If you鈥檝e ever spent an early-winter听night in an auditorium filled with frothing skiers, you鈥檙e likely to recognize Warren Miller鈥檚 voice.听
That voice鈥攕lightly nasally, switching between wry and earnestly obsessed with skiing鈥攂ecame the hallmark of Warren Miller鈥檚 films. In Miller鈥檚 new autobiography, 听($30; Warren Miller Company), he lends the narrator鈥檚 voice to stories about learning to ski on the rope tows of Mount Waterman, or sweet-talking his way out of naval duty so he could chase storms in Yosemite.听

Miller, often called the founding father of ski filmmaking, is also a prolific writer and cartoonist. He鈥檚 self-published books since 1942, when he sold a book of cartoons about his time on a submarine chaser called The Navy Goes to College, and he鈥檚 been documenting his life in snippets since then. Freedom Found is the whole shebang, from his start making surf movies to this year鈥檚 Warren Miller Entertainment film, , which he鈥檚 helping narrate for the first time in 12 years.听
Miller invented the ski film tour by hustling the movies he shot in the early days of Sun Valley, Idaho,听and Squaw Valley听to ski clubs around the country. He gets into some of that in Freedom Found, but the richest parts of the book are about Miller鈥檚 desire to live a ski bum lifestyle just as skiing was growing around the country. Living in that fascinating early slice of ski history is also what got Miller into movie-making in the first place.
Miller was there when ski resorts like Vail opened, and he filmed the beginning of听heli听skiing,听freeskiing, and snowboarding.
In the mid 鈥40s, Miller and his friend Ward Baker moved into a teardrop trailer they found for cheap in L.A., because they wanted to ski but they didn鈥檛 want to pay rent. With the trailer packed full of oatmeal, mackerel, and goat meat, they headed to the first place it snowed: Alta. From there, they moved into the parking lot in Sun Valley, where they broke into the pool and sweet-talked society girls into taking them to dinner. Miller was shooting pictures and film along the way, and by 1950, at age 26,听he had enough footage for an hour-and-a-half film. Miller narrated 听from the auditoriums where he showed it, became popular enough that it launched him into a yearly cycle of documenting skiing.
More than anything the book is a 70-year-long look at skiing鈥攂asically the entire lifespan of the sport鈥攁nd how it evolved. Miller was there when ski resorts like Vail opened, and he filmed the beginning of heli-skiing, freeskiing, and snowboarding. “There was hardly a place with a ski lift anywhere in the world that听Don or Brian or I didn鈥檛 point our cameras at during the '70s and听鈥80s,” he writes. “We were spreading the freedom of skiing around the globe, and听doing it in my trademark seat-of-the-pants style.”
He also gets into the less-glamorous nuts and bolts of being a roving filmmaker: two unhappy marriages, bankruptcy, broken friendships, the family life鈥攁n alcoholic father and a mother who embezzled听his money鈥攖hat led him to life on the road. You get all the sides of Warren Miller, not just the canned narrator.听
鈥淚 never took any business courses because I thought I鈥檇 never own a听business, and I never took any accounting courses because I knew I鈥檇听never have enough money to need to account for it,鈥 he writes. 鈥淎s a result, in听those two very important disciplines, I was way beyond bankruptcy听several times during my career, but too naive to know it.”
The book drags when Miller goes long on his personal relationships or proselytizes about the state of skiing. Andy Bigford, a longtime employee of Warren Miller Entertainment, helped with the writing, and it could have benefited听from an editor with more distance鈥攕omeone who could parse out the stories integral to the narrative from the ones that just happened to be a part of Miller鈥檚 life.听
But if you鈥檙e a sucker for the idiosyncratic history of skiing鈥攖he time Miller did amateur chiropractic work on Benjamin听Netanyahu on a Sun Valley dinner table, for instance鈥攐r are nostalgic for an era when ski bums could actually be bums, there are worthwhile stories to be found in Freedom Found. 听