Matchstick Productions: Channeling the Outlaw Spirit of Crested Butte

Words by: Katherine Nettles  |   Photos courtesy of Matchstick Productions

Murray Wais and Steve Winter didn’t initially set out to become filmmakers. “Honestly, we just wanted to ski,” says Steve. But as the two followed their passion for ski bumming and adventure, a path emerged to what has become an enduring career of creating action sports films and a vault of some of the ski industry’s most beloved ski movies. 

Murray and Steve have actually known each other since they were kids competing against each other in little league baseball while growing up in the suburbs of Seattle. “Our team won,” notes Steve. They went on to the same high school and then attended a (now decommissioned) ski academy at Wenatchee Valley College in central Washington. 

“We were on the hill every single day. We were snow camping and starting to get into backcountry skiing, backcountry camping and that kind of stuff, coming from kind of being city kids,” says Steve. “So we got a two year, associate’s degree in skiing.”

Murray says that experience taught them both that they wanted to make skiing a way of life. “We really liked the community around skiing, going to a resort every day, the mountain lifestyle and just being outdoors.” 

Steve remembers some early inspiration during their time at Wenatchee Valley College, when Greg Stump released his film, Maltese Flamingo. “As we were becoming die-hard skiers, we were starting to watch Greg Stump movies. And we were super addicted to his first couple films and would watch them nonstop, nonstop, nonstop…but we weren’t thinking about becoming filmmakers,” he recalls, so much as better skiers.

After graduation, Murray enrolled at the University of Oregon to study journalism and Steve went to Breckenridge to become a ski instructor. Steve says he didn’t love it, and after his second winter there he moved back to Seattle and started poking around using public access equipment. 

“You can borrow a camera and borrow editing gear, and you go shoot something that ends up being on a public access station. It’s kind of a community way to learn and get your first hand in broadcasting,” he explains. 

Steve then took a three-state road trip through ski areas, including Crested Butte, and took some footage along the way. He made it into a short film called Nachos and Fear.

This was in the pre-digital era of the early 1990s when pitches and purchases all had to be done in person, so Steve and Murray teamed up to take the film to Las Vegas to show it and make ski industry connections. They slept in the car one night and behind some curtains in a quiet corner of a hotel another night. “It was dirbagging at its finest for sure,” says Steve. A few small film jobs, including one for K2, came out of it. 

The CB start

Steve and Murray moved to Crested Butte in 1992 and began making Matchstick’s first ski film, Soul Sessions and Epic Impressions. Steve had visited another high school friend there previously. 

“It had the best community. It was not a roadside ski area, it was a real town with a real ski bum vibe and lifestyle that I loved,” he says.  Meanwhile, Murray graduated from college that winter. “I knew I wanted a rural lifestyle, and creative and different job,” he says, so he joined Steve in CB to help him finish Soul Sessions. It premiered in 1993. 

Murray was also starting a career as a freelance journalist and got assigned by Powder Magazine to cover the second annual U.S. Extreme Skiing Championships at that time. The contacts they made at that auspicious event later became well-known ski mountaineers and heroes of the ski industry, but at the time they were just ski bumming like Steve and Murray. “We met Seth Morrison, Shane McConkey, Kent Kreitler, Dean Cummings, Doug Coombs, Dean Conway, the list goes on,” remembers Steve. “We basically plugged in to a whole scene.”  

“Things were so much different then,” marvels Murray. He talks about the high cost of cameras and renting studio spaces in which to edit. They were mostly self-taught, learning to network and share space in editing studios. 

“Looking back on that first film for me is embarrassing,” says Steve. “It’s not edited great, we were just learning how to do all this stuff. Of course we’re proud of that era, being ski bums trying to make real ski films without a lot of corporate support. But where it has gone is mindblowing.” 

Murray concedes that at first it was hard to be creative in editing, given the limitations of the technology and the high cost of studio space and equipment. “You had to assemble that movie out of the VHS tapes as you went along. It was really hard to build narrative, it was hard to organize an emotional feel for it. You were putting clips next to clips, basically.” 

“Having a few mentors along the way in the film production world who were cool enough to say to these young kids, ‘here is how it works,’ made a huge difference,” Steve recognizes. 

“We just really wanted it,” says Murray.

