Wood River Journal: Catch skiing's early days on DVD
Posted on Wednesday, December 14, 2005
Before there was Warren Miller, there was another Sun Valley filmmaker named Otto Lang. And like Miller, Lang helped hook a nation on skiing, filming his first ski movie “Ski Flight” in 1936-the year Sun Valley opened. Now you can have that 20- ...
Catch skiing's early days on DVD
By KAREN BOSSICK
The Wood River Journal
December 14, 2005
http://www.wrjournal.com/articles/2005/12/14/arts_and_entertainment/story4.txt
Before there was Warren Miller, there was another Sun Valley filmmaker named Otto Lang.
And like Miller, Lang helped hook a nation on skiing, filming his first ski movie “Ski Flight” in 1936-the year Sun Valley opened.
Now you can have that 20-minute film and a library of other classic ski films directed by Lang, John Jay and Dick Barrymore.
The nine classic ski films appear on eight DVDs in a collector's set being offered by Topics Entertainment of Renton, Wash.
The set retails for $49.99 and is available locally at the Ketchum/Sun Valley Ski and Heritage Museum and Sun Valley Lodge Gift Shop. They're also available on Amazon.com and REI.com
In addition to “Ski Flight,” the DVDs' include:
“Skifully Yours,” an insightful retrospective on the Sun Valley ski scene as it appeared during 1939.
“Olympic Holiday,” a chronicle of the 1960 Winter Olympic Games in Squaw Valley.
“Winter Magic Around the World,” part-travelogue, part-ski spectacle using footage shot between 1946 and 1970.
“Ski Down the Years,” a light-hearted look at the Golden Age of American Skiing in a time predating release bindings, fiberglass skis, aluminum poles and high-speed quads.
“The Best of John Jay,” a greatest hits of the ski-cinema patriarch.
“The Basic Principles of Skiing,” the quintessential black and white instruction film used in the training regiment of the United States' 10th Mountain Division.
“The Performers,” a short film from 1971 that ushered in the freestyle revolution.
“The Last of the Ski Bums,” which follows three footloose Americans in 1967 as they nightclub in France, win at roulette in Monte Carlo, hit the slopes at Chamonix and ski New Zealand's Tasman Glacier.
The Bosnian-born Lang opened America's first ski school in 1935 at Mt. Rainier.
"I remember (those days) as the age of innocence in skiing, the wild and woolly days of near self-destructive impulses of skiers, carried away by their enthusiasm and let loose on the slopes without proper schooling and often inadequately equipped. There was a rich field to be mined in teaching those hordes of skiers how to do it right,” he recalled later in his book “Bird of Passage.”
Lang visited Sun Valley in 1937 at the invitation of Nelson Rockefeller, who helped him get “Ski Flight” on the big screen. The theatrical film premiered at Radio City Music Hall in New York in 1938, along with Disney's “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.”
There's no doubt that it sowed the seeds for skiing in many Americans' minds with 80,000 Americans seeing it in New York alone, he said.
Lang was asked to join Sun Valley's ski school in 1939 and he happily accepted, becoming instructor to such celebrities as Groucho Marx, Gary Cooper and Gerald Ford.
He became the ski school's head in 1941 when Friedl Pfeifer was arrested on suspicion of being a spy for the Germans-a charge that was later dropped. That same year he directed the skiing sequences in the ski film classic, “Sun Valley Serenade.”
It was one of his students, Twentieth Century-Fox studio head Darryl Zanuck, who started him on a Hollywood career that resulted in four Academy Award nominations.
Following the war, Lang became a full-time Hollywood director, directing such TV series as “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” as well as episodes of such shows as “Bat Masterson,” “The Rifleman,” and “Sea Hunt”
He also was a producer for such films as “Tora! Tora! Tora!” and “Call Northside 777” and assistant director on such films as “Viva Las Vegas,” “Love Is a Many Splendored Thing,” “Call Me Mister” and “The Ox-Bow Incident.”
Now 97, he lives in Seattle but returned to Sun Valley last winter for the opening of Carol's Dollar Mountain Lodge.
