A work in constant progress (and occasional regress).
Birthplace:
New York City, New York, USA
Born:
December 11, 1915
Died:
December 7, 2000
John Jay (1915–2000) was a pioneering American ski filmmaker. He helped fashion the ski film into its modern form, and shared his unique style in travel adventure lectures, books, and magazine articles for over sixty years. Jay was an early promoter of skiing, and his films captured the growth of the sport from early rope tows to helicopter skiing. He was commissioned by Williams College, the Canadian Pacific Railway, and Panagra airline to produce promotional films in the late 1930s. His first feature film was Ski the Americas, North and South (1940). During World War II he served as meteorologist, photographer and public relations officer with the 87th Mountain Infantry Battalion at Fort Lewis, Washington and later the 10th Mountain Division where he made training and recruiting films and evaluated equipment for winter warfare. Ski Patrol (1943), filmed in Sun Valley, was his second feature film and helped produce a wealth of new recruits. In late 1943 he was named Commanding Officer of the 10th Reconnaissance Troop. He wrote a History of the Mountain Training Center in 1944, which was released in 1948. From 1946 to 1970 he resided at Williamstown, but traveled the world filming and presenting in lecture format a new ski film each year. He "virtually invented the ski film in its modern form," said prolific ski filmmaker Warren Miller.
Director:
1946 The Best of John Jay
1953 Winter Paradise
1960 Olympic Holiday
1975 Winter Magic Around the World
1993 Ski Down the Years
Producer:
1946 The Best of John Jay
1953 Winter Paradise
1960 Olympic Holiday
1975 Winter Magic Around the World
1993 Ski Down the Years
Most data and links to images for the Movies section come from TheMovieDB (TMDB).
Additional data for Film Titles come from The Open Movie Database (OMDb).
At least one plug-in comes from IMDb.
Data are -- hey, it's a plural -- subject to the limitations of their sources. (For example, TMDB search results currently max out at 20.) I am limiting myself to free data sources for now. (No, a "free trial" is not free.)
While much of the above data are retrieved directly from outside APIs and other such sources, data from American Film Institute (AFI) and British Film Institute (BFI) were manually entered the old fashioned way into a MySQL database. Re BFI I took the following liberties:
Regarding profile removals and data corrections:
Filtering is applied here to film projects flagged as "adult" by TheMovieDB. Pending "popular demand" I am contemplating a login and profile system with preferences (such as whether to allow adult images to appear) and permissions (such as data entry).
Whereas the overall purpose of this website is to serve as a personal demo/portfolio/workshop of web and data skills, this Movies section is not meant to compete with or substitute for far more definitive movie websites.
Whether or not he still clings to an award which he won in 1986 as a film critic for his college's newspaper, Jeffrey Hartmann is not responsible for the texts of overviews and biographies supplied by external data sources.