Hermosa Beach ski filmmaker Warren Miller left legacy of stoke
Before there were extreme skiers and GoPro cameras there was Warren Miller flying down the sides of mountains with his Bell and Howell. Photos courtesy of the Miller family
In 1972, when Los Angeles County was pressuring Hermosa Beach to allow a bike path to be built on its beach, Strand resident Warren Miller appeared before the City Council. The county had already received commitments to pave the beaches of every other city, from Santa Monica to Torrance, including Manhattan Beach and Redondo Beach.
Miller unrolled a length of butcher paper on which he had drawn to scale the 12-foot-wide Strand, and next to it the proposed 12-foot-wide bike path. Then, as the council and audience wondered where he was going, Miller drew diagonal lines across the two ribbons of concrete.
“What do you see? Miller asked the council.
The picture was unmistakabley an auto lot with diagonal parking.
“We saw the county put parking lots on the beach in Manhattan Beach. If you let them pave our beach, that could happen here,” he said.
The council subsequently told the county it could put its bike path on Hermosa Avenue, but not on the beach.
Ward Baker and Warren Miller camping in the Sun Valley parking lot in 1947.
Miller passed away on Wednesday of natural causes at age 93, leaving Hermosa with the widest unpaved beach in Los Angeles County and a legacy of stoke for generations of skiers and surfers, worldwide.
Before there were extreme sports and GoPro and drone cameras, there was Warren Miller racing down black diamond runs alongside the world’s best skiers with his Bell and Howell 8mm film camera.
Miller screened his first ski film, “Deep and Light” at the Alpine Ski Club in Pasadena in 1950 and continued producing, and in the early years filming, editing and narrating, a new ski film annually for five decades.
Warren Miller at Malibu in the 1940s.
His annual fall screenings at the Redondo Union High auditorium, and similar theaters around the world, signaled the start of the ski season, and also winter surf. The screenings were like “showing a porno film on an aircraft carrier six days out of port,” he told the Seattle Times in 1985. “I truly believe in my heart that the first turn you make on a pair of skis is your first taste of total freedom… I came to the conclusion that man’s search for freedom is embedded in our genes,” he told the Seattle Times in 2010, when he was 83.
Miller had a voice as melodious and recognizable as Vin Scully’s. His fifth wife Laurie would shush him whenever they were in a chairline for fear he’d be mobbed by admirers, who would not otherwise recognize him because he rarely appeared in front of the camera.
But in Hermosa, Miller was readily recognized, not as a famous filmmaker but as a 6-foot-2 former USC basketball player and surfer who had a boat in King Harbor, and lived on The Strand with his wife Dottie and three kids Scott, Chris and Kurt. He handed out ice cream cones to the kids in the annual Strand Fourth of July kids parade.
Miller learned to surf before he learned to ski and always included surfing in his ski films. He made his first kook box in junior high woodshop. In 2014 he was inducted as a surfing pioneer into the Hermosa Beach Surfer Walk of Fame.
As he prospered, he acquired property around town, including the Warren Miller Films office on upper Pier Avenue and Henry and Grace’s Gem Cafe next door.
But he never forgot the winters he lived with friends in his teardrop trailer in ski resort parking lots, unconsciously inventing the ski bum lifestyle.
“I knew of his existence, chasing down the mountain without a lift ticket, the lift attendant and the ski patrol in pursuit,” Sun Valley’s legendary ski instructor Otto Lang told the Seattle Times in 1995. “Warren was … there’s a German word for it: lebenskuenstler — an artist in artful living, like an artful dodger.”
For decades, Miller didn’t raise the cafe’s rents, preferring to make sure he and other Hermosans could continuing enjoying Grace’s pies and Henry’s burgers. He was similarly supportive of the three dozen tenants of his the 200 Pier Avenue building. Today, it would be called a business incubator. Then it was called low rent, low maintenance, a building where small businesses like Scooter Records, Hermosa Lock and Key, and the Bichelmeyer family’s insurance company could take root.
“I was way beyond bankruptcy several times during my career, but too naive to know it,” he wrote in one of his 11 books. Nonetheless, he was an innovative businessman who developed a system for counting the people at his screenings to protect himself from thieving theater owners who lied about the number of tickets sold. He was also an early adopter of what became known as focus groups.
After his annual ski film was edited, Miller would invite friends to view it. His ski films were part thrill ride, part travelogue and part Keystone Cops. The increasingly daring jumps by skiers who wanted to be in his films eventually made him concerned for their safety and his responsibility for encouraging their stunts. The comedy, typically showing chairlift pile-ups, were always warm hearted.
He would issue the friends yellow notepads on which they were to write jokes for his narration. Typically, they were one liners, often with a philosophical undertone. “The best place in the world to ski is where you’re skiing that day,” became one of his best known lines.
Among the friends were Strand neighbors Barbara and Don Guild. The couple met Miller in the early 1950s when a mutual friend invited the Guilds and Miller on a surf trip to Malibu.
They rode in the Guilds’ woody wagon, which they had recently bought from surfboard shaper Dale Velzy for $200. Velzy threw into the deal two balsa surfboards, which Barbara sat on in the back of the woody during the ride to Malibu. The three men sat up front. At some point during the trip Miller turned around and noticed Barbara Guild was reading the Christian Science Monitor. He asked her if she was a Christian Scientist. When she said she was, Miller deadpanned, So was my wife Jean, until she died of spinal cancer — which was true.
The couple and Miller and his future wives would surf, ski and windsurf together for the next six decades.
“If you don’t do it this year, you’ll be one year older when you do,” he said many times over those years at the end of his films.
2014 Surfer’s Walk of Fame Pioneer inductees (left to right) Beacher Anderson, Bob Bergstrom, Stu Lindner’s wife, Finn Sanders (Mo Meine’s great granddaughter), Fenton Scholes, Warren Miller and Hermosa Beach Mayor Michael DiVirgilio.
Miller is survived by his wife Laurie, sons Scott and his wife Melissa and Kurt and his wife Ali, daughter Chris and her husband David Lucero, and grandkids Ryan, Jenna, Alexander, Valeska, Kasimira and stepson Colin Kaufmann. Memorial services are pending.
In lieu of flowers, Miller requested any memorial gifts benefit the Warren Miller Performing Arts Center in Big Sky, MT. To donate and for more information: warrenmillerpac.org. ER