Roger Ebert dies at 70

[Dalton]

Breaking news from the Sun-Times...

Roger Ebert loved movies.

Except for those he hated.

For a film with a daring director, a talented cast, a captivating plot or, ideally, all three, there could be no better advocate than Roger Ebert, who passionately celebrated and promoted excellence in film while deflating the awful, the derivative, or the merely mediocre with an observant eye, a sharp wit and a depth of knowledge that delighted his millions of readers and viewers.

“No good film is too long,” he once wrote, a sentiment he felt strongly enough about to have engraved on pens. “No bad movie is short enough.”

Ebert, 70, who reviewed movies for the Chicago Sun-Times for 46 years and on TV for 31 years, and who was without question the nation’s most prominent and influential film critic, died Thursday in Chicago. He had been in poor health over the past decade, battling cancers of the thyroid and salivary gland.

He lost part of his lower jaw in 2006, and with it the ability to speak or eat, a calamity that would have driven other men from the public eye. But Ebert refused to hide, instead forging what became a new chapter in his career, an extraordinary chronicle of his devastating illness that won him a new generation of admirers. “No point in denying it,” he wrote, analyzing his medical struggles with characteristic courage, candor and wit, a view that was never tinged with bitterness or self-pity.

Always technically savvy — he was an early investor in Google — Ebert let the Internet be his voice. His rogerebert.com had millions of fans, and he received a special achievement award as the 2010 “Person of the Year” from the Webby Awards, which noted that “his online journal has raised the bar for the level of poignancy, thoughtfulness and critique one can achieve on the Web.” His Twitter feeds had 827,000 followers.

Ebert was both widely popular and professionally respected. He not only won a Pulitzer Prize — the first film critic to do so -- but his name was added to the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2005, among the movie stars he wrote about so well for so long. His reviews were syndicated in hundreds of newspapers worldwide.

The same year Ebert won the Pulitzer -- 1975 -- he also launched a new kind of television program: “Coming Soon to a Theater Near You” with Chicago Tribune movie critic Gene Siskel on WTTW-Channel 11. At first it ran monthly.

The combination worked. The trim, balding Siskel, perfectly balanced the bespectacled, portly Ebert. In 1978, the show, retitled “Sneak Previews,” moved to PBS for national distribution, and the duo was on their way to becoming a fixture in American culture.

“Tall and thin, short and fat. Laurel and Hardy,” Ebert once wrote. “We were parodied on ‘SNL’ and by Bob Hope and Danny Thomas and, the ultimate honor, in the pages of Mad magazine.”

His colleagues admired him as a workhorse. Ebert reviewed as many as 285 movies a year, after he grew ill scheduling his cancer surgeries around the release of important pictures. He eagerly contributed to other sections of the papers -- interviews with and obituaries of movie stars, even political columns on issues he cared strongly about on the editorial pages.

In 1997, unsatisfied with spending his critical powers “locked in the present,” he began a running feature revisiting classic movies, and eventually published three books on “The Great Movies” (and two books on movies he hated). A second column, his “Movie Answer Man” allowed readers to learn about intriguing little details of cinema that only a Roger Ebert knew or could ferret out.

That too became a book. Ebert wrote more books than any TV personality since Steve Allen -- 17 in all. Not only collections of reviews, both good and bad, and critiques of great movies, but humorous film term glossaries and even a novel, Behind the Phantom’s Mask, that was serialized in the Sun-Times. He even wrote a book about rice cookers, The Pot and How to Use It, despite the fact that he could no longer eat. In 2011 his autobiography, Life Itself won rave reviews. “This is the best thing Mr. Ebert has ever written,” Janet Maslin wrote in The New York Times. It is, fittingly enough, being made into a movie, produced by his longtime friend, Martin Scorsese.

Roger Joseph Ebert was born in Urbana on June 18, 1942, the son of Walter and Annabel Ebert. His father was an electrician at the University of Illinois, his mother, a bookkeeper. It was a liberal household -- Ebert remembers his parents praying for the success of Harry Truman in the election of 1948. As a child, he published a mimeographed neighborhood newspaper, and a stamp collectors’ newspaper in elementary school.

In high school, he was, as he later wrote, “demented in [his] zeal for school activities,” joining the swim team, acting in plays, founding the Science Fiction Club, co-hosting Urbana High School’s Saturday morning radio program, co-editing the newspaper, being elected senior class president.

He began his profesional writing career at 15, as a sportswriter covering the high school beat for the News-Gazette in Champaign-Urbana.

Ebert went on to the University of Illinois, where he published a weekly journal of politics and opinion as a freshman and served as editor of the Daily Illini his senior year. He graduated in 1964, and studied in South Africa on a Rotary Scholarship.

