Remembering Roger Ebert
Memories ten years along
I wrote about Roger Ebert the day he passed.
EVERYTHING THAT ROGER EBERT WAS, was a newspaperman, and was because he was a newspaperman. Ink, and then film, and then ink about film. That would include appreciating the movement of careers, the motion of plots, like a sportswriter. That would include the late-night badinage of the ink-stained, as in the many years spent, without regret, at O’Rourke’s and the Old Town Ale House. That would include the competitive urge with The One Across Michigan Avenue, the one called the Chicago Tribune. But also the one called “Gene Siskel.” Plus, words and paper with racy asides and winning wisecracks. (And in later years, wisecracks sketched quickly on a small pad of paper and handed to you.) Television didn’t make Roger Ebert, but in a small, small way, Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel made television. (And when I was a guest on the show after Siskel’s death, Ebert’s key words of advice were, you’re not doing this or that, it’s not even conversation, you’re committing television.) Words. Anecdotes. There are a lot of them.
In this month’s print edition of Newcity, I wrote about this year’s Ebertfest.
Of the many, many functions of movies, the entire industrial apparatus, from stem to stern, from page to soundstage to cinema, Roger believed at his most optimistic and utopian, furthers fellowship through shared moments, even those that are shared across time, a movie’s lifetime, our own.
I wrote about knowing Ebert when Steve James’ Life Itself opened in 2014.
Aside from a lifetime interest in dirty jokes—a subject sorely missing from the film of Life Itself—Roger would sometimes shout a joke at the screen, and it was almost always a perfectly timed and shaped zinger, more for the glory of the joke than for the joker. He wasn’t a heckler: he just couldn’t help but share a good one. I remember four or five or more times he volleyed what must have been a favorite retort: “It took more than one man to change my name to Shanghai Lily!” I also remember the entire screening room cracking up each and every time.
I wrote in 2013 about the first edition of Ebertfest without Ebert.
The weekend before, I was at a dinner at the Sarasota Film Festival where custom holds that each table had to put forward one guest to offer a joke or a story or a toast. The round began with AC/DC’s Brian Johnson, reciting a filthy limerick, the odd chance and lilt of which would have made Roger laugh. I offered these words: “We take the moment and artists for granted. And this moment at this gathering is special, like all moments. I never expected Roger Ebert to go. I met him when I was nineteen and as a weekly reviewer in Chicago, saw him movie after movie for years and years until the end of his season. Once I toasted him with this toast: ‘To more time, in a time without limits.'” That eddied through the fourteen programs of Ebertfest: time, frozen, shared, lavished to an admiring crowd from beyond the beyond. Before Days of Heaven, young filmmaker Grace Wang, one of Ebert’s “far-flung correspondents,” showed her debut short. “I thought there was more time,” she said, regretting she didn’t thank him in the credits. “I sent him a photo of this absurdly small cassette [of my film], telling him, ‘This is a moment.’ And he wrote back just five words: ‘A moment for a lifetime.'”
I interviewed Vincent Gallo directly after he had Ebert had reconciled over The Brown Bunny.
Gallo paced outside the screening, fidgety the way he was later in the evening when he and I talked during a Landmark Century preview.
After the screening, to publicist Ryan Werner’s keen approval, Ebert and Gallo talked. And talked. The pair went back into the forty-nine-seat room, letting the doors shut behind them. What had been a planned half-hour conversation went on and on, over an hour. No cries of bloody murder from inside, only a warm, busy murmur of conversation. When Gallo and Ebert walked into the corridor, they each had small, satisfied smiles. The other reviewers and the camera were gone. Ebert declared he was wrong, and soon wrote that he considered The Brown Bunny to be a very good movie, three stars even.
I wrote about Roger’s final Ebertfest in 2012.
All the movies here are about forgiveness and mortality, I message a friend in the midst of last week’s fourteenth edition of Ebertfest in Champaign-Urbana.
The quick, glib text in turn: “Isn’t that all movies, really?”
… The event that promised to be most resonant in this moment of the handover from celluloid to digital was Sunday noon’s closing attraction, a projection of the Blu-Ray of “Citizen Kane,” with Ebert’s time-honed commentary track playing. (He’d presented the film to audiences for many years, doing shot-by-shot analysis.) Ebert’s wife, Chaz, said it was an opportunity to hear his voice in the expanses of the theater one more time, since he hasn’t spoken since his surgeries of 2006. When Ebert makes a brief introduction with the help of the generic voice program on his MacBook, the crowd cheers and stands. Ebert scowls, gestures, sit down, siddown already!
The heavy red velvet curtains part, “An RKO Radio Picture” appears—a radio tower girdling the globe and transmitting worldwide—with the words: “This is Roger Ebert, watching Citizen Kane with you.” Okay, I tear up. The surge of Orson Welles’ images take over immediately, as does Ebert’s two-hour nonstop weave of history and observations. The last words spoken are, “I’m Roger Ebert. I hope you’ve enjoyed seeing Citizen Kane.” The curtains close, the lights rise. Chaz moves center stage, in front of the red velvet waves and folds. She weeps. “It’s actually the first time I ever saw it,” Chaz says through tears. “After all these years, I’m glad I saw it on this big screen with Roger back there—and have his voice—in the Virginia Theatre—” She sobs, can’t go on, the audience applauds. “I’ve seen ‘Citizen Kane’ many, many times but we’re always so busy, I didn’t have time to stop and listen to the commentary track!”
Festival director Nate Kohn appears on stage with a scrap of paper, from the Big Chair at the very back of the hall. “I have a note from Roger he wants me to read,” Kohn says. “He sends his apologies to the lady in the lobby who was loudly demanding her money back because he kept talking during the movie.” The audience laughs. Roger, heard once more; still.
