I am 75 years old, the next millennium is about to begin and I've been in the film business for 50 years. All this numerology has very little significance to me today and it had even less a half-century ago on the beach at San Onofre after a morning of surfing. I was standing alongside my Coleman camp stove eating a late breakfast and talking about my first-ever ski film.

I was earning $1.25 an hour as a laborer on the wrong end of a shovel. I had just finished a season of ski instructing at the brand-new Squaw Valley. They built the third chairlift in California and we could either ride it or one of two rope tows. There were four instructors in the ski school and on a busy day, we all would have a pupil. On slow days, I cautiously took 16mm movies of my friends skiing. I say cautiously because the $125 a month didn't buy much film to feed the voracious appetite of my camera.

That breakfast in 1950 at San Onofre was a critical one because afterwards we sat around and talked of how to finance my fledgling film company. Four of my breakfast friends agreed to loan me $100 each. That investment jump-started the company that still bears my name so many years later.

That $400 loan let me pay for a print of my new film and make a down payment on a 16mm projector and screen so I could show it. My grandmother loaned me my grandfather's wire recorder so I could copy some borrowed 78-rpm records and play my musical score. I already had put money down on a 1950 Chevy panel delivery truck to live in, and planned on using it to travel and show my film while personally narrating it. I was optimistic that I could get enough ski clubs to sponsor my film so that I might make enough money to produce my second annual film. That original $400 loan has taught me a lot of lessons.

I have learned there is a big difference between being cheap and being frugal. For many years, every $9 I was able to save on room and board and travel expenses was another roll of film I could buy to feed the insatiable appetite of my hand-wind, 16mm Bell and Howell movie camera.

I learned that if I'm not the first person in the ski lift line, someone else will be.

I learned to show my ski films anytime I could get more than two people to sit still for an hour and a half.

I learned I had to use a certain amount of marginal photography while I was going through the learning process of producing better movies. I diverted the audience's attention by telling stories.

I have learned that the world wants to laugh and that this doesn't happen nearly often enough.

I learned that those long, skinny things strapped to my feet have been a magic carpet that took me all over the world many times.

I learned that when I'm standing at the top of a hill, it doesn't matter who is with me. We all are equal. The enjoyment each of us gets while going downhill is what really counts. All the money in the world means absolutely nothing when you are zoned into a cobalt-blue sky with a foot of untracked powder under your skis or snowboard and your smile stretches from one horizon to another.

I learned that old saying, "pioneers die with their asses full of arrows," isn't necessarily true. Dave McCoy borrowed $84 against his motorcycle to buy the parts to build his first rope tow and ended up owner of Mammoth Mountain. When we first filmed Mike Wiegele in 1969, he didn't need any two-way radios because he didn't have any employees.

I learned that someone could start their own ski film business any time they want to. Why not? When I started in 1949-50, there were three or four pages of motion picture producers in the Los Angeles phone book and I was competing with every one of them for your entertainment dollar. At the same time, there were fewer than 15 chairlifts in North America. I wasn't smart enough to realize that, for the first five years I was in business, I had to work all day, all summer as a carpenter to pay the rent, then edit film at night.

In April 1952, my first son was born and six months later, his mother had a backache. Before the end of the year, the doctors operated, sewed her back up and said, "Warren, your wife has malignant cancer of the spine and will not live longer than six months." They were wrong. She lived nine months.

Sitting on the beach the day the doctors told me my wife was going to die, I learned that the waves had been breaking on that same beach for millions of years. They would continue to break on that same beach for many more millions of years. However, in 100 years, the world would be full of all new people. Hardly anyone still would be alive, including my nine-month-old son who was sitting beside me playing in the sand.

In Switzerland, I learned the value of positive thinking from an ice-climbing guide while filming from the bottom of a deep crevasse. "What makes you think this 80-foot-tall ice block won't tip over and kill us while we're down here?" I asked. His simple reply was, "What makes you think it will?"

I learned in New Zealand that a small, three-passenger Bell helicopter somehow can take off from a snowbank at 9,000 feet while carrying five men, five pair of skis and two complete camera outfits. I learned this while atop the Tasman Glacier after dark with pilot Mel Cain, cameraman Don Brolin and myself inside, and Jean-Claude Killy and Leo Lacroix tied outside to the runners like two dead deer.

I learned that when I booked a thousand-seat auditorium and only nine people showed up to see the movie, I had a lot of problems.

More important, on show nights such as that, I kept repeating something I learned the third time this non-attendance debacle occurred. An old vaudeville performer was managing the Opera House in Sun Valley in the fall of 1950 when I showed my first film. Almost no one bothered to come to the movie, so we split the box office gross of $17. My 40 percent amounted to $6.80. After the show, over a free cup of coffee at the employee cafeteria, he said, "I'm going to give you some advice I hope you never forget:

1) Always entertain the people who show up and feel sorry for those who don't.

2) You are going to work all your life to be a success overnight."

I learned that an 11-year-old girl, born with spina bifida and weighing less than a rucksack full of cameras, could leave a dent in my heart that remains today. She was the poster child for a March of Dimes benefit ski race and, when the celebrities got through having their pictures taken with her, I picked her up and took her to the top of the mountain on the lift. As I skied down with her in my arms, she gave me hugs that changed my life forever. Tracy Taylor was her name.

I learned that if I tell a story on film honestly and with conviction, I can move mountains.

I learned that Pappy Rogers, the general manager of Sun Valley when I lived in the parking lot during the winters of 1947 and 1948, was a man with a lot of compassion and understanding. We managed to sneak onto his lifts for two years. Afterwards I learned we indeed had been considered local color. We were something out of the ordinary guests could talk about. Way out of the ordinary.

I learned when I was a Boy Scout in 1936 that when I came back from a weekend of backpacking, I instinctively told stories about sleeping under a tree somewhere. I became a storyteller. And for the last 50 years I have been telling stories with the aid of film, music and a lot of very talented people who put the film together.

I learned that if I sold my film company to my youngest son at terms he could afford, I probably could have a job writing scripts and narrating his films for another five years. That was 10 years ago.

I learned to never tell a lie because I don't have a good enough memory.

I learned I am a 14-year-old kid trapped in a senior citizen's body.

During one year in the mid-1960s, I checked into 209 different hotels or motels while filming, presenting the film, and lecturing all over the world. That same year, I learned I could put my voice right on the film so I could spend more time with my family.

I learned that believing what they say about me in the newspapers is the fastest way down the road to obscurity. I have to believe in myself.

I learned that riding a unicycle is not as hard as it looks, but it takes three times as long to learn as you think. Learning to juggle while riding a unicycle takes even longer.

As one of the last people to start using metal skis in the 1950s, I quickly learned 40 years later to buy one of the first 20 pairs of fat skis that came to the U.S. While everyone in the lift line was laughing at my dumb-looking skis, I got to spend three years laughing my way through powder until the rest of the country finally caught on.

I learned that when I'm falling asleep at the wheel at 2:30 a.m. with 150 miles of driving remaining, two cups of very strong tea and three scoops of ice cream would keep me awake.

I learned that the people I was pointing my camera at were a lot better skiers than I was, or I wouldn't be pointing my camera at them. Don't try to keep up with them.

I learned life is not a rehearsal. If I wanted to do something else with my life, I had to go for it.

I learned that stepping off a boat onto a moss-covered dock in the dark can result in a 16-inch rod and a six-pack of screws in my broken leg. That single misstep this year caused me to miss my first ski season since 1937.

I learned that if I don't do it this year, I'll be a year older when I do.