Thrills and Chills

“To ski or not to ski” has never been the question for filmmaker Warren Miller or his son, Kurt, although it easily could have been the title of one of their many films on the subject. The questions have been “Where” and “How far can we take it?”

This winter, as in seasons past, 600,000 people around the world will buy tickets to a Warren Miller film, continuing a trend that dates to the time President Truman was in office. Small potatoes by Hollywood standards, perhaps, but it keeps this independent company in business.

Each year, since 1949 when company founder and two-time Oscar nominee Warren Miller made his first film, “Deep and Light,” for a mere $600, the company comes back with fresh footage: 90-minute presentations of daredevil skiing from exotic locations accompanied by snippets of international culture, bloopers and skits, all wrapped in the good humor of Miller’s own wiseacre style of narration.

Self-financed and self-marketed, Warren Miller Entertainment is celebrating its 50th year with the aptly titled “Fifty,” directed and produced by Miller’s son Kurt and his business partner Peter Speek, who purchased the company 11 years ago.

“Fifty” opens with a timeline montage of King, Kennedy and Nixon clips and intercuts footage from the Miller catalog, illustrating a parallel growth as filmmakers, as well as advances in ski technology, changing fashions and widening variety of lifestyles available in winter sports.

Reached by phone while vacationing on Maui’s North Shore, Miller, now 75, born and raised in Hollywood, was hoping to get in a little windsurfing.

“I bought my first 8mm camera the day I got mustered out of the Navy in 1946 and started taking surfing movies at Malibu and San Onofre. Those were the only places that you could ride in those days because the boards were so cumbersome,” Miller said. That winter, along with partner Ward Baker, Miller took his surf films to the Sun Valley ski resort in Idaho, and, as is seen in vintage footage in “Fifty,” lived in a small trailer in the parking lot screening the films for skiers who had never surfed.

“The skiers would nod and giggle to whatever I said to cover up bad photography. Then Ward and I took movies of each other learning how to ski and took those films back to San Onofre to show to the surfers,” Miller said. “There is a real kindred spirit between the two sports.”

Shooting, editing, scripting, scoring and booking the films himself, Miller enlisted a ski club to promote the film for three nights at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, offering 60% of the gross and himself as the live narrator. “Once production wrapped I tucked the film under my arm and traveled with it. I narrated live for 35 years, and, for the first 15 of those, because we had only two employees, every place the film went I was there, too,” Miller said. “One year I did 106 cities and slept in over 200 hotels, which is really stupid.”

As interest and demand for tickets grew Miller began plowing back his earnings into increasingly sophisticated and ambitious productions. In just his third year, Miller’s films took on a broader international focus with sequences shot in Europe and South America despite the double hardships of raising his first child and the cancer death of Miller’s first wife, Jean, in 1953.

“I always had more ambition than cash, but no matter what happened I kept grindin’ the pictures out,” Miller said. While the ski films provided a winter income Miller found it increasingly difficult to support his family during summer months. So, to round out the production year, he began soliciting corporate clients and making horse racing films for Hollywood Park, commercials for Nissan and Continental Airlines, travel films for the New Zealand government and “dog and pony show” films that helped investors raise funds to build many of today’s major ski resorts. An avid yachtsman, Miller also produced a number of sailing films.

Realizing a potential for growth, Miller in 1983 sold a 50% share of his company to Terry Bassett and Bob Geddes, concert promoters who, at the time, owned both Irvine Meadows and Avalon Attractions.

Films Rise to Event Status

Kurt Miller, who started working in his father’s mail room and had graduated to the marketing department at the time of the sale, recalls, “With Terry and Bob aboard, we began to look at our films like concerts and made more of an event of them. You don’t just come to the movie anymore, you also get a free lift ticket, discounts at local skiing shops, door prizes and a copy of our magazine, Ski World,” for an average ticket price of $14. “We were selling out and finding that people were showing up an hour early,” he said.

