] That was it.
[Warren] That's a whole part of my life that I never talked about.
It's what she chose to do... anyway.
I somehow shouldered my way out of that
and kept right on doing it.
Not at all, actually I'm about to show her show, go on.
If you don't have that attitude,
you don't deserve to be in show business.
[piano music]
[Warren] Out here there is risk, there's pleasure, there's freedom,
there is an edge, an edge where we say enough.
Warren was down in the dumps and beaten, but he'd been down before.
And when his back was against the wall, he always responded.
[Warren] Because each of us has drawn a line and edge
that we won't ski beyond.
That edge separates our instinct for self preservation,
from our urge to risk it all by climbing just a little higher.
[rock music]
[Dan] He realized that to reinvent himself,
he needed to reach out to new people,
and not forget his roots.
That was a game changer, it was a paradigm shift.
♪ Beyond the edge twenty miles a minute ♪
♪ Shot like a bullet from a frozen gun ♪
His films took on a new energy, a new life.
There was upbeat music, there was perspective,
the footage was unbelievable.
[upbeat music]
[Bill] When we see something spectacular on the screen,
we say, how did, how did they do it?
Can you share some of those secrets?
Well, Bill, I've been very fortunate over the years
in having a group of very dedicated people working with me.
Warren liked people who worked their butts off.
He just loved that that's old school, you know.
Let's face it, going out on the side of the mountain,
it's always below freezing. [chuckles]
And back in the day with mechanical stuff,
batteries going dead and everything,
I mean, I think he felt a special kinship
with the cameraman who are out there doing it like he used to do it.
[Warren] Almost forgotten when you're skiing this deeper and deeper stuff
for the cameramen who have to be able to ski wherever the skiers do.
And ski with about 50 pounds of camera gear on their backs.
Cameraman Brian Sisselman
has taken many of the great pictures
you've been watching for the last ten years.
And, yes, making movies really is a cinch.
All you have to be able to do is ski ride
along with the guys while they're ripping it up
and you're aiming your camera by instinct
and experience only.
And another one of our team of the best in the world
is Gary Nate from Ogden, Utah.
Gary is the world's oldest teenager.
[Kim] And Gary is a classic individual, I mean,
he's just one of the most colorful people you'll ever meet.
[footsteps thumping]
Uh, well, that's about Bell and Howell D70
that is a wind up camera
and it was Warren's first camera,
but it was given to Warren and with that camera
on $500 of borrowed money,
he did his first film Deep And Lightin 1949.
[slow music]
To me, it was part of my head, all I needed to do was this.
And it was just like I'm looking at you.
As opposed to some of the other cameras, uh, that you see today,
you know, of course, you know, we're not talking GoPro here. [laughs]
You stick a GoPro in your ear and the way you go.
[dramatic music]
[Warren] Surrounded by 13 peaks over 12,000 feet,
Gary Nate rigged up a Bolex
and he had a 5.9 millimeter wide angle lens.
The special mount that he designed and built himself.
Strapping it on to Todd Brown, they began the 15-kilometer run back down to the village
with Mike Slattery, Max Berbee and Billy Madsen.
[dramatic music]
Okay, what I have here is a home made chest mount,
that you've put on your chest.
I had, uh, a guy actually engineer this
so that you could raise it or lower it,
depending upon, you know, whether you wanted it up or down,
or whether you were like this or whether wherever you were in the air,
it was just like that, bam, there you go. You're good to go.
And then what we used to do, we clear a path down the bumps, have them go into the bumps,
and I just go down the clear path a little bit of an angle...
full throttle all the way down.
[Kim] The combination between the two, because if a skier
doesn't do his deal and the cameraman doesn't do his deal.
One of the other can do what they're supposed to be doing perfectly.
But if they both don't do it at the same time, you know,
one misses their mark, one misses their focus whatever.
Gone, it's done!
Well, the last 40 years almost every place I've been,
and that's just about all over the world, people have always said,
"What's the best place in the world to ski?" And I've always said
the same thing sounds can, but it's really not.
Wherever you are at the time is the best place because that's where you are,
the snow is white, it's on the side of a hill,
the lifts running, nobody's checking tickets,
you get the ride free, it's fabulous.
