Aspen – It’s getting crowded in the world of ski porn.
What began nearly 60 years ago with the original ski bum, Warren Miller, has evolved into a niche industry with about 60 filmmakers churning out annual flicks. New companies emerge every year, feeding the small market of core skiers and snowboarders who drool over the powdery action sequences and giant jumps.
And each new kid with a camera is aiming to usurp the filmmaking veterans who paved the path, just as each new athlete on the other end of the camera is aiming to be the Next Big Superstar in the ski world. In a genre where snowy is best, each neophyte has just as good a chance as the virtuosos when it comes time to cull gasps and hollers from theater crowds.
“They are all ultimately promoting the sport, each with a distinct style,” said Ryan Miller, the event marketing manager for Aspen Skiing Co., who helped organize the inaugural festival celebrating the ski film culture last weekend in Aspen. “These guys are creating the legends and myths that will drive our sport for the next decades. People will look back at these movies and chart the evolution of our sport.”
From Warren Miller’s vintage gapers-tumbling-off-chairlifts to monster cliff hucks and new school urban jibs offered by newcomers like Level 1 Productions or Rage Films and old hands like Teton Gravity Research or Matchstick Productions, film is the history book of snowsports.
Warren Miller was the chief historian for several decades, capturing the persuasive draw of snowy slopes. Today, his movie company is a division of a division of a division of the world’s largest media company, Time Warner.
Miller paved the way for filmmaking legend Greg Stump, who patented a style that elevated the world’s best athletes and tied their turns to thumping music.
A decade ago, Crested Butte’s Matchstick Productions and Jackson Hole’s Teton Gravity Research took the Stump format and carried it further, capturing and conveying a vibrant and growing vibe in the then neon-plagued ski world. Both MSP and TGR ensnared skiing audiences with helicopter views of master skiers such as Seth Morrison, Shane McConkey and Doug Coombs ripping down mammoth, never-skied mountains. Their movies gave rise to big-mountain skiers and the notion that famous skiers did not have to be racers.
Pro bump skier Johnny DeCesare arrived in the late 1990s with his California-based Poor Boyz Productions, a company that first captured the new school jib movement that is injecting new life in skiing.
The MSP-TGR-Poor Boyz trinity carried the core-skiing scene for nearly a decade, much like ABC, NBC and CBS owned television in the days of rabbit ears antennae. Every year, the lines in their movies got steeper, the jumps bigger, the locations more exotic and the athletes more daring.
Technology ended the MSP, TGR Poor Boyz’s exclusive cartel. Digital cameras opened the game to anyone with a couple of thousand dollars. The big sponsorship dollars were no longer necessary to make a decent ski flick. Anyone with a camera, a computer and a rowdy crew of passionate powder lovers can make a great film, a theory proved true by British Columbia cinematographer Bill Heath, whose unfunded and unsponsored 2003 film “Sinners” ranks as one of the most profoundly soulful ski movies made.
Today, distinction is the goal and even veteran filmmakers labor to stand out in a crowded field. Josh Berman thinks praiseworthy panache comes with not just the biggest, baddest jumps but creative filming techniques. His movie “Shanghai Six” – produced by his fledgling Denver-based Level 1 Productions – has some of the rowdiest rail riding and jib skiing in a flick that does not include any talking or narration. Names of athletes and locations are incorporated into Berman’s film, displayed on things like airplanes, tanker ships, movie marquees and airport signs.
“What I do is made for a very specific audience. I like to think that I’m making movies for me and my friends,” the 27-year-old filmmaker said. “Only now, my group of friends has really grown.”
Ski gear companies, such as Oakley and Burton, are getting into the film business too. And the athletes are creating their own film companies. X Games superpipe champion and perpetually dominant jib skier Tanner Hall joined skiing heavyweights Evan Raps and CR Johnson to build their own film company – named The Bigger Picture – corralling creative control into the athlete’s corner.
Poor Boyz founder DeCesare offered Hall’s crew his production and distribution expertise on their first movie, “Pop Yer Bottlez.” Even though he was technically supporting a rival company that could fuel competition in an increasingly saturated industry, DeCesare says it’s a partnership he plans to foster.
“I don’t think it will ever hurt to have more film companies. It grows our sport,” DeCesare said.
The athletes, on the other hand, do feel the heat from the new kids in the flicks. Hucking 100-foot cliffs and spinning over 160-foot gaps is not an old man’s game. Yet the established athletes must step up their film performance every year to keep ahead of the hungry youngsters flooding the scene.
Tanner Hall broke both his ankles this spring trying a spinning jump across a 120-foot gap jump in the Utah backcountry with the cameras running. Simon Dumont, another top-shelf jibber, fractured his pelvis and ruptured his spleen the same month after he overshot a 100 foot gap by another 100 feet. Aspiring Vermont filmmaker Alec Stall was killed in February while skiing for his Meathead Films company. Going big is dangerous and more and more newcomers are emulating the big tricks they see on film, betting their bodies they too can be a superstar.
In TGR’s latest, “The Tangerine Dream,” 35-year-old Jeremy Nobis displays his race-honed prowess on insanely steep flutes of snow lining super-sized hills in Alaska.
“I do not take any risk, because there are kids nipping at my heels. And I don’t take any risks for the camera,” Nobis said. “I do what I do because I’m living the dream I’ve had since I was 4.”
Staff writer Jason Blevins can be reached at 303-820-1374 or jblevins@denverpost.com.
