Warren responded by fleeing to the sanctuary of the outdoors, and a lifetime of entrepreneurship funded his dreams. It started at age 8 candling eggs and sweeping floors at a grocery store, then delivering newspapers and selling magazine subscriptions before working in the machine shop of his grandfather, an accomplished engineer and inventor. Warren survived the domestic chaos of his early life by body surfing in the ocean off Topanga Canyon; hiking with his Boy Scout troop in Yosemite; skiing at nearby Mt. Waterman; and surfing at San Onofre on a surf board he built in shop class.

“Rather than face the fact that my family was very strange, I made the assumption that the way our family lived was much the way that every family lived,” Warren recalled in his 2016 autobiography, Freedom Found. “With hairdos for my sisters, whiskey for my father, and some food saved from dinner for me, my mother kept us together. A lot of people have had it a lot worse, but this was the way I had it."

Born in Hollywood in 1924 to Albert L. Miller and Helena H. Miller, Warren’s childhood was far from idyllic. The Great Depression derailed his father's radio career, and Albert never worked again. The Miller family at times struggled to put food on the table and made periodic midnight moves to skip out on the rent.

At age 12, Warren purchased his first camera for 39 cents. He photographed his fellow Boy Scouts and sold them the prints for a profit. “This purchase marked only the beginning of what was to be a very, very expensive habit of documenting my world,” he recalled. He bought his first skis and bamboo poles at age 15 for $2 from his paper route earnings. He studied Otto Lang’s book Downhill Skiing before heading off to Mt. Waterman with his Boy Scout troop leader to take the plunge.

Just in the nick of time, as a youngster, his maternal grandparents, Walter and Edith Humphrey, came to the rescue. “Spending nearly two years living with my grandparents was the best thing that could have happened to me," Warren recalled in his autobiography. "Once I moved in with them, my whole life changed. My grandparents encouraged conversation, and they were really interested in what I was doing and thinking--an entirely new sensation for me.”

As World War II intervened, Warren enrolled in the officer’s training program at USC, worked his way up to company commander and ensign, and successfully published his first cartoon book, The Navy Goes to College. When a typhoon sank Sub-chaser 521 off Guadalcanal, Ensign Miller helped the captain hatch the plan that led to the dramatic but safe evacuation of the crew.

Years later as a handsome, 6-foot, 2-inch, 180-lb. undergrad at the University of Southern California, Warren played varsity basketball. He won his first trophy in the Southern California speed ice skating championships, directed the card stunts at Trojan football games, and stepped up his pursuit of big waves and deep powder snow.

“People remember their first day on skis because it comes as such a mental rush,” Warren continued. “When you come down the mountain from your first time on skis, you are a different person. I had just now experienced that feeling, if only for half a minute; it was step one in the direction I would follow the rest of my life.”

“In the Sun Valley parking lot, I liked the smell of rabbit frying above the totally silent evening. At the same time, I could look up and see the constellation of Orion high in the black canopy of winter nights. No one ever had it as good as I did then, except Ward Baker, who was cooking the rabbit for us at the time.”

From there the two embarked on a multi-season ski bum odyssey in Warren’s 1936 Buick Phaeton, towing the now-famous “teardrop” trailer from Yosemite to Alta to Sun Valley, Jackson, Aspen, and Mammoth. Their parking lot lifestyle included eating oatmeal cooked with frozen milk on his Coleman stove; shooting ducks and rabbits for dinner; scamming lift tickets; dining on-mountain with “Miss Nicelunchowski” (Warren’s recipe for tomato bisque: just add hot water to ketchup and sneak as may oyster crackers into your mouth as you can); and winning premier ski races as members of the Sun Valley Parking Lot Ski Team. Warren and Ward’s adventures defined the ski bum genre and provided a handbook for future generations to follow.

After befriending a Navy WAVE, Warren concocted a method to spend his end-of-war Navy days at Yosemite’s Badger Pass. He bought a Bell and Howell 8-mm camera for $77 with his mustering out pay, and he got his first sustained ski and filming experience during the winter of 1946, with his ski bum buddy Ward Baker at his side. The hook was set.