While still in Urbana, he began free-lancing for the Sun-Times and the Chicago Daily News.

He was accepted at the University of Chicago, where he planned to earn his doctorate in English (an avid reader, Ebert later used literary authors to help explain films -- for example, quoting e.e. cummings several times in his review of Stanley Kubrick’s groundbreaking “2001: A Space Odyssey.”)

But Ebert had also written to Herman Kogan, for whom he freelanced at the Daily News, asking for a job, and ended up at the Sun-Times in September of 1966, working part-time. The following April, he was asked to become the newspaper’s film critic when the previous critic, Eleanor Keen, retired.

“I didn’t know the job was open until the day I was given it,” Ebert later said. “I had no idea. Bob Zonka, the features editor, called me into the conference room and said, ‘We’re gonna make you the movie critic.’ It fell out of the sky.”

Ebert’s goal up to that point had been to be “a columnist like Royko,” but he accepted this new stroke of luck, which came at exactly the right time. Movie criticism had been a backwater of journalism, barely more than recounting the plots and stars of movies -- the Tribune ran its reviews under a jokey generic byline, “Mae Tinee.” But American cinema was about to enter a period of unprecedented creativity, and criticism would follow along. Restrictive film standards were finally easing up, in part thanks to his efforts. When Ebert began reviewing movies, Chicago still had an official film board that often banned daring movies here -- Lynn Redgrave’s “Georgy Girl” was kept off Chicago screens in 1966 -- and Ebert immediately began lobbying for elimination of the censorship board.

He had a good eye. His Sept. 25, 1967 review of Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway in “Bonnie and Clyde” called it “a milestone” and “a landmark.”

“Years from now it is quite possible that ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ will be seen as the definitive film of the 1960s,” he wrote, “showing with sadness, humor and unforgiving detail what one society had come to.”

It was. Though of course Ebert was not infallible -- while giving Mike Nichols’ “The Graduate” four stars in the same year, he added that the movie’s “only flaw, I believe, is the introduction of limp, wordy Simon and Garfunkel songs.’’

Ebert plunged into what turned out to be a mini-golden age of Chicago journalism. He found himself befriended by Mike Royko -- with whom he wrote a unproduced screenplay. He drank with Royko, and with Nelson Algren and Studs Terkel. He wrote a trashy Hollywood movie -- “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls’’ for Russ Meyer, having met the king of the buxom B-movie after writing an appreciation of his work.

In later years, Ebert was alternatingly sheepish and proud of the movie. It was the first “sexploitation” film by a major studio -- 20th Century Fox, though Time magazine’s Richard Corliss did call it one of the 10 best films of the 1970s.

Nor was not Ebert’s only foray into film writing -- he was also hired to write a movie for the Sex Pistols, the seminal British punk band in the late 1970s.

Eventually, Sun-Times editor James Hoge demanded that Ebert -- who took a leave of absence and went to Hollywood to write “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls” -- decide between making films and reviewing them. He chose newspapering, which increasingly became known because of his TV fame, which grew around his complex partnership with Gene Siskel.

“At first the relationship on TV was edgy and uncomfortable,” he wrote in 1999, after Siskel’s untimely death, at 53. “Our newspaper rivalry was always in the air between us. Gene liked to tell about the time he was taking a nap under a conference table at the television station, overheard a telephone conversation I was having with an editor, and scooped me on the story.”

In 1981, the program was renamed “At the Movies” and moved to Tribune Broadcasting. In 1986, it became “Siskel & Ebert & The Movies” and moved to Buena Vista Television, and the duo began the signature “thumbs up, thumbs down” rating system that Ebert came up with.

“When we left to go with Disney . . . we had to change some things because we were afraid of [violating] intellectual property rights,’’ he said. “And I came up with the idea of giving thumbs up and thumbs down. And the reason that Siskel and I were able to trademark that is that the phrase ‘two thumbs up’ in connection with movies had never been used. And in fact, the phrase ‘two thumbs up’ was not in the vernacular. And now, of course, it’s part of the language.”

“Two thumbs up” became their registered trademark and a highly coveted endorsement that inevitably ran at the top of movie advertisements.

Ebert’s cancer forced him off the air in 2006. After auditioning a number of temporary co-hosts, Ebert settled on Sun-Times colleague Richard Roeper in 2000. At its height, “Ebert & Roeper,” was seen on 200 stations,

All that need be mentioned of Ebert’s social life was that in the early 1980s he briefly went out with the hostess of a modest local TV show called “AM Chicago.” Taking her to the Hamburger Hamlet for dinner, Ebert suggested that she syndicate her show, using his success with Siskel as an example of the kind of riches that awaited. While she didn’t return his romantic interest, Oprah Winfrey did follow his business advice.

