Warren Miller, the veteran moviemaker whose annual ski films heralded the start of a new season for millions of outdoors enthusiasts for more than six decades, has died at his home on Orcas Island, Wash. He was 93.
Miller had lived on the island with his wife Laurie since 1992.
Called "the granddaddy of the ski bums" by National Public Radio, Miller turned his fascination with the sport into 90-minute features that combined jaw-dropping jumps and cornball jokes. For years, he roamed the country every fall, personally introducing his latest movie in high school gyms or civic auditoriums.
The formula was simple: thrills, chills, funny footage of women skiing in bikinis, or men in koala bear outfits _ and timing.
"The secret," he told the Los Angeles Times in 1999, "is to bring the films to town before the snow starts falling.
"That's why we've been able to make the same film 50 different times," he said. "It jump-starts the season."
In his later years, Miller had little or nothing to do with the films that bore his name. In 1983, he sold a half-interest in his company, Warren Miller Entertainment, to a concert promotion firm. Six years later, Miller's son Kurt and a partner bought the company and kept it until 2002. It has had three owners since.
Born in Los Angeles on Oct. 15, 1924, he grew up in Hollywood and served in the Navy during World War II.
In 1946, he and a buddy used Miller's aging Buick to haul a cramped trailer into the parking lot at a resort in Sun Valley, Idaho. They stayed the winter in the unheated, 8-foot-long, 4-foot-high metal capsule and subsisted on rabbits they shot and a gruel they made out of water, ketchup and oyster crackers.
He dedicated his 1958 memoir, "Wine, Women, Warren and Skis" to the fictional "Miss Abigail Nicelunchowski, inventor of the oyster cracker."
"Without whose foresight in offering vitamin enriched oyster crackers to the Union Pacific Railroad for their Sun Valley, Idaho operation, I might never have survived the terrible winter of 1946," he wrote. "Good luck to you, Miss Nicelunchowski, wherever you are."
Miller later became a Sun Valley ski instructor. When two students who were executives with the Bell & Howell movie machinery company learned that their teacher had dabbled in surf films, they gave him one of their 16-mm cameras.
That set Miller on a path leading to "Deep and Light," a modest production with sound courtesy of his grandmother's tape recorder and music from a church organ.
Miller, who died Wednesday, is survived by his wife Laurie, sons Scott and Kurt, daughter Chris and a stepson, Colin Kaufman.
