Big airtime

Every Hollywood product placement specialist dreams of working on a film that shouts the sponsor’s name from a mountaintop. Critics say that plum gig can be found in Boulder, Colo., home to assorted peaks and Warren Miller Entertainment, where some say the line between corporate pitches and content is as blurred as the vision of a triple-twisting freestyler.

Do the ski movies of action sports guru Miller get too cozy with sponsors? The Denver Post grumbled about “a half-dozen near-commercials and scores of ‘product placements’ ” in one film. And Maui Time Weekly noted “a distracting amount of plugs for Nissan in Warren Miller’s snow flicks, making the most recent films seem like very long Nissan commercials.”

But in a world where the Lakers play at Staples Center and the Stones are brought to you by T-Mobile, why not bow to the achievements of Warren Miller? At 79, he maintains folkloric status as a sports marketer, a sports filmmaker and an icon to three generations of adrenaline-seekers.

“It’s about freedom,” Miller says, explaining why his movies resonate, making kids feel like adults and grown-ups like juveniles. Freedom is the crux of the motivational philosophy he has honed over five decades of preaching in lodges and dingy high school auditoriums: You can do it. You can break the shackles of pimply faced teenage servitude or adult catatonia and live free, have adventures, ride the wild earth.

Every year around this time, Miller emerges from his screening den like some cinematic Punxsutawney Phil, signaling the official start of ski season. The latest of his 54 films is “Journey.” Directed by his son Kurt and narrated by Miller, it continues the formula of far-flung slopes, high-flying daredevils and deadpan humor that turned $400 and a borrowed camera into an empire encompassing everything from ski resorts to production companies. It’s made Miller a major powder broker.

“Between Warren Miller and Bud Browne, the first surf filmmaker, the two set the stage for the filming of all extreme sports to come,” says Greg MacGillivray, president of MacGillivray Freeman Films, a Laguna Beach company whose outdoor-oriented IMAX titles include “Everest.” “As soon as you hear Warren’s voice, it takes you back instantly to those screenings.” What MacGillivray remembers is, first, “a sense of stoke. Seeing those places that were far away from anywhere I could ever get to, you end up being transported.” Second, “it gave me the idea that I could make films like that.” In college, MacGillivray did just that, directing a surf movie in the style of Miller and Browne -- showing it in auditoriums to his live narration.

The outsized home-movie circuit was a Miller trademark -- and core to his formula. Like so many entrepreneurial master strokes, though, it grew not out of marketing strategy but from an enthusiast’s lifestyle and nonexistent budget. Miller grew up in the Southland, an avid surfer who rode his favorite break, 34th and Strand in Hermosa Beach, on a 95-pound redwood board. The audience for his first movies about surfing in the ‘40s could have fit into a couple of Pontiacs. But he had another obsession: peeling down powder. It led him and a friend to spend a couple of winters in a trailer in the Sun Valley, Idaho, parking lot. They dodged lift tickets and ski patrols. “We shot rabbits and lived on oyster crackers and ketchup,” Miller recalls fondly.

With a borrowed movie camera, he started filming the action and showing his footage in living rooms and lodges, spicing up his raps with a wry narrating style. That led to “Deep and Light” in 1950. With the theater route locked up by Hollywood, he set up his projector and microphone in a high school auditorium in Pasadena. Tickets: $1. Over the years, the locations became more global, the athletes more famous, the moves more aerial. In 1954, he showed a scene of Olympian Stein Erickson doing a back flip while actually staying in his skis.

By the ‘80s, snowboard acrobatics had joined the mix. Jeff Galbraith, editor of the snowboarding pub Frequency, believes snowboarders have influenced Miller more than he’s influenced them. “But I have tremendous respect for him,” he says. “He’s grown snowboarding tremendously by letting it be seen as a mainstream and viable activity.”

As the man who brought gravity-defying maneuvers to the masses decades ago, Miller has earned the right to wag his finger at the new school of slope shredders. “Pay attention to the outdoor scenery while you’re doing that stuff,” he urges.

And to the extreme novelty of the pre-sponsored world.