For most people around the world who know it, the name Spider Sabich conjures images of ski country’s most lurid true crime tale, set in the decadent Aspen of the 1970s, in which he — the dashing young ski champion — is shot dead by his starlet girlfriend.
His accomplishments as an athlete, his groundbreaking efforts for ski racers to make a living, and the beloved 31-year-old human who died on March 21, 1976, have been largely lost to history. They’ve been overshadowed by the circumstances of the day he was shot by singer Claudine Longet, the international media frenzy surrounding her 1977 trial in Aspen, her controversially light sentence and the decades of silence from Sabich’s intimates that followed.
Amy Redford, the Utah-based filmmaker and daughter of screen legend Robert Redford, is now directing a feature-length documentary to tell the whole Sabich story.
“The essence and heart of this is to talk about Spider’s life, and not just about his death,” Redford said this week.
Redford, whose father based his character in the 1969 film “Downhill Racer” on Sabich, has partnered with Sabich’s daughter, Missy Greis, who is producing along with veteran film producer Tina Elmo, best known for the acclaimed 2018 surfing documentary “Momentum Generation.”
They have a head start on making the film, as the retired World Cup racers Mark Taché and Christin Cooper have donated their voluminous Sabich archive to Greis. It includes more than 50 hours of interviews, thousands of ski photographs and film footage. Taché and Cooper gathered that material as they campaigned for Sabich to gain induction into the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame, and in 2022 created the hourlong tribute “Spider Lives” for the Bob Beattie Ski Foundation, which dissolved last year.
Redford plans to announce the documentary project Thursday, when the Aspen Historical Society is hosting a screening of “Spider Lives” at the Wheeler Opera House in Aspen. The event, which includes a discussion with Redford, Taché and Cooper, will raise funds for the Historical Society and Aspen Valley Ski and Snowboard Club.
Redford said she would begin filming interviews with Aspenites this week while in the ski town. Her creative team is putting “sweat equity” into it right away, Redford explained, because they are eager to begin interviewing subjects who are ready to talk — many of whom are now in their 80s. Her team still needs to secure funding for the film, which will combine archival footage with contemporary interviews and animation.
“No one wanted to talk about it”
Sabich grew up as the son of a police officer near Lake Tahoe, California. A standout ski racer, he went on to compete for the University of Colorado, for the U.S. Ski Team at the 1968 Winter Olympics in Grenoble, France, and on the World Cup circuit from 1967 to 1970.
Robert Redford and Aspen novelist James Salter embedded with the U.S. team in Europe and traveled with them to Grenoble as the pair developed the screenplay for “Downhill Racer.” Salter wrote in his 1997 memoir, “Burning the Days,” that he was eyeing another Coloradan on the team, Billy Kidd, as inspiration for Redford’s character. Redford, though, was drawn to the quiet but wildly charismatic Sabich, who Salter describes as “golden, unimpressible, a bit like Redford himself.”
Amy Redford said her father put it this way: “The best parts of that character were inspired by Spider Sabich, the lesser parts were probably inspired by me.”
Sabich followed his coach and mentor Bob Beattie to Aspen and became a superstar through the upstart World Pro Ski Tour’s head-to-head professional slalom races. He won the tour championship in 1971 and 1972 and captivated sports fans through his fierce rivalry with Frenchman Jean-Claude Killy. His movie-star looks and rock-star charm helped fuel his off-the-slope celebrity status, landing him on the cover of GQ magazine in November 1974.
He became the face of American ski racing for the “Wide World of Sports” generation and the avatar of Aspen’s wildhearted ’70s ski bum era spirit, which Amy Redford said she is eager to capture in her film.
Those closest to Sabich were shocked into silence after his death and as the tabloids descended.
“I think it was such a devastation when it happened,” recalled Taché, who grew up in Aspen idolizing Sabich. “No one wanted to talk about it because, of course, the tragedy was about this other thing.”
Longet claimed she shot Sabich by accident at the home he built in Aspen’s Starwood neighborhood (made famous by the 1971 John Denver song “Starwood in Aspen” but not yet the billionaire haven it is today). Convicted of negligent homicide in 1977, she was sentenced to 30 days in the Pitkin County Jail and was permitted to serve her sentence only on weekends. Now 82, Longet has not spoken publicly about it since settling a 1979 civil lawsuit brought against her by the Sabich family, but remained in Aspen. Last summer, she put her Red Mountain home on the market for $39 million.
“Handled with a lot of care”
Redford understands the weight of being entrusted with this story from Sabich’s friends and family nearly five decades after his death.
“This community is so deeply protective and really steadfast about not letting this become an exploited story,” Redford said. “And that just doesn’t happen that often these days, when everything is up for grabs. … It has to be handled with a lot of care and because of that I feel incredibly morally accountable to Missy, to her mom and to that community.”
Redford grew up splitting time between New York and her family’s Sundance Mountain Resort in Utah, and has been living in Utah full-time since 2018. There, she befriended Greis, who grew up in Aspen but has long been based in Salt Lake City, where she founded Publik Coffee Roasters. The pair bonded over their fathers’ intertwined legacies and, eventually, over the desire to tell the Spider Sabich story.
“We completely trust Amy as the steward of this story,” Greis said.
Greis and her mother, CU ski racer and Aspenite DeDe Brinkman, didn’t reveal publicly that Sabich was her father until 2022. Brinkman and Sabich grew up together in California, were classmates at CU, both settled in Aspen, and Brinkman had Missy in 1967.
At Sabich’s posthumous induction into the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame in April 2022 in Snowmass Village, Greis stood on her father’s behalf for the induction, surrounded by his U.S. Ski Team teammates including former CU athletic director and ski coach Bill Marolt, Kiki Cutter, Moose Barrows and Billy Kidd, who introduced Missy: “Spider now lives in our hearts and our memories, and Spider and the legacy of Spider will live in Missy and Grace, his daughter and granddaughter, and as of tonight, Spider is going to live in the place he belongs, in the Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame.”
Brinkman, Missy and Grace Greis were also among those who did interviews with Taché and Cooper, whose tribute began as a planned 6-minute short film as part of a campaign to get Sabich into the Hall of Fame. They hatched that plan with Beattie before his death in 2018, and discovered a community of skiers and friends ready to memorialize Sabich and tell their stories after a decadeslong reticence.
“Once we got into a few of the interviews, it was like, ‘Whoa, this needs to be much bigger than a 6-minute tribute film,’” Tache recalled. “This is important.”
Redford aims to portray Sabich’s life and legacy in full, she said, and his unique gifts on and off the snow: “To have grace, and generosity, and tenacity, and humor, which are all these qualities that he possessed, putting those qualities forth as something to uphold is really critical, especially in this moment.”