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Roger C. Brown Bio

Roger Brown was born on January 13, 1935 in Boston, Massachusetts.He was raised in Swampscott, MA. where he attended public schools until his senior year.

He wanted to go to Dartmouth College, primarily because of skiing, so former graduates who were family friends suggested he enroll at Kimball Union Academy, a prep school with a reputation for being a back door to Dartmouth. In spite of having polio and being temporarily paralized and losing three months of the school year he graduated Cum Laude from KUA and was accepted at Dartmouth.

Roger’s father Gordon was an outdoorsman who loved to fish and hunt. Roger followed in his father’s footsteps and to this day loves to trout fish in the high lakes of Colorado. For a while, when he first moved to Vail, he was also a meat hunter, using venison to save on grocery bills.

Roger found out he wasn’t a good enough skier to make the Dartmouth ski team so at the end of his freshman year he and two other students travelled to Chile to train. Roger made the team when he got back and he raced in the American Olympic team tryouts, but a bad wreck in the downhill ruined his chances. That summer he got a letter from the Dean of the college essentially saying he would have to make a choice between sking and academics. He gave up the skiing.

Roger’s dad was the best friend he had in those years. Unfortunatley Gordon died of alcohol related problems when Roger was a junior at Dartmouth. It was heart breaking but it set him free to pursue a life outside the family business where his older brother was working.

Roger had a degree that made getting work easy, but he didn’t like any of the conventional jobs he tried and very often the bosses didn’t like him. Then one night he went to see a John Jay ski travel lecture film. Jay was charming but Roger wasn’t that impressed with the film. “I can do that and do it better”, he decided and he started saving money to buy a Bolex 16mm movie camera. He built living quarters into a Volkswagon bus and headed to Sun Valley, Idaho where he got a job in a ski shop and shot film on his days off. It was an expensive addiction but he learn how to shoot and by the end of 1960 he had pulled together a lecture film called “Out to Ski”. He had several showings with mixed success and went broke.

Gordie Butterfield, the Head skis sales rep for the West Coast, was with Roger on an expedition Roger organized to make ( and film ) the first ski descent of Mt. Rainier ( it turned out to be a second descent but the others took their skis off in some places and Roger’s expedition didn’t ). Roger kept in touch with Gordie and when the Rocky Mountain Head ski sales rep job opened up Roger took it.

Meanwhile, Bob Parker, a ski writer and editor, called Roger and asked him if he wanted to make a film for a new ski area that was about to be built called Vail. Parker had seen “Out to Ski” and liked it. Parker said they didn’t have much money but they could give him a piece of land instead of paying for his labor. Roger was on a salary with Head so this seemed like a perfect opportunity. A few years later he built a house in Vail and lived there until 1977. Goron, Mike, and Nick were born in those years.

In 1963 Roger was hired to do a film on the search for Noah’s Ark on Mount Ararat in Turkey. He was contacted by 7th Day Adventists but strangely the first meeting was held at a Nadick, Massachusetts Army base. It turned out the Army was providing a lot of special to equipment to “help find and recover the ark.” Roger found out later that an important Russian atomic energy plant was located sixty some miles north east of Ararat. He was part of a spying expedition.

While on the mountain Roger got to know a George Silverberg a scientist from the Naval Ordinance Test Station in China Lake, California. George told Roger about a high speed camera they used to photograph missile launches. It would shoot up to 500 frames a second. Noraml speed is 24 frames so the camera was capable of shooting extreme slow motion. Roger contacted D. B. Milliken, the company that made the camera, as soon as he returned to the States. They sold him an old second hand model but it worked just fine. Now he was able to shoot super slow motion ski scenes that no one had ever seen before.

Meanwhile Roger teamed up with Barry Corbet, a Jackson Hole climbing guide who had also attended Dartmouth. Both young men had interests in subjects like philosophy that were a part of the climbing scene but not skiing. They realized that if they wanted to separate themselves form the competition they would have make ski films that were different. The slow motion camera helped but more was needed, stories, metaphores, even poetry, or at least the recognition that skiing could be a ballet as much as an outdoor exercise. And like dance in ballet, the story was important but great skiing was paramount.

Then more luck fell their way. The Hart Ski Company had hired some very talented acrobatic skiers to demonstrate their skis. Roger and Barry were hired to make films about the Hart Ski Team. Hart gave Roger and Barry total creative license and they didn’t hesitate to use it.

“Ski the Outer Limits” made everyone a little nervous before it was released. Was it too different? Maybe, but it was also too late to change. Barry had had a terrible accident and had edited the show from a newly acquired wheelchair. It didn’t take long to find out how much people liked “Ski the Outer Limits” however. It was a huge success. Many people said it was the best ski film ever made. But the price was terrible. Barry Corbet was permanently paralized.

After several years Barry decided he didn’t want to do more sports films, it reminded him too much of what he could no longer do. Roger kept making ski films, introducing his sons to the film business in the process. But he wanted to get beyond ski films.

In the late ‘70s Roger made a documentary feature film called “The Edge”. It contained several different sports that are now called “exteme”, rock and ice climbing, hang gliding, surfing, acrobatic skiing, and scuba diving with sharks. John Wilcox, executive director of the ABC American Sportsman” series saw “the Edge” and hired Roger to do shows for him, a “first” descent kayaking show in the Devils Canyon on the Susitna River in Alaska, and then adventure shows all over the world. Eventually his sons worked on shows for Wilcox, first as soundmen, then cameramen, then directors. Now the whole family is in the adventure sports film business except for dad who is pretty old for the craziness that has evolved in extreme sports.

Roger received four national Emmys for his adventure show work, and dozens of grand prize and first place awards for his ski films. He has done Clio award winning commerials and second unit work on several features and helicopter camera work on Imax shows.

He has written a book “Requiem for the West” and he has built two houses along the way. He has always been broke or nearly broke, mainly because of divorces. Constant travel is not good for marriages. But he wouldn’t trade his life for any other. It’s been a great ride all the way.