And a lot of that, you know, if you know your way around,
you can get away with it at any resort in the world.
Take my word for it.
[piano music]
[John] Warren brought the wild mountains to more skiers
than any other cameraman or, or producer, filmmaker out there.
[Dan] A Warren Miller film is a, is a contrast.
It's wild place and skiing,
it's telling the audience, "Hey, sit up, pay attention.
We're going somewhere that's going to blow your mind."
So the locations are critical.
They have to be exotic,
they have to be the names that echo around in your brain.
I didn't know they skied in Romania.
[Warren] To really step back into a time warp,
go to Transylvania Romania,
where you can ride clear across the country
on the train for only 85 cents.
You can't figure out where to get off,
you can ride in a cab with a guy that chain smokes,
took his last bath in September
and his taxi windows won't roll down.
[Chris] And they were the first film company
that was allowed into Russia.
They were the first film company to film Kazakhstan.
[Warren] I was a little nervous when I discovered that the pilot
was our bartender from the night before.
As we got up above 13, 14,000 feet and headed East,
I fell sound asleep as we flew over France,
Switzerland, Austria and Germany.
I must've slept for seven maybe eight hours,
because we flew all the way to Moscow.
[symphony music]
[Dan] When you go into Istanbul, Turkey,
or you sneak into Beirut, Lebanon,
it's not so much Warren Miller films
that people are accepting, they're more curious, why you're here.
Why are you carrying skis and why you wearing boots
through our marketplace?
[Warren] Dan and John are from Boston using skis made in Austria,
Italian ski boots wearing Japanese goggles.
Underwear made in Georgia at a ski resort in Turkey,
trying to ride a ski lift that was made in France
and had been broken by a helicopter made in Russia.
Which proves that skiing really is a way of life
that knows no international or economic boundaries.
[Dan] And to see a skier in that place was amazing.
We worked really hard to get that
being halfway around the world hearing about,
"Oh, there was a freak snowstorm."
Buying some six-dollar bus ticket
for 15 hour bus ride and then hire a cab with no snow tires.
The guy has never driven in snow before, he gets a flat tire,
he gets stuck, he pulls a gun,
we take the bullets from the gun.
We-- like everything's happening.
But we end up with the shot.
We book ourselves into a hotel that was a cave.
[laughs] And it was like, we slept on rock beds
and-- but unbelievable.
And Warren's like,
"Yeah, that's what we're after."
This isn't about going left and right down any slope.
This is about taking somebody to someplace
they've never been before.
[camera shuttering]
[Warren] Time, there's all kinds of it,
and the only thing in life we own, no one can give you any,
but people can take it away from you.
You can waste it or you can invest it in ski time.
[Dan] The start of the movie Ski Time
is shot in Squaw Valley, California on Eagle's Nest
at the top of KT-22.
And it's a really steep, uh, cliff face
that sometimes has snow and sometimes doesn't have snow.
And Schmidt drops in,
in that iconic sideways shmear turn
on this really steep face,
snow is flying, and he makes these turns
and you just come into the moment that it's time.
It's time to get out there and get after it
because the cat on the film is crushing it right now.
And you can't even believe what he's skiing
as only Scot Schmidt can.
[Scot] Your life as your, your physical being is at risk,
so therefore you are forced to be focused here,
forced to be in that moment.
[Warren] Scot Schmidt,
his mother and father raised him wrong.
[dramatic music]
[Brian] Warren had a way of dropping back, having some objectivity.
So when Scot Schmidt hurls himself off this cliff,
it's like half the people on the audience are thinking,
"What is wrong with this guy?"
You know, [chuckles] "How does it that his mom let him do that?" [laughs]
That is just-- that's just wrong.
[Scot] "Dear Scot, just a short note to tell you about
the footage of you leaping through space at Squaw Valley.
Just thought I'd let you know, it's probably the most spectacular footage
that has ever come into my-- our offices.
Next time we look for someone to go to a foreign country,
to ski in our films, would you be interested?
I remain sincere, Warren Miller."
-[chuckles] -[Warren] Here he showed up and his ski boots were shine
and the buckles all buckled and they weren't rusty and,
I think it was the yellow packer was your uniform of the day.
