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A conversation with Warren Miller

By G.D. Maxwell Warren Miller is almost as entertaining as a speaker as he used to be when he made the films that continue to bear his name. Anyone who can figure out a way to wrest a living from the thrill of skiing is halfway to heaven on earth.

By G.D. Maxwell

Warren Miller is almost as entertaining as a speaker as he used to be when he made the films that continue to bear his name. Anyone who can figure out a way to wrest a living from the thrill of skiing is halfway to heaven on earth.

He spoke last week at the Whistler Chamber of Commerce Spirit Luncheon and was kind enough to spend 45 minutes beforehand shooting the breeze about the sport we all love. I don’t know whether he was practising his speech or if the questions helped him decide what to talk about but those of you who were there might have heard some of this before.

Pique:

Do you think there’s a link between the demise of stretch pants and the declining popularity of skiing?

WM:

Absolutely! There’s no doubt about it. I write a weekly newspaper column and I wrote that about three years ago and then sold the same column to Ski Magazine . I got more e-mails from that column than any other I’ve ever written.

Most people credit Howard Head, safety bindings, snow grooming and snow making for causing the big bubble in ski popularity. I said, "You’re wrong. It’s stretch pants."

Sex sells; I don’t care what you say. And in today’s world, if you stand in a lift line you can’t tell whether somebody weighs 100 or 200 pounds. They all look like a sack of cats on the way to the river. Particularly the women.

I kept getting these e-mails from ladies saying, "I’m 45 and I still fit in my 1962 stretch pants. Do you know where I can get a new ones?" I really believe that.

Pique:

Why doesn’t everyone ski?

WM:

There are three reason most people don’t ski: price, price and price. If I want to hook you on cocaine, I don’t say, "Hey, give me a thousand dollars." I start giving you samples. The ski industry does not give samples.

Why doesn’t a place like Whistler-Blackcomb, for example, have an outlet in downtown Vancouver... where it’ll cost $10 to get boots, bindings, skis, poles and a one day ticket on the beginning chairlift?"

I’ve been preaching that concept for 40 years. And so far, nobody’s done it.

Pique:

Why’s the ski industry so dumb?

WM:

About five years ago, in a six day period, I was at Sun Valley, Aspen and Vail. As it turned out, I had lunch with the president of each place and I told them the same story. All three of them told me exactly the same thing. "If we did that, everybody else would."

Anybody that started skiing after the age of four can remember the first time they went and what an incredible revelation the whole thing was to them. It’s because they had freedom for the first time in their whole life.

The first time you traversed across a hill and were able to make a snowplow turn and come back, I had you by the... heart. Those skis took you exactly where they wanted to take you but you had total freedom, controlled only by your adrenaline. That’s what this whole thing is all about. It’s freedom.

Pique:

At the end of a ski day, you can jump into a hot tub with people who, in the real world, wouldn’t give you the time of day. For half an hour, you can talk passionately about the kind of day you’ve had. What is it about skiing that makes it a great leveler?

WM:

We have to go back to that word that I used earlier – freedom. That’s man’s basic instinct.

I discovered this in 1946-47 when I was living in the parking lot at Sun Valley. I sat in the Roundhouse watching Gary Cooper and his wife and Ernest Hemmingway have lunch. After lunch, everybody went to the top of Baldy. I stood there knowing I was going to be in the parking lot eating frozen rabbits for dinner and these guys were going to stay in a room that cost as much as $18 a night.

But when we were at the top of the hill, all those people – and myself – were exactly equal. The common denominator was gravity and adrenaline and passion. Wanting to let our freedom take us wherever our adrenaline would allow us to go. That freedom thing is what lets you sit in that hot tub with those people.

Pique:

Can you do more business on a chairlift than on a golf course?

WM:

Absolutely. When I taught at Sun Valley, there were two guys in my class and I had an eight millimetre camera – we’re talking 1949 – one of the guys asked me about the camera. I told him how good it was and he said, "I’m glad you like it. I’m the president of the company." I said, "What’s that mean?" He said, "I’m president of Bell and Howell." I didn’t even know what that meant.

That night at dinner, we launched a really lousy ski film and I criticized it, from a reasonably astute point of view for those days. I told him I was going to go into the lecture business someday. He said, "Why dontcha go right now then?"

I said, "Well, they’re paying me $125 a month and the camera I want to buy is a Bell and Howell 70DA and it’s $236 with three lenses." And Hal, the other guy who was the controller of Bell and Howell said, "Chuck, why don’t we loan Warren a camera and he can pay us out of his lecture earnings?"

Chuck said, "Okay." I still didn’t know what they were talking about but three weeks later, the camera came and they saved me probably three years by doing that for me. The next winter at Squaw Valley I taught and made a movie.

Pique:

What made you think anybody would be interested in watching ski movies?

WM:

I don’t know. I saw one in 1947, a John Jay movie in Sun Valley. He showed it to about 20 people. He’d been to Switzerland and had some funny stuff from Mammoth and I walked out of there thinking, "Wow, that guy’s making a living doing that. If he does, I could." Three years later, I made my first one.

Pique:

Watching ski movies now, how do you think a non-skier views them?

WM:

Turns ’em off. They can never do it. When I owned the company, I always considered myself as the News of the Day. I would go to Boyne Mountain where some guy paid $4,800 for a single chairlift and put it up in Michigan. That’s a new resort so it’s news to me. Well, five years later, that guy hired Stein Eriksen, who’d won two gold medals. So I went to Boyne and filmed Stein in the midwest.

I went to Wilmot, Wisconsin when someone said there’s some guy up there, he’s rented an air compressor and he’s got a bunch of pipes and he rams water through the pipes and snow comes out. So I put it in my movie. I showed those things to my audiencies.

I don’t see very many of the current movies because... well, I just don’t see them. I haven’t even seen the one the company put together this year. I saw the portion where I ski because I had to write the script. But I don’t like the way that film has gone.

Pique:

Has it going too far?

WM:

I think it has. I think it’s gone too far.

When you watch a movie, you can do three things. You can watch the movie, listen to the music or the words. You can only do two of the three at a time. If you’re listening to the words you don’t pay any attention to the music, it’s sort of background, elevator noise. That’s why I never turned the volume way up. Because my storytelling was what I was doing. I was telling a story. The stuff I loved to do was human interest.

Pique:

Do you think there’s any room in ski movies for that anymore?

WM:

Maybe my film will come back that way next year.