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In Remembrance: Otto Lang
Otto Lang, the skiing instructor who became an Academy Award
nominated film producer, has passed away on January 30, 2006 in
Seattle Washington. He was 98.
Born on January 21, 1908 in Tesanta, a small town outside of
Sarajevo in what is now Bosnia-Herzegovina, Lang was taught to ski
by a Norwegian family friend. He later studied with famed instructor
Hannes Schneider, developer of the Arlberg technique of teaching
skiing which is still used today.
Immigrating to
the United States in 1936, Lang eventually settles at Mt. Rainier in
Washington, where he opened a ski school at Paradise Lodge. One of
his students was Gretchen Fraser, the first American skier to win an
Olympic gold medal in 1948.
Lang had his first brush with Hollywood when his own skiing was
featured in the 1936 documentary short Ski Flight (aka
Snow Flight). The independently produced film was shown across
the country, most notably before Disney’s Snow White And The
Seven Dwarfs during its run at New York City’s Radio City Music
Hall.
In 1937, Lang donned a blond wig to perform a difficult skiing stunt
for Sonja Henning for the 20th Century Fox romantic
comedy Thin Ice, which was shooting on location at Paradise
Lodge. Lang agreed to do the stunt so long as no pictures were taken
of him in drag in Henning’s costume. In his 1994 autobiography A
Bird Of Passage: The Story Of My Life From The Alps Of Austria To
Hollywood, USA, Lang regretted that he had made such a demand,
calling himself “an old-fashioned prude.”
The famed Sun Valley Resort in Idaho invited Lang to become
co-director of their ski school in 1939. When the romantic comedy
Sun Valley Serenade came to the resort for filming in 1941, Lang
served as the film’s technical director for the skiing sequences.
However, it wasn’t until resort founder W. Averell Harriman asked
Lang to give skiing lessons to 20th Century Fox studio
chief Darryl Zanuck that he began his second career as a motion
picture director and producer.
After some on the job training as the third assistant director on
the 1943 western The Ox-Bow Incident, Lang directed his first
film, the documentary short They Fight Again (1944). He would
also direct the short feature The Art Director (1949) and
direct abd produce the shorts Vesuvius Express (1953) and
The First Piano Quartette (1954). Lang would receive Best
Documentary Short Subject Academy Award nominations for Vesuvius
Express and The First Piano Quartette as well as for
Jet Carrier (1954), which he produced.
In addition to his directing jobs, Lang took a hand at producing,
most noteably the Jimmy Steart film noir Call Northside 777
(1948) and the Oscar nominated espionage drama 5 Fingers
(1952) which starred James Mason. Lang also served as the associate
producer for the Japanese sequences for the Pearl Harbor docu-drama
Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970).
Lang’s first feature film was the 1957 Cinerama documentary
Search For Paradise. He would only direct one other
feature-length film in his career, the adventure Fury River
(1961). The balance of Lang’s directorial career was spent in
television, working on such shows as Highway Patrol, The
Rifleman, Bat Masterson, Sea Hunt, The Dick
Powell Show, Surfside 6, Hawaiian Eye, Cheyenne,
The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and Daktari.
In addition to his various Academy Award nominations, Lang was
inducted into the U.S. National Ski Hall Of Fame in 1978. |
