In stories of the Ultimate Fighting Championship’s early days, much has been made of the contributions from John Milius, the combat-obsessed screenwriter behind Apocalypse Now and Red Dawn, the true-life personality from which The Big Lebowski’s fictional Walter Sobchak was derived, and an early Gracie Jiu Jitsu devotee whose imagination and Hollywood name helped bring the showcase for the Brazilian clan’s martial art to fruition.

His son, Ethan, is a footnote in these stories, yet his connections to jiu jitsu, MMA, and even the Gracie family itself run deeper. Ethan learned under Royce before no-holds-barred fighting was ripe for pay-per-view. At the first UFC, he watched Teila Tuli’s airborne tooth land near his seat. When a youthful indiscretion led to his departure from the Gracies’ academy, he taught and trained at the Beverly Hills Jiu Jitsu Club alongside a who’s who of late ‘90s MMA, like Bas Rutten and Mark Kerr. Marc Laimon—esteemed jiu jitsu instructor and head coach for UFC welterweight champion Johny Hendricks—once said Milius is “the only man who can claim to be my teacher.

These days, Ethan Milius isn’t a teacher at all: he’s a deputy district attorney for Los Angeles County. Coming off the prosecution of a 35-year-old cold case murder and the birth of his first son, Fightland spoke with Milius about his father’s introduction to Gracie Jiu Jitsu as well as his own, the friction that drove him from the Gracies to points elsewhere, and the through lines between jiu jitsu and the legal profession.

Ethan Milius: My father made a surf film called Big Wednesday, and one of the guys in Big Wednesday was named Reb Brown—really nice guy, handsome guy, muscular, blond hair. He was a boxer before he got into movies, and he trained with Rorion Gracie. Reb kept telling my dad, “Hey, you’ve got to come down and see this jiu jitsu thing. It’s amazing, they can beat anybody”—that myth of what Gracie Jiu Jitsu was early on.

In the early days, the appeal was that you had this thing that wasn’t known to the general public; you had access to this incredible skillset that nobody else knew about. There was something mythical about that, and I think that appealed to my father. If you look at it in terms of all his films, he’s always had as a major theme man trying to deal with an inherently violent nature, so it was naturally going to be appealing to him.

He loved jiu jitsu. He’d keep a baton in his office, and he’d ask people to try to hit him with the baton, then he’d do the takeaway. He’s a longtime member of the NRA, and he’d have people take a gun—obviously he’d brass-check it and make sure it wasn’t loaded—and then he’d say, “Try and shoot me before I take it away.” Invariably, he’d take it away, but it would end up in these arguments because you can’t really determine whether or not the guy pulled the trigger. They’re like, “No, no, I got you! Let me do it again!” So they’d start arguing about it.

My dad, he’s not a thin guy. He’s probably two to three times my bodyweight. But one day he said, “Just punch me and I’m going to take you down.” I thought, “Okay, I’m gonna punch him in the stomach.” I hit him hard—I remember his whole stomach rippled—and then he just collapsed on top of me, and I was crushed underneath him. Clearly, I shouldn’t have hit him.



With Marc Laimon (left) at the Beverly Hills Jiu Jitsu Club in 1998.

I’m 39 now, and my father started jiu jitsu when I was 14 or 15. He would do private lessons with either Royce or Rorion—mostly Rorion. And basically, as a kid, he said to me, “You’re going to do this.” That’s where I started. There wasn’t a lot of debate about it.

When I first met Rorion, he seemed like a car salesman. It seemed like he was trying to push a product, and you didn’t have anything like the UFC at the time to test it. And you had a history, a variety of movies, and a culture informing you to come to a conclusion of “how can this be unbeatable?” So when I initially met him, my impression wasn’t that this is amazing, breathtaking stuff that is going change the world of martial arts. Initially, my impression was that he was a car salesman.

Rorion would basically have an intro class where he’d show you two or three stand-up techniques— how to defend if somebody puts you in a headlock, how to defend if someone grabs you around the neck, and if someone grabs you by the lapel. Then he brings you to the ground and he has you get mounted and he goes, “Can you escape?” He brought Royler in—one of the most renowned and accomplished tournament jiu jitsu guys to ever have graced the mat, but he’s tiny. And I was about 15 at the time, and he looked to me to be about 15 as well—he was in mid-to-late 20s, but he looked like a little kid. And I was like, “I’m chucking this guy.” Royler mounts me, I do what everybody does and turn my back, and he chokes me out. I’m like, “Let me try again.” He does exactly the same thing. Then I mounted him and he rolled me. That was a very powerful introduction to jiu jitsu, and having Royler be the guy was great, because I literally thought he was a little kid.

