Mike Marvin, a native of Tahoe City and fourth-generation Californian, hails from a family with a long history of visiting Lake Tahoe. His family's summer destination since the late 1930s, Mike's grandmother built one of the first lakeside homes in Tahoma in 1946, followed by three more Tahoe homes.
Mike attended Tahoe Lake School, Tahoe-Truckee High School, the Academy of Art in San Francisco, and the University of Nevada. His passion for filmmaking began in 1972 when he produced his first 90-minute ski movie, "Earth Rider," featuring a legendary ski-parachute jump off Yosemite's El Capitan, which marked the birth of extreme skiing in America.
This was followed by three more ski movies: "Children of the Morning," "Wingless Angels," and "Spirit," which won the Virgin Island Film Festival's best sports documentary award in 1976. That same year, Mike moved to Los Angeles to pursue his Hollywood career, starting with the studio movie "Six Pack" starring Kenny Rogers in his theatrical movie debut.
Mike's next project was adapting the novella "Legends of the Fall," which he brought to the attention of Hollywood studios. He wrote several drafts of the script and was commissioned by Edward S. Feldman to write "Hot Dog the Movie." The script was completed in 1982, and the movie went into production in Squaw Valley in 1983. The story is loosely based on Mike's true life adventures making ski movies around the world.
The fictionalized version follows a young freestyler named Harkin Banks to the championships at Squaw. "Hot Dog" opened at number two in the country behind "Terms of Endearment" and grossed $20,307,325 at the US box office, ranking #9 in box office for extreme movies in the entire history of the motion picture business.
Mike has continued to work in Hollywood, writing, directing, and producing almost three dozen movies, TV movies, and episodic TV. For the past five years, he has been the Head of Production for A-Mark Entertainment and has recently returned to independent producing. Mike is also an author, artist, and musician, with roots dating back to the Kingston Trio, of which his cousin, Nick Reynolds, was a founding member.
Mike still performs the music of the Kingston Trio with Joshua Reynolds, Nick's son, and Tim Gorelangton, a close family friend. His paintings hang in some of the most beautiful homes in the country.
