Roger Ebert

• 1. Introduction

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  Roger Ebert typed his last blog post two days before he died on the 4th of April 2013, signing off with words that could have come from any of his 46 years of reviews: "I'll see you at the movies." He had spent his final months writing about films even after cancer surgery had taken his jaw, his voice, and his ability to eat. What drove a man to keep reviewing movies while his body was failing him? And how did a kid from Urbana, Illinois grow into a critic whose opinions, in the words of The New York Times, propelled film criticism into the mainstream of American culture? Those are the questions this documentary will answer. Along the way, we'll meet the rival who became his closest friend, the filmmakers he championed before anyone else knew their names, and the television format that brought argument about art into living rooms across the country.

• 2. Urbana to Chicago

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  Roger Joseph Ebert was born on the 18th of June 1942 in Urbana, Illinois. His father Walter was an electrician; his mother Annabel was a bookkeeper. His paternal grandparents had come over from Germany; his maternal line ran Irish and Dutch. His first movie memory was of his parents taking him to see the Marx Brothers in A Day at the Races. He started a newspaper in his basement called The Washington Street News, wrote letters to science-fiction fanzines, and at age 15 was filing sports coverage for The News-Gazette while still a student at Urbana High School. By his senior year he was class president, co-editor of the school paper, and winner of the Illinois High School Association state championship in radio speaking.

  At the University of Illinois he ran The Daily Illini and befriended William Nack, later the sportswriter who covered Secretariat. His college mentor Daniel Curley introduced him to a reading list that ran from Crime and Punishment to Nostromo, approaching these works, Ebert recalled, "with undisguised admiration." A classmate named Larry Woiwode would go on to become the Poet Laureate of North Dakota. Ebert's first published review, of La Dolce Vita, appeared in The Daily Illini in October 1961.

  A Rotary fellowship took him to the University of Cape Town for a year, and he returned planning to complete a PhD at the University of Chicago. He needed income and applied to the Chicago Daily News, hoping editor Herman Kogan would recognize his freelance work. Kogan instead sent him to the Chicago Sun-Times, where city editor Jim Hoge hired him as a reporter in 1966. When movie critic Eleanor Keane left the Sun-Times the following April, editor Robert Zonka handed the post to Ebert. The paper wanted a young critic to cover films like The Graduate and the French New Wave directors. Ebert left his doctoral studies behind and never looked back.

• 3. The Critic Finds His Voice

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  Ebert's first review at the Sun-Times opened with a line about a French film "washing ashore" like the New Wave itself. Within a day of getting the job, he read Robert Warshow's The Immediate Experience, and the lesson he drew shaped everything that followed: the critic must set aside ideology and open himself to what he called "the immediate experience." That same year, 1967, he met Pauline Kael at the New York Film Festival. After reading his columns, she told him they were the best film criticism appearing in American newspapers.

  He found his footing early. Reviewing Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde, he called it "a milestone in the history of American movies, a work of truth and brilliance." He was one of the first critics to say so. He also wrote the first published review of Martin Scorsese's career, for a film then called I Call First, and predicted the young director could become "an American Fellini." He served on the jury at the 33rd Venice International Film Festival in 1972.

  In 1975, Ebert became the first film critic to win the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. Offered jobs at The New York Times and The Washington Post in the wake of the award, he turned both down. He would not leave Chicago. That refusal, as much as the prize itself, defined the kind of critic he intended to be.

• 4. Siskel and Ebert

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  Also in 1975, Ebert and Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune began co-hosting a weekly television show called Opening Soon at a Theater Near You, produced locally by the Chicago public broadcasting station WTTW and later picked up by PBS as Sneak Previews. The premise was simple: two critics, side by side, arguing about movies. They trademarked the phrase "Two Thumbs Up" to describe the moment they agreed.

  In 1982, they moved to commercial syndication with At the Movies With Gene Siskel & Roger Ebert, and in 1986 they moved again to Siskel & Ebert & the Movies through Buena Vista Television. They appeared on The Late Show with David Letterman sixteen times and The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson fifteen times. They were everywhere. Richard Corliss in Film Comment called their show a sitcom about two men "who live in a movie theater and argue all the time." Ebert took no offense. He conceded the show was not in-depth criticism, but argued that when he and Siskel had an opinion, "that opinion may light a bulb above the head of an ambitious youth who then understands that people can make up their own minds about movies."

  Behind the television bickering was something more complicated. In May 1998, Siskel took a leave for brain surgery and returned visibly changed, continuing to review films alongside Ebert until February 1999, when he died of a brain tumor. Ebert wrote of the early years of their partnership: "For the first five years that we knew one another, Gene Siskel and I hardly spoke. Then it seemed like we never stopped." A decade after Siskel's death, Ebert revealed that the two had once discussed with Disney and CBS a sitcom called Best Enemies, about two movie critics in a love-hate relationship. "Maybe the problem," Ebert wrote, "was that no one else could possibly understand how meaningless was the hate, how deep was the love."