In his memoirs, Ebert writes of a controlling, alcoholic, faith-obsessed mother whom he was frightened of displeasing. “I would never marry before my mother died,” he wrote. She passed away in 1987, and in 1992 he married, for the first time, at age 40, to attorney Chaz Hammel-Smith (later Chaz Hammelsmith), who was the great romance of his life and his rock in sickness, instrumental in helping Ebert continue his workload as his health declined.

“She fills my horizon, she is the great fact of my life, she is the love of my life, she saved me from the fate of living out my life alone,” he wrote.

In addition to his TV and newspaper work, Ebert was a fixture at film festivals around the world – Toronto, Cannes, Telluride -- and even created a festival of his own, The Overlooked Film Festival, or just “EbertFest,” which he began in Champaign in 1999 and dedicated to highlighting neglected classics.

Between 1970 and 2010, Ebert made yearly visits to the University of Colorado’s springtime Conference on World Affairs, where he has presented frame-by-frame critiques of classic movies to enraptured audiences.

He has also used the conference to speak on a variety of subjects, from his romantic life to his recovery from alcoholism -- he stopped drinking in 1979 -- to the problem of Spam e-mail. In 1996 Ebert coined the “Boulder Pledge,” considered a cornerstone in the battle against spam.

“Under no circumstances will I ever purchase anything offered to me as the result of an unsolicited e-mail message,” Ebert wrote. “Nor will I forward chain letters, petitions, mass mailings, or virus warnings to large numbers of others. This is my contribution to the survival of the online community.”

Not only was Ebert eager to correspond with and encourage skilled movie bloggers, but he also put his money where his mouth is, investing early in the Google search engine and making several million dollars doing so.

Ebert received honorary degrees from the American Film Institute, the University of Colorado and the School of the Art Institute, He is a member of the Chicago Journalism Hall of Fame, and was honored with a sidewalk medallion under the Chicago Theatre marquee.

He first had surgery to remove a malignant tumor on this thyroid in 2002, and three subsequent surgeries on his salivary gland, all the while refusing to cut back on his TV show or his lifelong pride and joy, his job at the Sun-Times.

“My newspaper job,” he said in 2005, “is my identity.”

But as always with Roger Ebert, that was being too modest. He was a rennaissance man whose genius was based on film but by no means limited to it, a great soul who had extraordinary impact on his profession and the world around him.

“‘Kindness’ covers all of my political beliefs,” he wrote, at the end of his memoirs. “No need to spell them out. I believe that if, at the end, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhapy is where all crime starts. We must try to contriube joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn’t always know this and am happy I lived long enough to find it out.”

Survivors, in addition to his wife, include a step-daughter and two step-grandchildren.

[Flagg]

I never much liked him (especially his views on games as art) but he certainly shouldn't have had to go out like that. Cancer is a fucking bitch. RIP

[Lord Relvenous]

Wow. Just yesterday I read about how he was cutting back because of the cancer returning. This was unexpected.

While I don't have many feelings either way in relation to him, he did what he loved as long as he could. Gotta respect that.

[Thanas]

There was no other english-speaking critic like him. I always got a good sense of whether I would enjoy a movie or not from Ebert and there were only a few exceptions to that rule. He did quality work and will be missed.

[Isolder74]

Farewell to a great movie critic.

[DieselJester]

Farewell to a great movie critic.

Yup. RIP there Ebert. I might not have agreed with about 75% of your reviews, but nonetheless have fun continuing to critique any movies they have in the afterlife with your buddy Siskel.

[Broomstick]

I didn't always agree with him but he sure did know how to write well. I admired him for refusing to hide from view despite infirmity and deformity caused by cancer, but rather insisting on returning to as full a life as he could manage. RIP, Mr. Ebert, and my condolences to your family, friends, and fans.

[spaceviking]

I liked how his reviews were always honest. Many news paper reviews want the reader to think the critics are smart, rather than if the movie is enjoyable.

[Dalton]

There's a lot to be said for a man who wrote a book called Your Movie Sucks.

[Lord Relvenous]

Salon reprinted an essay today from his memoirs titled "I do not fear death".

http://www.salon.com/2011/09/15/roger_ebert/

[Alyeska]

Roeper had some nice things to say about Ebert giving a glimpse into his private life.

http://www.suntimes.com/19276472-761/if ... ebert.html

Roger would have told me to stop fretting and start writing.