He wore the, he wore the same clothes all the time
and then when we were editing,
we could take a shot out of Yellowstone Club
and put it in New Zealand or vice versa.
How old were you when that-- you got that?
I was at 21 years old,
when I received this letter from you
and we sure stirred things up a bit,
-and it was really fun. -[Warren] Yeah.
[Scot] When I found this, things changed overnight for me.
[Andy] Warren had evolved his brand.
He was always welcomed to
new ways of getting down the mountain
and certainly bringing a stream skiing
into his film with Scot Schmidt helped move the needle.
But, uh, you know, Warren could feel it,
he could see that there were new young filmmakers coming up
like Greg Stump who are going to change the world.
[Greg] In 1983, I basically schmoozed my way
into a Warren Miller film.
So in Ski Time, which is coincidentally,
that's my only Warren Miller movie that I skied in
and also Scot Schmidt first movie he skied in.
[Warren] The storms that ruined Malibu, well they buried Snow Valley
with as much as six feet of snow at a time.
So their 12 charlottes attracted a lot of skiers
from the six million people that live within a hundred miles.
It attracted good skiers like Greg Stump, Terry Overmeyer, Scott Willingham.
But I was ultimately doing it
because I wanted to promote myself.
When the movie came out in the theaters, I was proud as punch man.
I brought my friends to the Warren Miller movie
and there's Greg Stump from Gorham, Maine.
[Warren] Greg Stumps from Gorham, Maine.
He was national amateur freestyle and ballet champion.
I tricked him, you know, [stutters] I did it right before my first movie came out.
I didn't care about being in a Warren Miller movie,
I cared about promoting Greg Stump the ski filmmaker
and he realized that I, I duped him.
And so he's like, "I'll get that guy and change his name."
And when Ski Timecame out on VHS...
[tape rewinding]
[Warren] Todd Stockwell is from Yucaipa,
and he's an avocado grower.
[upbeat music]
He went to the trouble of going back
and re-narrating my sequence.
He was competitive by nature he wanted to win,
he wanted to be the best, it was part of his DNA.
[Greg] I asked Warren, he, he denied that he did it.
He didn't remember, you know, and, uh, but they did it,
it's Warren's voice, and I'm no longer Greg Stump,
I'm Greg Stottlemyre, avocado farmer.
[chuckles]
[eerie music]
[Brian] One of the great things about watching the ski films
is the just immaculate beauty of the surroundings
contrasted with this intense danger.
Skiers are severely injured all the time.
We lose friends every single year
there's a couple of guys that we either knew or knew of...
that lost their life to traumatic brain injury... avalanche.
[man] Is this dangerous what we're looking at? It looks like a good--
[Warren] Well, these skiers, if there were football players,
they'd be playing on Sunday afternoon in an NFL game,
they are the world's best.
Managing risk in avalanche terrain
is all about personal survival.
Your life depends on the choices that you make.
[slow music]
[Scot] Yeah, I had a couple of really close calls
and realized very soon, early that
you don't mess with these things
because you will not win.
That's the white dragon, it can't be slate.
[Brad] All of us had near death experiences,
but one of the more famous ones on film is the Egan brothers.
[dramatic music]
We had danced through a lot of danger in our career
and that one you couldn't escape.
And we started down there and I just heard this noise
and it was, uh, a deafening, like someone dumped a bunch of
bee bees in a tin funnel into a big can.
It was a cornice that had filled in that part of the mountain
it looked like you could just ski right along the edge.
[dramatic music]
When that corn is broke,
I mean, it's the size of a Greyhound bus,
it dropped about 900 feet.
[Dan] Looking back at the mountain
and so much of the mountain was gone.
You see our tracks, they disappear
and then they begin again.
The number one question asked to
any either Edgan brother is,
"Where you in front or back?" [laughs]
Says "Yeah, and I was in the front." [laughs]
We had come a lot of times to really close calls,
but that, that was extremely close.
If you watch the footage closely,
you can see that John made a little bit of a snowplow
thinking he might have time to stop
and then realized he didn't have time.
So he pushed and that push is what saved his life.
[Warren] You ever heard of skier hurt?
Nobody ever broke their leg, nobody ever lost an arm,
nobody ever crushed into an automobile or anything like that.