I had private lessons with Royce. He is remarkably different today than he was then. He was really just a happy-go-lucky guy, a guy you wanted to spend time with and hang out with. He was maybe in his mid-20s without a care in the world. To me, he just seemed like that cool kid you wanted to hang out with. You’d wrestle with him and he’s extremely talented, but was he was a cool guy to hang out with. I wouldn’t say he was a particularly adept teacher—he didn’t have a natural ability to convey information. A lot of people liked, by contrast, the way that Rorion taught. I didn’t. I knew he was articulate and he could convey the info he wanted to convey, but I didn’t find what he was teaching was good for me.



Training with Carlos Newton (left). Fabio Santos, Ricardo Liborio and Ethan in San Diego, CA circa 1995 (right).

One of the major things I disagreed with was that Rorion would pass the guard by essentially using his arm to trap the bicep of the person that was in guard, then put his left leg up and slide his right arm into the gap essentially where your groin was, and dip his shoulder. That to me seemed like you’re going to be caught in a triangle, or you’re going to always be worried about it. His defense was essentially that if you stack the person up, that shouldn’t be an issue. The way I thought of it was, why would you put yourself in that position to begin with?

I don’t think people were particularly satisfied with that technique, but at the time, nobody really knew anything else: It was either what Rorion was teaching or what Royce was teaching. Periodically, guys from Brazil would come up and train—Vitor Belfort, when he was a purple belt, would come up and train. You didn’t have a lot of exposure to anything else going on. We knew there was a group of people out there called the Machados, but didn’t know much about them. Sometimes people would leave and go train with the Machados, and there was always this thought that those guys are traitors—Royce would always say the techniques you learn there aren’t the real thing. You had this closed world where you were indoctrinated to believe that the only thing out there that was authentic and real and would work was what was being taught by Rorion and Royce and, by extension, Rickson. Other than that, the thought was that nothing else compares.

Every three or four months at the academy, Royce would come by and there was a core group of guys, the better jiu jitsu competitors, and he’d say, “Hey, how much do you weigh?” The not-very-intelligent ones wouldn’t see that this was a repeated cycle. It basically meant that somebody that had called in and asked to do a challenge match. Instead of Royce saying, “Hey, I’ll fight this guy,” he’d say, “I’ll have one of my students fight.” Maybe 10 percent of the time the guy who called in would follow through. There were definitely times when Royce asked me and I’d say, “Okay I’ll do it.” Every time I was the guy to do it the guy wouldn’t show up. It was also apparent—to me at least—that not every phone call that was purportedly happening was not actually happening: it was also a way of Royce testing us. So it was like, “Whatever you want me to weigh, I’ll weigh,” you know?

Rorion is my daughter’s grandfather… Really, the reason I left is because I started dating Rorion’s daughter, Rose, and Rorion didn’t want me to date her. Without getting too personal, he literally said, “You’re like a son to me. I don’t want you to date Rose, and it’s for your own good.” And as a young person, I totally ignored what he said. It probably wasn’t the smartest thing, but I have a wonderful daughter as a consequence.



With Mark Kerr in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

It wasn’t like I was away from jiu jitsu—I just wasn’t doing it with Royce anymore—and seeing other people doing jiu jitsu and different techniques opened my mind. You look at guys like Ryron and Rener and they’re extremely talented, and all they ever trained with was Royce and their dad and people at the gym, so it’s not like you couldn’t become extremely good by training there. But after I had left, I was training at different places. Eventually, I ended up training with guys from when I was in Torrance. One of the guys was the very last person I had trained with in Royce’s gym—it had been like 30 minutes going back and forth, neither one being able to dominate the other, just a slugfest. And the next time I trained with him, like two years later, I was toying with him. I could do whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted, however I wanted to do it. And at that point, it dawned on me: I had progressed because of exposure to different techniques and styles, he had stayed the same, and staying the same hadn’t benefited him.