After hearing the terribly sad news of the passing of my writing hero, my friend, my television partner, I sat at the keyboard and tried to come up with the perfect lead to sum up my feelings about Roger Ebert’s death.

Five, six minutes went by — an eternity when you’re on a self-imposed deadline. And all I could think of was the way Roger’s fingers just danced across the keyboard when he was writing a review or filing a story on Oscar night. It was like witnessing a musical genius on a Steinway. His fingers could barely keep up with the narrative flow he was creating on the spot.

Roger was a natural. When it was time to write, he’d sit down and start attacking that keyboard. If there’s such a thing as writer’s block, I never saw him confronted with it. He was the most prolific, the most gifted, the most dependable newspaperman I’ve ever known.

If there were a Mount Rushmore of movie critics, we’d start with Roger Ebert, and there would certainly be a place for the late Gene Siskel, and after that there would be room for plenty of debate.

But the discussion would start with Mr. Ebert.

It’s impossible to say how many directors, how many writers, how many actors were at least partially inspired to get into the business due to their exposure to “Siskel & Ebert,” and the thousands upon thousands of reviews, essays and interviews penned by Roger. All I know is, when I was with Roger at Sundance or the Toronto Film Festival or at the Oscars, it seemed as if not an hour would go by without some well-known film personality approaching to say how much they loved Roger’s work, and how much it meant to them and their families when he first mentioned their name in a review.

Shortly after I was named as the successor — I was never the replacement — to Gene Siskel, Roger and I were in New York on a press tour. We were walking through Rockefeller Plaza when a group of Japanese tourists crossed our path.

They immediately stopped, en masse, and started clicking away. Walking around with Roger was like walking around with a live-action cartoon character. People were just thrilled to see him suddenly enter their lives.

He was as famous as the biggest movie stars, as beloved in his home state as the most legendary sports figures. Roger was certainly aware of this, and he was as comfortable with his fame as anyone I’ve ever met — but it never defined him, it was never something he spent much time pondering.

The guy I spent all those hours with in the screening room, in the TV studio, at film festivals and dinners and traveling, was a guy who loved talking about his beloved wife, Chaz, and his family, a guy who loved telling stories about movie stars and the larger-than-life figures he called his friends, a guy who would wax poetic about his beloved Steak ’n’ Shake.

He was political. Everybody knew Roger was a card-carrying liberal, and he was never swayed by the chants of “Stick to movies!” Why should he stick to movies when he was as well-versed and as passionate about politics as half the elected officials in Washington?

He was corny. For years, Roger and Chaz would host massive Fourth of July parties at his home in Michigan, and Roger would always wear his wonderfully tacky American flag shirt while presiding over the karaoke contest and the barbecue and the dancing on the temporary floor installed in the backyard. You never saw him happier than when he was surrounded by family and friends.

He was kind. As a television partner, Roger was exceedingly generous. Even though he was risking the wrath of Disney for spilling the news too soon, Roger told me I had the job before Disney told me I had the job. When the news was made official, Roger took me aside and said, “This is a partnership. You’re not a guest on the Roger Ebert show. You’re my co-host. It’s a 50-50 deal.”

And so it was. We had equal time on “Ebert & Roeper.” The second time we appeared on “The Tonight Show,” Roger insisted it was my turn to take the lead and sit in the chair next to Jay, with Roger on the sofa.

The only thing better than seeing movies with Roger in the screening room on Lake Street in Chicago was talking about movies with Roger in the studio on State Street in Chicago. Years into the job, I’d be sitting there, wondering when someone was going to tap me on the shoulder and tell me to get the hell off the set. To this day, I shake my head in wonder when I look back at all the time I spent with such a great and wonderful presence.

The world lost a great voice today.

As many have said, I didn't always agree with Ebert. But the man was articulate, well read and educated, and extremely intelligent. Even when reading something you disagreed with, you knew the man had a point.

I have only read some of his political commentary. I wish he had written more. He was so well spoken, and so well written he could dissect a topic and get right to the heart of something. But perhaps his relatively light touch by only getting into politics on occasion was to his advantage. Here he was, a beloved and respected member of the American culture. Perhaps his limited political commentary gave it that much more weight and got people to read and consider things they didn't immediately agree with.

My heart goes out to Chaz and the rest of his friends and family. Ebert is once again reunited with Siskel. And the world is a little dimmer without his presence.

[Starglider]

Even when reading something you disagreed with, you knew the man had a point.

Except for his constant instance that 'video games are not, and will never be, art' (whereas any movie, however soulless clearly is).