I picked out a shot I wanted to get
and I asked the skier, "Can you handle that?"
Do you have any doubt? If they had any doubt at all we choose a different angle.
Give him, give him the benefit of the doubt all the time.
Because I wanted to make them look great.
[Warren] For the next six hours, we put one foot in front of the other,
looking for a slope that would be
a gourmet skiers piece de resistance.
The ropes are, because if you fell,
you drop almost a vertical mile to the rocks below.
How are these pictures taken?
Very carefully.
[Warren] Liberty gives me credit for taking my camera
to places that it's never been before.
I choose camera angles and places
where it really looks dangerous
but the skiers a guy that looks in a dangerous position
and I tried to not reveal what I was doing,
that's none of their business.
[Warren] Next morning, it was a bus ride to Lang
and a train ride to Zurich.
Then a jet plane ride to Vail, Colorado,
where I met my son Kurt and his partner Peter Speek.
The three of us are finally able to get time off together
so that they can join me in my lifelong search
for the free lift ticket.
Stop just above me about ten feet and try not to fall.
Okay, keep closer together!
You guys want to climb back up and do it again?
Peter, you got to be within three feet of him
or you're such a small image size in relation to him.
How about if we just ski down a little further?
Oh, this is good, good blue sky back there.
[Peter] I think, I think he likes to hike back up there,
I think he's enjoying that.
[crowd cheering]
[announcer] Today Warren Miller only turns up
for a personal appearance at about a half dozen
of the hundreds of showings of the company's latest ski film.
They are always sellouts and the onlookers
are reverential about his presence.
But to most audiences, he is just a familiar voice
on the narration track.
And in fact, Warren Miller no longer
owns Warren Miller Entertainment.
[Kurt] Damian, Kurt Miller calling.
[announcer] It was sold four years ago
to Miller's son Kurt and Kurt's partner, Peter Speek
with Warren agreeing to continue to write the script
and provide the lighthearted narration.
I worked for my father for 12 years
before I was lucky enough to be able to buy the company.
We ended up buying 80% of the company
for over a million dollars.
[Andy] Kurt and Peter made it clear that
they were in the driver's seat of this company.
All of a sudden Warren found himself as the employee
and somebody who didn't always have, uh, a lot of voice in things.
[John] Yeah, the early '90s, when Warren transitioned the film company
and sold it to his son Kurt, um, was tough.
And I think Warren had a different idea of how it might go.
[Kurt] Fight up specific formula that was
180 degrees from my father.
[Andy] Warren was 90% storyteller and, uh, and skier.
That's what he was all about, that was his passion.
And Kurt and Peter were 90% sales people.
That's what they wanted to do.
So there's where you had a difference of opinion.
Kind of a tough one when they do
something completely different than you would have done
in the same business situation.
[Andy] Kurt and Peter would want Warren to cut out his jokes,
which they felt were old and corny,
but which the audience still laughed at.
They wanted to take it to the next level. [laughs]
You know, they wanted to up the game,
they wanted to make money,
have sponsors, bigger, better, more.
[Kurt] Took it over in January of '89.
That year I'd estimate between 67,000 people
had come that fall to the film, $12 a ticket, eight dollars a ticket.
Over a 12-year period,
we grew in the United States to 300,000 people
and they were paying $22 a ticket.
I don't think he knew what we were doing.
I don't think he had any idea.
So we started bringing in the skiers as narrators.
They're there firsthand, they're there!
[man] Out here in Antarctica,
a continent that averages 7,000 vertical feet,
we got to be within reason in our own capabilities.
Even though it's always fun to push your abilities
because that's why you like to ski the extreme
for the excitement, the joy, the mystery.
We went from skiers who just skied
to skiers that were being interviewed.
Like we had anything to say, right?
I mean, [chuckles] we're skiers, [laughs]
like, just get out there and shred it, dude.
I don't really care what you have to say.
[interviewer] Can Warren Miller entertainment
work without Warren Miller?
Walt Disney died... that answered your question?
[Andy] A lot of the evolution that Kurt and Peter saw
were typical of what you do in propelling a brand forward.
But, uh, you know, they were different from Warren
and once they went down their different paths,
there really just wasn't any coming back.