After that, I left and went to Beverly Hills Jiu Jitsu. It was kind of miraculous the way all those guys came together: Bas Rutten, Marco Ruas, Pedro Rizzo, Mark Kerr would fly out from Arizona and train there, Darrell Gholar, Oleg Taktarov. Marc Laimon and I actually lived at the gym. I would run the cash register, teach classes, be a training partner for other guys—whatever was needed.

I spent the most time training with Mark Kerr. He was big, dude—and lightning quick. He would use me as the dummy in takedown drills. It’s not very persuasive when you have a guy who’s 160 pounds being taken down by a 260-pound guy, but I can tell you from being on the other side of that, the speed at which he moved was just absolutely amazing. And if they didn’t prohibit head butting, he probably would have had a much more profound impact on the MMA world than he did.

To me, wrestling naturally went well with jiu jitsu. I felt like I’d end up trying to do a sweep on someone—let’s say I’m in the guard, I try to do a sweep, the sweep isn’t completed and we both end up out of position. It’s a perfect moment to transition into a scramble, to start to do the equivalent of a double-leg. I fell in love with wrestling and I took up the opportunity when Darrell Gholar was there to learn a lot from him.

The last time I ever put a gi and a belt on was the World Championships as a brown belt in 1999—I had already gone back to UCLA and realized that jiu jitsu was not my future…Once I finished at UCLA, initially, I wanted to write and be a novelist. I thought I’d follow in my dad’s footsteps and go to Hollywood as a scriptwriter to transition into being a novelist. I quickly realized that that’s not going to pay the bills immediately, so I decided to become an attorney. As soon as I finished law school and passed the bar, I wanted to do something where I was contributing back to society in a positive way. That’s when I applied to the district attorney’s office, and I’ve been there for the last eight years.

In trial—as I imagine in almost any other oppositional type of profession—you’re doing the same stuff that you’re doing in jiu jitsu. You’re trying to outmaneuver your opponent by thinking ahead of what they’re doing, and you’re only as good as you prepare. You could be the most talented person, but if you don’t put in the time and energy to prepare, you’re not going to be successful.



Ethan with Wendell Alexander at the University Gamma Filho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 1999.

The way you think enables jiu jitsu to be an intelligent approach that incorporates being physical. “I want to proceed from the guard, and these are my plans for attacking and going to cross-side”—that way of breaking things down is something I use today when I prosecute cases. I’m indebted to it for who I am today, even though I haven’t trained in probably four or five years.

I was assigned to a unit downtown, one of my supervisors was really into the UFC, we hit it off, and we’d work out in a gym down in the basement. There was a bailiff who put down mats in the gym, and he’d recruit other bailiffs to just beat the shit out of them. He asked my supervisor to train some boxing and kickboxing with him, and he said, “ We’ll just go 50 percent.” He proceeds to go 110 percent and he kicked the shit out of my supervisor. I saw my supervisor limping around, and he told me what happened. The next time I went down to the gym, he was off for the weekend, and I was just lifting and running on a treadmill. I go into the mat section and this bailiff is destroying some unfortunate, smaller bailiff. He looks up and says, “Hey do you wanna train?” “Sure.”

Anybody with any moderate ability would have done exactly what I did, choking him out in 30 seconds. A law clerk happened to be watching, he told my supervisor—I didn’t tell him—and that cemented our friendship. He always tells stories about that.

I trained consistently for about a year after that, then I hurt my elbow and realized, I can’t do this. I can’t have injuries, or walk into court and try a case in front of a jury with a black eye or something. There’s a certain professionalism that jurors expect—they don’t expect a guy to have mat burn on his face. It’s enough that I have cauliflower ear on one side.

When I trained, I wanted to be physical, be in constant motion. I didn’t want to walk away going, “You know, I’m not really that tired.” I wanted to leave everything behind. When you get to the point where your body won’t cooperate with you because it’s falling apart—you’ve got knee problems, neck problems, you can’t go 100 percent because you’re injured all the time—it stops being worth it.

Even back then I liked cycling, and now I ride all the time. Never been injured and it’s wonderful. I have a lot of friends who have broken collarbones, but knock on wood, it’s never happened to me.

If jiu jitsu were something you could do and it didn’t take the toll on your body and you could do it the way I want to do it, I’d probably still do it. But it just isn’t. Although I have to say, even though my wife will not agree with this: I’ll be teaching my son jiu jitsu.

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