That dedication paid off, as Matchstick went on to create more than 30 films, dozens of short films and commercial projects, partnered with Red Bull TV and Discovery HD, expanded into other sports like mountain biking and wake boarding, won dozens of awards and received four Emmy nominations. 

Matchstick was also a big part of an era that created skiing for film as a career. When they started out, the only pro skiers were ski racers. Ski films were beginning to feature skiers like Glenn Plake and Scot Schmidt but they would travel somewhere and shoot footage, then go back to real life and jobs. 

“There weren’t ski film movie stars,” says Steve. “Pro skiers really came along after our first couple movies. And we started pushing for companies to sign on skiers.”

The push came because something was shifting as the emerging sport of snowboarding captured the attention and imaginations of many younger people. A channel was opening for snowboarding films similar to what already existed around skateboarding and surfing, and Murray and Steve were asking more traditional marketing professionals to incorporate some of that spirit. 

“We really had an outlaw way. We were doing things that were really not the norm in skiing. That’s why we’re Matchstick Productions, to light a fire under the ass of the ski industry. To say skiing is cool. We were kind of butt hurt that snowboarding was so cool and skiing was so stuffy,” says Steve. “We were punks and listened to punk music. The outlaw spirit of Crested Butte that we wanted to bring to skiing was symbiotic.”

They also partnered with and became close friends with some of the skiers of that era of the same ilk, such as the legendary freeskiing and base-jumping pioneer Shane McConkey who died tragically in 2009 while filming a movie with MSP.

 Murray describes how after McConkey’s death, which jarred the ski community, “Red Bull ended up paying for the movie and giving all the proceeds to his widow.”

“It was an awesome thing to be involved with,” says Steve of the Emmy-nominated documentary they created, McConkey. “To be involved with something that wasn’t about money and making money on the back end of it, and just go out and make a really cool documentary about your buddy that was not only one of the most incredible humans but just a great skier and give all the proceeds to his family—it was amazing.”

Tragedy was not new to the industry, or to Steve and Murray at that point. In 1997, Steve was in a devastating helicopter crash in South America that killed two people and nearly took his life as well. 

“It was August and we were filming a segment for Pura Vida,” recalls Steve. A sharp turn without enough air speed caused the helicopter to crash into a mountain, and then slide approximately 100 yards before coming to a stop. The pilot died on impact, and the photographer died within hours. Steve recounts that he was resuscitated twice—once in the field and once in the operating room. He suffered spinal fractures and a spinal cord injury which ended his ability to ski. He was 27 years old.

“People ask me if it changed me or gave me more zest for life,” he muses. “But I was starting a film career, travelling the world, skiing a lot, taking a lot of risk already. It didn’t slow me down because the life I was living was already what I wanted. It just confirmed that what I was doing was what I loved,” he says, in a characteristic spirit of resilience and willpower.   

Their latest film, Calm Beneath Castles, premiered this fall and toured around the world bringing stoke to hundreds of thousands of people in live audience screenings with the familiar anticipation of yet another ski season ahead, and maybe dreams of skiing a new place or a new line. 

By all accounts, Steve and Murray say newer and more accessible technology has absolutely paved the way for higher quality work and more creativity. “It’s easier to tell stories, and to document. And even though it’s easier for competitors to come along and make films now, it doesn’t matter because it’s easier for us as well,” says Steve. 

Along those lines, they are looking at the next chapter for MSP incorporating more storytelling and connecting with viewers.

“We’re working on a project for next winter that’s going to be a little bit different, but have a lot of the same epic skiing of course, but have a little bit more story that is relatable to hardcore skiers but also that somebody who is not a hardcore skier can understand about why we live this kind of lifestyle, as mountain people in general,” says Steve. The goal is to represent more of why some people are willing to struggle and endure extreme elements, a challenging tourism economy of low pay and high rent and a rural community. “It’s hard for other people in cities to understand why they go through those hardships. But then you have those beautiful days in the mountains. And they don’t understand because they haven’t lived that lifestyle.”

Murray says he thinks the future in general of ski films is on solid ground, although the channels of distribution will always change for their millions of viewers. 

“There’s always going to be like-minded people that want to come together and celebrate something they are passionate about. Ultimately that’s what we represent,” he says. “We have this shared experience with millions of people of going out and skiing, and pushing yourself and finding the freedom of the hills, and celebrating snow and winter. I think as long as people want to do that it will continue to grow and move forward.”