VAIL, Colorado — Just over two decades ago, filmmaker Greg Stump — who visits Vail Thursday night — set a new precedent in ski films with his movie “Blizzard of Aahhh's.” While Stump's cameras captured Scot Schmidt, Glen Plake, and Mike Hattrup dropping off sheer cliffs, the film shoved the sport of U.S. freeskiing out of the fringes and into the mainstream.

Stump, a pioneering-freestyle-skier-turned-ski-filmmaker, set a new standard in ski films in the late ‘80s, and now he's circling back with his latest project, aptly titled “Legend of Aahhh's,” which will premier this fall.

“The truth is, it's a thinly-disguised memoir,” Stump said. “But I'm propagandizing it as the history of big mountain skiing through the vehicle of the ski film from the 1930s ... to what the kids are doing today.”

And of course, it's all from Stump's interesting-yet-entertaining point of view.

“It's from my perspective, so its completely twisted,” Stump said during a phone interview this week. “The music is wonderful. It's really good. There's nothing like it out there right now.

“Its kind of Ken Burns-y, but way funkier. Imagine if Ken Burns drank for 20 years, did a lot of acid and then made a movie. I'm saying that obviously mocking, but you get the idea.”

Stump will preview 15 minutes of the film at tonight's Vail Symposium Unlimited Adventure event. Attendees will also be treated to clips from many of Stump's ski films over the years, all with the filmmaker's trademark sense of humor.

“He's crazy,” said Carrie Marsh of the Vail Symposium. “Bottom line is Greg Stump's presentation is going to be extremely entertaining. Even if you don't like skiing, this is the one to see. He's a legend in his own right, from the use of music to innovative ways of showing the best skiers out there. Greg is certainly a maverick in the ski film industry.”

A master poet

Stump has been working on this latest film for two years, he said.

“'Legend of Aahhhs' is an intense project,” Stump said. “It circles around how ‘Blizzard' changed so many things.”

Though “Blizzard of Aahh's” is the film that really put Stump on the map, it wasn't his first foray into crazy ski films.

“I was making ski movies for seven years before I hit my stride with ‘Blizzard,'” he said.

Along with skiers plunging over cliffs and dropping down near-vertical chutes, it's his early films' soundtracks that also set them apart. From Seal and Iggy Pop to The Beastie Boys and Frankie Goes to Hollywood, the music added to the appeal.

But Stump does more than make ski movies. He's produced, filmed and directed hundreds of commercials and music videos for national and international clients including Swatch Watch, Coors, Adidas, Salomon, Wrigley's, United Airlines, and, in 2000, a Disney Super Bowl commercial starring skateboard legend Tony Hawk.

His musician subjects include some heavy hitters as well — Willie Nelson, Seal, Kris Kristofferson, Merle Haggard, Neil Young, Los Lonely Boys, Dinosaur Jr. and The Beach Boys.

But it's that first one, Willie Nelson, that sticks out to Stump, even though he wasn't a fan of the musician before he filmed a show Nelson put on in Maui.

“I never met him that night. We were flies on the wall and he barely knew a camera crew was there. But oh my God, I thought, this guy is a master poet. I get it now.”

Though he wasn't being paid for the film, and Nelson hadn't even given the project his blessing, he spent six months editing the footage and finally got the chance to show it to Nelson.

“I'm sweating bullets, just as nervous as can be,” Stump said. “I'm hung over, dripping sweat. Willy is sitting behind me and my friends are standing by the door. Shaking, I turn this thing on. This opening I made played and Willie Nelson leans over and says, ‘Can you stop that?'

“I'm going ‘Oh man, he's not even going to see it' but then he said to me, ‘That opening you just put in there, that's one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen.”

To this day, he and Nelson remain friends and Stump says he'll likely be filming Nelson's son in the near future.

“Lukas (Nelson), who I got to know when he was a little kid, is now 21 and he's playing guitar like Jimmy Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughan rolled into one and singing like his dad and Bob Dylan. He opened for B.B. King, Blues Traveler and Dave Matthews Band. And not just because he's Willie's son. He's killing it on stage.”

High Life Editor Caramie Schnell can be reached at 970-748-2984 or cschnell@vaildaily.com.