Warren loves people.
He loves being in front of people,
and he loves inspiring people.
And I think being, you know, being phased out
was probably something he didn't really figure on.
[eerie music]
[Brian] I mean, it-- you know, it can't go on forever.
You know, and things do change.
And it was a sad thing, I mean, inevitable I guess,
but he was the force behind that...
and it disappeared.
Things change from the book,
from the many voices in the film.
And I guess what I'm really saying leading up to is,
that this is the start, my first annual farewell tour.
[audience applauding]
[Andy] Warren came to a crossroads in his life.
One thing that had happened in his personal life
is that he had met Laurie.
[Warren] My first met her in Sun Valley.
She owned a ski shop in Seattle at the time,
she had 105 ski instructors working for her.
Some dynamics between us that, uh,
I think very few people have.
She's just an all time great lady.
I have told her many times, particularly in the last few years two things,
"Had I not met you and had I not moved to Seattle,
I would have died 15 years ago."
Think about it, she owns a ski shop, right?
[audience laughing]
She was sitting in front of a window
at the warming hut at the top of Baldy
and I never looked at another woman since.
What do I love about him? I don't know, he's-- I've been with him 33 years,
I guess it's, it's just a part of my life.
What, what do I love about him?
[laughs] A lot, how's that?
[Warren] Here we are, years later, it's been a fun trip so far.
Saved me in every way.
[Andy] He was starting to discover
that there was life beyond working 20 hours a day.
He started to see that there were friendships
and love and things you could do
outside of the editing room.
You know, Warren always had to have some work going on.
He was always working on a book
or working at the Yellowstone Club
where they also created the nice life.
[Greg] The Yellowstone Club is probably
the most elite ski area in the world,
but Warren was one of the original ambassadors there.
I mean, it's the Warren Miller Lodge.
When I first showed up at the Yellowstone Club
I didn't know what I was supposed to do,
and they gave me a title of Director of Skiing.
[Brian] It, it makes sense that this Ski Bum,
would eventually be one of the instigators of what is
the most exclusive ski resort in the world,
and it's a perfect pay off.
[Andy] A lot of the other members at the Yellowstone Club
who were all multi-millionaires
started with nothing themselves
and ground out companies
and built companies out of their own hands.
And Warren totally related to that,
that was perfect for him.
[Greg] You know, they love to
introduce their kids to Warren Miller
and get an autograph from Warren Miller,
hang out in the Warren Miller Lodge.
They get to rub shoulders with the original Ski Bum.
I've heard all the stories. So it doesn't bother trying to wow me
with him like he used to.
But when you, when you have a table full of people,
he's-- he captivates them all and that's really fun.
[Chris] He rediscovered the fact that,
"Hey, I can choose a new career at 72 years old.
I don't have to keep doing it all."
For the first time he had seen that the last 50 or 60 years,
he had been just on the treadmill of a wonderful life,
but he didn't necessarily get to choose that.
And now he could choose what he wanted to do.
I remember him just like a little kid going, "Huh!
I can do whatever I want now."
What I appreciate is a lot of times when men retire,
they kind of go, "Okay, let's just play golf."
He's never gotten to a place where he said I'm done yet.
He had the opportunity up on Orcas
to build this world renowned skate park.
What Warren Miller found in promoting skateboarding,
was that rebel of kid.
That was him growing up.
So what he did is he created a skateboarder's ski resort,
basically the runs for skateboarders.
[door slamming]
[Mark] He showed up and he's like, "I'm looking for the dude,
the kid who builds skate parks, he sleeps in his car."
[slow music]
He was like, "I want you to build a skate park for me."
Well when I see something that
I think, "Wow, gosh, I wish I was that age and I'd be doing that."
[Mark] He would say, "We need to do something that matters
and we could make this bigger
than we ever even imagined possible in the beginning."
Not just the skate park on Orcas Island,
some for the kids to do, the best skate park in the world.
[Warren] Make the skateboard park so enjoyable,
they won't want to skate anywhere else.
And when did you say that's a tourism here?
No, they come-- people come from all over the world to skate at Orcas.
-They do. Wow. -Yep.
It's your fun for me to go over there and
-set up on that above the bowl... -[Mark] Yeah.
