From cotton to cornflakes and even asbestos, here’s how moviemakers have tried to reproduce snow

Part of a continuing weekly series on Alaska history by local historian David Reamer. Have a question about Anchorage or Alaska history or an idea for a future article? Go to the form at the bottom of this story.

As of this writing, Anchorage teeters upon the crisp precipice of winter. Soon, all our yards and trails and roads and a few sins will be covered by a soft blanket of snow. Alaskans know snow intimately, its sounds, feel and physics. We understand and recognize authentic snow in all its variations. Therefore, Alaskans can also discern the fake stuff used in movies and television. That is, we can typically identify a lack of natural snow but not the exact substitute. And the variety of substitutes in film history is an exciting survey of fire hazards, kitchen supplies, and actual poisons.

Movies set in the far north were one of early cinema’s most popular genres, sometimes collectively called snow pictures or northern pictures. Kids who eagerly consumed the lurid dime novels of the Klondike and Nome gold rushes eagerly consumed movies on the same topic years later. The cycles of nostalgia have been around for a long time. Still, there was a logistical issue to this demand. Northern movies required snow to establish the setting.

From the very beginning of narrative movies, there have been alternating ways of presenting snow on the big screen. The most obvious method for realistic snow is the actual product, location shooting. In the early California film industry, that often meant filming in the northern Sierra Nevada mountains, as with Buster Keaton’s “The Frozen North” (1922) and Ben Turpin’s “Yukon Jake” (1924). In the decades since, everywhere from Utah, to upstate New York, to Montana, to Washington state, to British Columbia have served as Alaska stand-ins with varying success.

Some directors insisted on shooting in Alaska and Canada for the novelty or enhanced reality. Albert Ira Smith filmed almost the entirety of “The Girl Alaska” (1919) in Alaska. Advertising for the film leaned into its slightly exaggerated claim as the “first and only photoplay ever made on Alaskan soil.” “Nanook of the North” (1922) was shot around Hudson Bay in Canada. And director Norman Dawn filmed two movies primarily in Alaska: “Lure of the Yukon” (1924) and “Justice of the Far North” (1925).

As Dawn told the Los Angeles Times in 1924, “The Alaskans are most friendly and helpful to picture makers who come up there; but they don’t like the poor imitation Alaskan pictures at all.” He continued, “To go to a picture theater when a pseudo-Alaskan picture, made in California, is being shown is to see and hear an uproar of laughter and good-natured razzing, such as these old sourdoughs can surely give.”

Apart from filming an entire movie on location in snow, some directors used editing trickery. For example, the 1920 film “Out of the Snows” features a member of the North-West Mounted Police struggling to prove he did not kill his fiancée’s father, as one often had to do a century ago. The movie’s exterior establishing shots were primarily filmed in actual snow at Lake Placid, New York. But the scenes featuring the principal actors, particularly lead actress Zena Keefe, were filmed inside cabin sets far away from the cold. Promotional material for the film claimed, “You never can tell!”

Authentic snow, however, causes a litany of on-set issues, even apart from the cold. It melts and is trampled during repeated takes. Moreover, using real snow means relying on ever-fickle nature to comply with the filmmakers’ whims and schedules. Unexpected warm spells or rain could erase their desired landscapes. The production of “Neeka of the Northlands” (1921) illustrates this issue well. During filming in King’s Canyon, California, temperatures warmed, and the snow began to melt. So, the crew poured paraffin (candle wax) onto the water to mimic the appearance of freezing over. Substances other than snow offered directors better control over their sets.

In some cases, the artificial snow was so stable that it was used more than once. Once the 1969 James Bond film “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service” finished filming, the crew for the smaller-budgeted “Downhill Racer” (1969) sports drama swooped into the same locations, using the same leftover fake snow. Artificial snow from “The Shining” (1980) production was subsequently used for “The Empire Strikes Back” (1980).

One of the first materials used to approximate snow on film was cotton. Highly flammable cotton. This was used on hot sets that frequently included open flames as part of the set design, like torches and candles. Once the extent of the fire risk was recognized, the practice ceased.

Another common early substitute for snow was cornflakes, painted or bleached white and sometimes ground. Cornflakes as fake snow worked better in the silent film era. As might be reasonably expected, the crunching of cornflakes under the feet of the cast impaired the recording of the dialogue, necessitating redubbing of the sound. The cornflakes were often mixed with another powdery substance to imitate the shape of mounded snow better.

Directors relied on a few different powdery substances to recreate the appearance of snow, usually materials that were widely available, finely ground, and would appear snowy on film. The most popular such substances included ground concrete, gypsum, salt, flour, and saltpeter (potassium nitrate). Crews sometimes mixed these substances in their attempts to mimic the real thing. The aforementioned “Shining” and “Empire Strikes Back” productions heavily used a mixture of Styrofoam and salt.