When Warren ventured out to market his film, he was turned down by nine ski clubs; most of them said he needed to replace his own voice with that of a professional narrator, but he couldn't afford to hire one. "The tenth club where I showed the film was the Ski Club Alpine, a bunch of Southern California ski racers, the leading ski club in that part of the world at the time, and they said, ‘Let’s do it!’ The audience laughed at my stories, not just polite laughs, but amazingly loud belly-laughs. The film really worked, even though I had no script other than the one that was lodged in my brain.”

“I had absolutely no training whatsoever in motion picture production, no idea of how to go from my 37 exposed, one-hundred-foot rolls sitting in their cans and end up with a final hour-and-a-half feature ski show on two 45-minute reels. I edited the film by blundering along."

Once exposed to the Sun Valley high life, which also included dalliances with a lengthy list of cultured high-society girls, Warren wasn’t quite ready for a 9-to-5 office job, and the standard 2.5 children plus a mortgage. Instead, he created his own career as the world’s foremost ski filmmaker. He spent the next several decades on the road 175 days a year, either filming in exotic locales or making personal appearances from Pasadena to Pittsburgh to show his movie.

In 1957, he married Dorothy Roberts. They had a son and daughter, Kurt and Chris, to join Scott. Warren ultimately married five times: however, his final one lasted more than 30 years -- twice as long as all the previous four marriages combined! He felt he hit it right when he married Laurie.

It was never easy, and there were frequent obstacles along the way. In 1953, with the film company on the verge of a glimmer of showing a profit, he was very happily married and the proud father of an 18-month-old son, Scott. Then his wife Jean, a dedicated partner, avid skier and model, died of spinal cancer. Within a few months, Warren lost most of his hair and gained 35 pounds.

That inaugural showing of Deep and Light in a Pasadena theater on a Friday night in the fall of 1950 began Warren’s life-long journey. He went surfing on Sunday, and the next day was back pounding nails for $2.25 an hour. It was then he realized he would have to make ski film No. 2.

Warren demanded that his films both entertain and inform his fans, and he insisted on telling the truth as he saw it. That sometimes got him in hot water. During a poor New England winter in the late 1960s, and while making an appearance on "Good Morning America," Warren recommended that skiers go West to find good snow. This led to several Eastern resorts banning him from their parking lots forever.

By the early 1960s, Warren’s film company was gaining even more steam. He added staff and moved into a new headquarters in Hermosa Beach, CA. His films helped to attract hundreds of thousands of people to skiing in its boom years, while some 500 new ski resorts opened in the U.S. from the1950s through the 1970s. Warren produced promotional films for a long list of resorts, including Vail and Telluride in Colorado; Sun Valley, Idaho; Snowbird, Utah; Alpental, Washington; and Sugarbush, Vermont.

Warren’s fledgling ski film grew in popularity and reach in the late 1950s. As a filmmaker, he annually traveled abroad to film Europe’s best resorts, and his films chronicled the rise of skiing in North America. When the Jantzen sportswear company recruited spokesmen in 1957 to represent the brand in national ad campaigns, Warren joined Bob Cousy, Bud Palmer, Frank Gifford, and Ken Venturi on the promotional team. Meanwhile, Warren branched out to produce dozens of outdoor, action-oriented films, including chronicling an ill-fated expedition to boat UP the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon.

Meanwhile, the film company carried the banner of skiing to countries around the world, including Russia, Israel, and China. Warren’s right hand man, Don Brolin, captured the first ski images behind the Iron Curtain in the early 1970s. When he returned from filming at the Russian National Alpine Ski Championships, he found 23 letters buried in his luggage. They were hidden there by Russians who hoped he would mail them to their relatives in the U.S. to let them know they were still alive. When the company filmed at a ski resort in Israel, artillery fire boomed in the background. If there was snow to ski on, the Warren Miller crew managed to get there.

In 1986, Warren brought on acclaimed rock music promoter Terry Bassett as his partner, and he began to think about toning down his 16-hour work days and hectic travel schedule. In 1989, he sold the film company to his son Kurt Miller and his partner Peter Speek. Kurt Miller and Speek sold the film company in 2001 to Time Inc., which had recently acquired SKI and Skiing magazines. Warren’s involvement in the film company ended in 2004, but he did return to appear in the film in 2016 to coincide with the publication of his autobiography.