...watch the kids do it.
Warren definitely has, uh, a good eye for... passion.
I think he can tell whether
you're really into what you're doing
or if you're, you know, just trying to fake it.
[Warren] You guys were all sleeping in your cars?
Yeah, well, I'm still sleeping in my car.
-Okay, keep it up. That's the way you-- -Yeah, I will.
Someday you will...
Please get a pillow for your car.
Yeah.
[slow music]
[Chris] One of my favorite quotes of all time
is on the poster of the opening day.
[Warren] This says very simply, "There's no limit to the amount of good a person can do,
if they don't care who gets the credit."
It's about July 4th, 2002,
simply stated that is what this park is all about.
[Chris] He never wanted his name... used.
And he said it was because a community built this.
Everyone was a part of what happened, not just one person.
Whether you're surfing or you're skiing
or you're driving, it's freeing your mind.
[slow music]
And that was what he longed for as a child,
and he did find that missing piece of his childhood.
I did have a thought as a kid that
I wanted him to be more like all the other fathers.
Home for dinner, going to their dance recitals and all
and I'd see that and think, "What's-- why don't we have that?"
I missed out on having my dad a lot of my childhood.
[symphony music]
[audience chuckling]
[audience clapping]
[Chris] At that moment I think all my childhood concerns were gone.
That it wasn't like he was going away.
He was coming back with something.
Kind of, maybe that was like a little boy.
"Hey, Mom, look what have done,
look at the beautiful things I found,
please pay attention, see it!"
[audience applauding]
My dad's 92 years old.
He's still looking for the love of his father.
Maybe we're all better off for it
even though he may have suffered not having that love
because we all got what he started to share with us.
I believe my father's name has done more
for the sport of skiing than anything else.
[Dan] He took dreams of adventure, packaged it up
and brought it to a neighborhood near you.
I-- You know if I could say one thing about Warren
is that, is how grateful I am
for what he's done for everybody.
I love Warren Miller... he's my guy.
Thank you for... what you brought to my life.
[Andy] I re-live all the time we spent together
and, uh, I still listen to
your messages on voicemail to this day.
I get you, I get what your passion is,
I get what you're trying to share with people.
I feel the same way and, uh, thank you.
You changed my life.
I love you.
You did stuff that no one else could.
[Dan] When you build something you want it to last.
If you build anything in life that's worth it,
it will stand the test of time.
And Warren Miller Films has stood the test of time.
Well, that's kind of, that's kind of my life story
and I hope to see you next year, same time, same place,
thank you.
[slow music]
[upbeat music]
[crowd cheering]
Welcome all to Warren Miller's 68th annual feature film.
It's like as close a skier gets to be like or a real rush.
[interviewer] 1100 people.
1100 people? That's awesome, 1100 people?
-[audience cheering] -So I just always wanted you [mumbles]
huge applause for warren Miller himself.
For starting this year.
[audience cheering]
Thank you!
♪ Turn your magic on to me she'd say ♪
♪ Everything you want's a dream away ♪
♪ We are legends, every day
♪ That's what she told him
♪ Turn your magic on to me she'd say ♪
♪ Everything you want's a dream away ♪
♪ Under this pressure under this weight ♪
♪ We are diamonds I feel my heart beating ♪
♪ I feel my heart beneath my skin ♪
♪ I feel my heart beating
♪ You make me feel
♪ Like I'm alive again
♪ Alive again
♪ Oh, you make me feel
♪ Like I'm alive again
♪ Said I can't go on not in this way ♪
♪ I'm a dream I die by light of day ♪
♪ Going to hold up half the sky and say ♪
♪ Only I own me
♪ I feel my heart beating
-[man] Okay, we are going into a big wrap up. So, uh...-[Warren] Right.
-...it's time to slide into your one-on-one, uh, mode here.-[Warren] Okay.
I've been a very lucky person.
I was part of the good old days of skiing on seven foot
six inch skis wearing soft leather boots.
And I've shared many of the adrenaline rushes
that I've experienced in 50 years of skiing
and filming all over the world.
Now it's your turn to rush out and find some for yourself.
I'm Warren Miller and I hope to see you next year,
same time, same place.
Thank you and good night.
[man] Right on.