NONFICTION - April 23, 1995

A BIRD OF PASSAGE: The Story of My Life by Otto Lang (SkyHouse Publishers: $24; 463 pp.). So what did Otto Lang do in the winter of 1947, after producing the Jimmy Stewart crime thriller “Call Northside 777” for Darryl F. Zanuck? Returned to his regular job--directing the ski school at Sun Valley, Ida. Lang played important behind-the-scene roles, sometimes as producer or second-set director, in a number of memorable Twentieth Century Fox films--among them “13 Rue Madeleine,” “Five Fingers,” “I Was a Male War Bride,” and “Tora! Tora! Tora!”--and if he never became a major Hollywood figure (despite four Academy Award nominations, for short subjects), perhaps that’s because he had already achieved fame in the ski world. “A Bird of Passage” is a vivid account of an interesting life, highly readable and very gentlemanly, and marred only by occasional long-windedness. This last characteristic is easily explained, however; imagine becoming a ski instructor at the age of 19, and spending much of the next two decades teaching the new Hannes Schneider ski technique to rank, often adoring amateurs. Born in Bosnia in 1908, Lang was one of many instructors who left Austria in the 1930s, some fleeing Hitler, for the greener ski slopes (often literally) of America. Lang would wind up running ski schools at Washington’s Mount Hood and Mount Rainier, where he began his film career schussing for a friend’s ski documentary, but the big break came when Lang met, through the then-small international ski set, the man who intended to build a domestic world-class winter resort--Averell Harriman. The railroad executive and diplomat would befriend Lang, who seems to have charmed most everyone, and in 1941 would ask Lang to teach his pal Darryl Zanuck to ski. The rest is minor cinematic history, including the classic Hollywood moment in which Lang successfully pitches Zanuck with “Five Fingers” while they creep to the top of Mt. Baldy on a chairlift. Lang tells his story adeptly, and if “A Bird of Passage” is almost completely gossip-free, well, that’s surely one reason that a dedicated ski instructor got as far in Hollywood as he did.