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 20^th 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 20^th 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.