Titan of ski filmmaking launched career, genre in Sun Valley
Warren Anthony Miller, a ski-film pioneer in Sun Valley and lifelong pillar of the genre, died Wednesday at his home on Orcas Island, Wash. He was 93.
Born in Hollywood, Calif., in 1924, Miller took to the outdoors—and to photography—at a young age, surfing on a homemade board, hiking and camping with friends. Having fallen in love with skiing in the San Gabriel Mountains in the late 1930s, Miller turned his full attention to the burgeoning sport after serving in the Navy during World War II.
While famously living with friend Ward Baker in a teardrop camper trailer in Sun Valley Resort parking lots in 1946 and ’47, subsisting on tomato soup made of ketchup and hot water, Miller melded his love of skiing and his love for filming, sparking a prolific career of annual self-narrated ski films that as much defined the genre as propelled it forward.