For many productions, powerful wind machines would blow the materials across the set to imitate snowstorms. As the Los Angeles Times described Norman Dawn’s work, he “didn’t depend on the salt peter snow and the made-to-order wind-machine storms, but took his company up into Alaska during the wintertime.”

Charlie Chaplin’s silent blockbuster “The Gold Rush” (1925) utilized flour and salt. Yet, the film illustrates the limitations of such methods. As the colorful characters strut through the supposed snow, they leave no footprints. Any accumulation on their clothes fails to melt when they go inside. And when Chaplin gathers some in his hands, it runs through his fingers like the fine salt and flour it was.

One early film, the 1922 feature “Homemade Movies,” leaned into the incongruity for a farcical take on the popular snow pictures. The many visual gags in the movie relied on the obviously contrived and fake nature of the set. A transition from a non-snowy to a snowy scene featured the actual dumping of salt onto the roads and roofs. The presence of palm trees is emphasized. And less vicious bears are dressed as polar bears.

Unfortunately, many of the materials were at best unpleasant to work with and at worst outright poisonous. In 1959, the future James Bond Roger Moore starred in “The Alaskans,” a short-lived TV show set in gold rush Skagway. It was filmed in California, so the actors had to perform while draped in coats and furs under the hot sun. Moore said, “For many shots they were using airplane engines rigged up to simulate snow storms and gales. The ‘snow’ was salt and gypsum and having that blown in your face by wind machines and plane engines is no fun. What was worse, the camera crew had gauze masks to protect them, and they were standing behind the camera, and we the actors had to take the full blast. At the end of every day, we had our eyes washed out and frequently the eyes were scratched from the gypsum.” He understandably despised the entire experience.

Asbestos — the extremely carcinogenic asbestos — was a snow substitute available on retail shelves into the 1960s. Products like Pure White, Snow Drift, and White Magic allowed families to recreate the look of winter in their homes and on their Christmas trees while unwittingly poisoning themselves every time they inhaled. Asbestos was also used to recreate snow in several popular movies, including The “Wizard of Oz” (1939) and “Holiday Inn” (1942). The latter film is most famous for introducing the song “White Christmas.”

For “Dr. Zhivago” (1965), the Moscow of 1905 was partially reconstructed outside Madrid, Spain. Mounds of marble dust were there used to recreate snow under the hot Spanish sun. Breathing in marble dust can cause serious medical issues like pulmonary fibrosis. Film crews of that era were unaware of how dangerous such materials were, but from experience, they wore masks or covered their mouths while filming snow scenes. They at least knew their throats felt irritated if unprotected during such shoots. As noted by Roger Moore, the actors did not have this option.

During the pre-production for the Christmas classic “It’s a Wonderful Life” (1946), director Frank Capra specifically rejected cornflake snow. Asbestos and gypsum were perhaps still in short supply from wartime material restrictions. So, he asked special effects expert Russell Shearman to create a more realistic alternative that looked and acted more like real snow.

Shearman mixed foamite, a foaming agent then used in fire extinguishers, with soap, sugar and water. The resulting concoction was then shot into the air from high-pressure canisters. The qualities of the mixture meant it fell gently, wafting in the air in a more natural manner. The foamite snow not only looked more like real snow but acted more like it, clumping in hands and on clothing, leaving proper footprints in the wakes of actors. Shearman, with staffers Marty Martin and Jack Lannan, won a Technical Achievement Award at the Oscars for this work.

Today, most movie snow is either authentic, SnowCel, computer generated, or created by snowmachines, the non-snowmobile version of snowmachines. SnowCel is made entirely of cellulose, paper essentially. Available in varying particle sizes, SnowCel can mimic everything from light to heavy snows, new fallen snow, or frost. It was first utilized in Neil Jordan’s “Company of Wolves” (1984). Making the snow look accurate remains challenging, but the industry has thankfully moved away from the outright poisons of years past.

Key sources:

Eschner, Kat. “The Crazy Tricks Early Filmmakers Used to Fake Snow.” Smithsonian Magazine, December 21, 2016.

Kingsley, Grace. “Real vs, Cinema Alaska.” Los Angeles Times, July 13, 1924, 13, 15.

Moore, Roger, and Ken Roche. The Roger Moore Story: TV Times Extra. London: Independent Publications, Ltd., 1972.

Quirk, Lawrence J., and William Schoell. The Sundance Kid: An Unauthorized Biography of Robert Redford. New York: Taylor Trade Publishing, 2006.

Sandberg, Mark. “California’s Yukon as Cosmic Space.” In Films on Ice: Cinemas of the Arctic. Edited by Scott MacKenzie and Anna Westerstahl Stenport, 134-147. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015.