[CaptHawkeye]

There was no other english-speaking critic like him. I always got a good sense of whether I would enjoy a movie or not from Ebert and there were only a few exceptions to that rule. He did quality work and will be missed.

I found myself agreeing with him on a lot of movies. He could reliably form his own opinion on a movie without adhering to what every other critic was saying about it. His views on video games were somewhat hypocritical but it's not like the video game industry has done a very good job proving him wrong.

[Alyeska]

Even when reading something you disagreed with, you knew the man had a point.

Except for his constant instance that 'video games are not, and will never be, art' (whereas any movie, however soulless clearly is).

He still had a point buried in there. While saying "they will never be art" is clearly wrong, what he says about current video games is alarmingly true. Very few video games can leave people with the same feelings of emotion they get from movies. Art is in the eye of the beholder. In my own opinion, I would say most video games are mass market trash. But there are still gems out there. Games that have managed to evoke certain feelings in us. Games that make us laugh. Games that make us cry. That inspire us. And today with the indie game movement, the creativity is bursting even while the AAA industry is sinking.

[Starglider]

Very few video games can leave people with the same feelings of emotion they get from movies.

That is a bogus criteria for 'art / not art'. A great deal of fine art (e.g. landscapes, portraiture, sculpture) is not emotionally evocative (for the averge viewer), merely aesthetically pleasing. Nearly all movies are storytelling which is inherently about emotional engagement, but that is not why movies are art. Games can have no story or characters at all and still be highly artistic, in fact high concept 'art games' are more likely than usual to have no conventional story.

Ebert's opinions on video games are a classic case of Boomer 'everything invented when I was a kid is cool, everything invented later is worthless crap'. They were literally immune to rational thought, the guy didn't feel the need to actually experience any sort of gaming before dismissing the entire medium. Being smart in one area doesn't make him immune to holding blatantly stupid and regressive opinions, as illustrated by countless other experts (e.g. Eric Raymond, great developer & open source evangelist, racist warmongering jerk).

[JLTucker]

His reviews, while adequate for the casual movie goer, were not his greatest contributions. His blog posts were.

[Vendetta]

in fact high concept 'art games' are more likely than usual to have no conventional story.

They're also more likely than usual to be absolutely terrible as games see: Dear Esther, The Path.

The thing with games though is that we engage with them on a completely different level to other forms of art. A game needs the active engagement of the player to do anything at all, and the different aspects the player brings to the game will materially change what the game presents. It doesn't really matter how artistic the design is, it won't be anything at all without a player, or if the player is dicking around and pointing the camera the the wrong way, or whatever.

Gaming, if it can be considered art at all, is performance art, but the player isn't just the audience, they're a performer as well.

Since Roger Ebert didn't play videogames (which he actually said), this isn't something that he would have any real appreciation of. Even if you watch a game being played well, there's a missing element which is "I should be doing that, not watching it".

[Darth Yan]

God Damn it. I liked the guy; his reviews were funny, insightful, and as Lord Wong said he was actually willing to say his own damn mind rather than simply going with the crowd.

[The Yosemite Bear]

Sharing a row and eating popcorn with gene now.

[JLTucker]

God Damn it. I liked the guy; his reviews were funny, insightful, and as Lord Wong said he was actually willing to say his own damn mind rather than simply going with the crowd.

This hasn't been true for years. Not only did he like a majority of the movies coming out, his reviews we more plot summary than anything insightful. He wasn't a good critic.

[phongn]

Ebert's opinions on video games are a classic case of Boomer 'everything invented when I was a kid is cool, everything invented later is worthless crap'. They were literally immune to rational thought, the guy didn't feel the need to actually experience any sort of gaming before dismissing the entire medium. Being smart in one area doesn't make him immune to holding blatantly stupid and regressive opinions, as illustrated by countless other experts (e.g. Eric Raymond, great developer & open source evangelist, racist warmongering jerk).

Ebert later recanted about video games: he said he had insufficient knowledge of the genre to honestly make an opinion either way (within his framework of "what is art").

[Havok]

RIP.

I usually shared his opinions on movies and he was a pretty good barometer of if I would like a movie.
I remember really looking forward to their show when I was a kid and it was pretty much the only non cartoon I liked besides Magnum P.I. and Star Trek.



Got me a little teary.

[Stark]

A more horrific vision of hell could not be imagined.

[Alyeska]

Ebert was an Atheist. Those editorial cartoons are by people with a religious agenda, or the ignorant.

[JLTucker]

Ebert was an Atheist. Those editorial cartoons are by people with a religious agenda, or the ignorant.

Wrong. He was a Catholic. His blog posts pointed out that much.

http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2013/03 ... holic.html