• 5. The Great Movies Project

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  In 1996, Ebert wrote to Nigel Wade, then the editor of the Chicago Sun-Times, proposing a series of longer essays on great films of the past. Wade agreed. Every other week, Ebert would return to a film and write about it at length. The first film he chose for the series was Casablanca. A hundred of these essays were collected as The Great Movies in 2002. Two more volumes followed during his lifetime, and a fourth was published after his death.

  The project gave Ebert room to do something unusual: change his mind in print. He wrote in the introduction to the third volume that he had been simply wrong in his original review of The Godfather Part II, comparing his thinking then to the "brain cloud" in Joe Versus the Volcano. He admitted that seeing the director's cut of Blade Runner had genuinely improved his opinion of the film. And he wrote at length about how his view of La Dolce Vita shifted each time he returned to it, from adolescent envy of the glamour it depicted, to recognition of its tragedy, to something close to pity for its protagonist. "Movies do not change," he wrote, "but their viewers do."

  In 1999, Ebert founded the Overlooked Film Festival in Champaign, Illinois, later called Ebertfest. It was a concrete expression of a conviction he held throughout his career: that cinema outside major cities was booked by computer from Hollywood with no regard for local taste, leaving independent and foreign films invisible to most American moviegoers.

• 6. Voice Lost, Writing Continued

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  In 2002, Ebert was diagnosed with cancer of the salivary glands. Surgery in 2006 required removing a section of his lower jaw, leaving him disfigured and unable to speak or eat. He addressed the change publicly before his Overlooked Film Festival in 2007, posting a picture and paraphrasing a line from Raging Bull: "I ain't a pretty boy no more." He added that at least he was spared having to explain why he had once written Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.

  He turned to blogging. Peter Debruge later noted that Ebert was among the first writers to recognize the potential of discussing film online. His website, RogerEbert.com, had launched in 2002 and remained active. As of 2007, his reviews were syndicated to more than 200 newspapers in the United States and abroad. His final television series, Ebert Presents: At the Movies, premiered on the 21st of January 2011, with a section called "Roger's Office" in which his reviews were voiced by Bill Kurtis.

  He published his memoir, Life Itself, in 2011, covering his childhood, his career, his struggles with alcoholism and cancer, and his friendships. On the 7th of March 2013, he published his last Great Movies essay, on The Ballad of Narayama. His last review filed while he was alive was for The Host, on the 27th of March 2013. In his final blog post, he wrote that his cancer had returned and he was taking "a leave of presence," explaining that he intended to keep writing, now reviewing only films he chose himself. Two days later he was gone. A review of To the Wonder, filed before his death, was published posthumously on the 6th of April 2013, and another, for Computer Chess, appeared in July 2013.

• 7. How He Read a Film

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  Ebert's critical philosophy was grounded in a conviction he borrowed from Robert Warshow and made his own: "A man goes to the movies. A critic must be honest enough to admit he is that man." His own version ran: "Your intellect may be confused, but your emotions never lie to you." He tried to judge a film on its style rather than its subject matter, often repeating the principle that "It's not what a movie is about, it's how it's about what it's about."

  His four-star system was calibrated to context. He explained that asking whether Hellboy was any good was not the same as asking whether it measured up to Mystic River; the relevant comparison was The Punisher. He rated films against their own ambitions and their own genre. He gave Halloween four stars. He also gave Speed 2: Cruise Control three out of four, and when that review was cited for years as proof he was a bad critic, he defended it in 2013: "I'm grateful to movies that show me what I haven't seen before, and Speed 2 had a cruise ship plowing right up the main street of a Caribbean village."

  His negative reviews became their own genre. Of North, he wrote "I hated this movie. Hated hated hated hated hated this movie." Of Mad Dog Time, he concluded the film "should be cut up to provide free ukulele picks for the poor." Music critic Alex Ross of The New Yorker credited Ebert with teaching him how much could be communicated in a limited space, quoting the opening of his Badlands review: "They meet for the first time when she is in her front yard practicing baton-twirling." No throat-clearing. Just the fact.

• 8. Championing the Overlooked

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  Ebert wrote Errol Morris's first significant recognition into existence. His review of Gates of Heaven, a documentary about pet cemeteries, made Morris's reputation; Morris later credited Ebert directly with putting him on the map. Ebert called Michael Apted's Up films "an inspired, even noble use of the medium." He ended his review of Hoop Dreams by calling it "one of the great moviegoing experiences of my lifetime."

  He championed Werner Herzog for decades. At the Walker Arts Center in 1999, Ebert conducted a Q&A during which Herzog read his "Minnesota Declaration" defining his idea of ecstatic truth. Herzog dedicated his Encounters at the End of the World to Ebert. Ebert often quoted something Herzog told him: "our civilization is starving for new images."

  He wrote Martin Scorsese's first review. He endorsed animation as a serious form, writing in his review of Princess Mononoke that "animation shows" the essence of the world where realistic films show only its surface. He argued in print for Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata. He credited film historian Donald Richie with opening him to Asian cinema through an invitation to join the jury of the Hawaii International Film Festival in 1983, a festival Ebert attended frequently in the years that followed. His first published movie review had been of La Dolce Vita in October 1961. Fifty years later he was still trying to drag films that mattered into the light.