Warren Miller’s Weekly Column
Monday, August 29th, 2005Again, I’m posting Warren Miller’s weekly column in the spirit of keeping an archive of his stuff. Warren Miller & Co., if you read this, contact me. I’ll set you up with a fantastic blog platform to make sure all of his columns are archived. Here’s this weeks column:
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WHAT ARE YOU DOING WITH THE REST OF YOUR LIFE?
Warren Miller – http://warrenmiller.net
Where did the years go? It seems that only last week I was receiving instructions from the Ski School Director of Sun Valley, Otto Lang on the proper method of teaching my absolute beginner’s class. I felt like I had really taken a step up from living in my trailer in the parking lot when Otto offered me $125 a month and room and board. Otto, after a very successful career as a ski school director, 1934 and 1935, switched careers and was a Hollywood film producer for many years. I worked for Otto starting in December of 1948, fifty-seven years ago.
Today Otto is our guest on Orcas Island because he is going to show one of the most successful motion pictures that he produced. Five Fingers, starred James Mason and a host of other marquee players. It was set in Istanbul in 1944 and was produced for less than a million dollars. Chump change when measured by today’s excessive film budgets. Today Otto is 97 years old and a real hoot.
His film is part of the Orcas Chamber Music Festival’s annual two weeks of productions featuring performing artists from all over the world. To me however Otto is the main attraction and his career of creativity seems to be endless.
In 1988 at the age of 80, Otto published his autobiography. A Bird of Passage that chronicles his life in Yugoslavia where he was born, his years of teaching for Hannes Schneider in St. Anton, Austria, his career of teaching skiing to Hollywood stars in Sun Valley, followed by years of producing feature films in Hollywood. His book flew right off of the shelves to the best seller list in no time. The fact that he wrote it after he was 70 years old is a testimony to his creativity and “doing it just for his kids,” as he says. No less amazing to me is that Otto wrote the entire book in long hand with a ball point pen on yellow lined paper.
During his film making career he traveled the world and took thousands of still photos. These are not ordinary still pictures as they all demonstrate his creative composition and choice of subject matter. One I particularly like is of the Egyptian pyramids and in the foreground is a tree. Have you ever seen a tree in that part of the world? Otto found one to frame his picture! More amazing to me is that at the age of 91 Otto wrote a book about his pictures and travels, “Around The World in 90 Years.”
He is a real inspiration for me to continue to write my book about aging. “What Are You Doing with the Rest of Your Life?” is very exciting project for me. I have been able to immerse myself in research on things such as our life expectancy has doubled in the last 100 years. Futurists, Ray Kurzweil predicts that if you are under 30 years of age you will be able to easily live to be a 110 and with good health. If you are under 10 years old your life expectancy will be over 150 with good health. There are already nano-machines the size of a pill that is a complete camera. You simply swallow it and while it is passing through your system, it will take 5,700 expensive pictures of your digestive tract. In my aging book, I have written chapters about one’s midlife crisis; real or imagined; cosmetic surgery; what to eat for good health; alternative medicine; and is there such a thing as immortality? I’m excited to find a whole new avenue of expressing creativity. There are only an estimated 5,000,000 skiers in America, but last year there were 9,000,000 cosmetic surgeries performed in America. These are on people who want their outsides to look as good as they feel inside, or they think if they improve their outsides, maybe they’ll feel better inside. There are a lot more people over 39.5 years old, in the second half of their life than there are skiers. Maybe I’ve gone after the wrong market for these last 55 years!
In 1957 I wrote a book called Wine, Women, Warren and Skis about my winter of living in the Sun Valley parking lot. It first appeared in 1955 as the editorial in the program I was handing out at my ski movies. I had an extra paragraph of space left to fill up at the end and so I wrote, To reserve your copy at the pre-publication discount price of $2.00 send in a self addressed stamped envelope and I will send a copy of the book to you when I finish it. Over 1700 people sent me $2.00 ($3400 was a huge amount of money still is) which was spent on $5.00 motels and $1.00 dinners after my personal appearance shows in those days. Since then, the book has been reprinted 14 different times. I hope my new book about aging sells as well. To reserve a copy, send me your e-mail address and I will let you know when it is finished. Send it along with a note to warren@warrenmiller.net. In this day and age, I don’t dare as for $2.00 up front!
And remember, “Don’t take life seriously because you can’t come out of it alive.”
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