The younger Miller, now 40, seen in “Fifty” as a young boy in a coonskin cap, took his father’s advice and studied sales and marketing in college. Seeing an even greater potential for growth, he pioneered the company’s four-walling distribution policy, whereby the company rents the venues in which its films are shown and handles its own marketing. “We began four-walling our films by renting out the Santa Monica Civic. But unlike the concerts that Bob and Terry booked there, there was no band backstage, no drug and alcohol problem and little need for security. You just run the film and you’re done.”

During his first year of college, Kurt, a three-time All American sailor, solicited yacht clubs with a rental proposal for a sailing movie before a single frame had been shot and signed up 150 takers. The theory was that yacht clubs would pay Kurt a fee against a percentage of ticket sales as a fund-raiser for their youth programs. And when all was said and done, Miller turned a profit of $50,000.

Speaking by cell phone from Boulder, Colo., where the company has moved its headquarters from Hermosa Beach, Miller explained, “That got me through college and helped me to understand that a big part of the business is the distribution channel.”

About 11 years ago Kurt Miller and partner Speek purchased the company outright from their other partners and extended an employment agreement to Warren to continue writing the scripts and narrating the films. And while it is hard to imagine other voices narrating Warren Miller films, all agree that it is inevitable. “There is a younger group of people who would like to get this old [guy] out of the saddle,” Warren said. “But there is probably a larger contingent who think my voice, such as it is, carries a certain amount of authority. They can rely on it because the guy talking sounds like he has been there and done that. And they know I’m not going to swear or tell dirty jokes. So it’s safe to bring the grandkids.”

Taking the creative reins in 1988, Kurt Miller directed his first film, “Endless Winter.”

“This marked the beginning of our expeditions with a sequence filmed in Antarctica. That was the most costly shoot in the history of the company for a lot of reasons including cost overruns and the elaborate nature of the shoot,” Kurt Miller said. “And, as the new owners, we had a statement to make.”

As budgets increase (“Fifty” came in at just under $2 million and is expected to gross slightly better then last year’s $2.8-million-grossing “Free Riders”), crews have since been sent combing the globe for adventures from China to Yugoslavia and unusual domestic destinations.

Audiences also expect each film’s thrill factor to top the previous outing. And whether that means having a base jumper leap into the void with no more then a backpack or sending skiers down a 60-degree, 3,000-foot slope in Valdez, Alaska, Miller says the emphasis is on safety.

“We do not allow our athletes to put themselves into risky situations. They push themselves to the limit, but they take their direction from the mountain itself,” Miller said. “And the athletes we feature are all the Shaquille O’Neals of their sports. Johnny Mosley [featured in “Fifty”], for example, is an Olympic gold medalist in mogul skiing,” an acrobatic style of skiing over tightly packed, curved ridges of snow. To widen audience appeal, Miller pumps up the soundtracks with music by such established names as Dave Matthews, Counting Crows and the Foo Fighters.

Beyond theatrical distribution, Miller and Speek have also struck deals with Buena Vista Home Video to market home video versions of their films with the first DVD due out shortly. On cable TV, the Outdoor Life Channel is carrying the 13-part series called “Warren Miller’s Outdoor Adventures.” And there are other deals for TV and premium pay services in place with Encore, Starz and the Fox Sports Network. And through its Action Marketing Group arm, the company also is pursuing CD-ROM ventures, e-commerce and producing live events for Amstel Light and Discovery.

“The main question is how to bring enthusiasm and compelling entertainment to the films year after year,” said Miller, with sequences shot at Mount Kenya and in New Zealand already in the can for next year’s film. “Really what I have done with my dad’s films is to continue to motivate people to go enjoy themselves in the outdoors.”

Meanwhile, Warren, who continues to write a weekly column for the Rocky Mountain News and is at work on his autobiography, concurs, “The secret is to bring the films to town before the snow starts falling. That way the films, for skiers, are like showin’ a porno film on an aircraft carrier when it’s two days out of port. You can watch it, but you can’t do it. And that is why we’ve been able to make the same film 50 different times. It jump-starts the season.”