Thumbs Up for Roger Ebert

We tend to take for granted any pleasure, however acute, that is offered to us regularly; the gift becomes routine. Only when it’s removed do we realize how precious it was. And if, in some real-life Hollywood ending, the gift is restored, we can again savor the privilege, this time more acutely.

Roger Ebert, who’s 65 this week, began writing on movies 40 years ago, mainly as a critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, but syndicated to some 200 newspapers. He’s created a body of work — virtually all of it available on his handsome, helpful website — that is as broad, deep, reliable and rewarding as it is insanely prolific. I’ll take a blind stab and say Roger has written more than 10,000 individual movie reviews, plus another 3,000 or so essays.

Many of these have been collected into his 40-plus books on film. But on this five-foot shelf there are also an Ebert novel, Behind the Phantom’s Mask (begun as a weekly newspaper serial); a travel book, Perfect London Walk, written with Daniel Curley; The Computer Insectiary: A Field Guide to Viruses, Bugs, Worms, Trojan Horses, and Other Stuff That Will Eat Your Programs and Rot Your Brain, co-authored with John Kratz; and at least five other books to which Roger has penned introductions. There’s no writer’s block for this perpetual scribe; he’s never missed a deadline. I’ll bet that if Roger had written this tribute, he would have finished it in time for his actual birthday, which was Monday.

To all this he’s added what people may think is his main job: being a TV host, fronting series of weekly movie-review shows since 1976, first with Gene Siskel, then with Richard Roeper. He’s also recorded commentaries for DVD releases of classic films, from Citizen Kane to Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, the sleazerrific Russ Meyer movie that Roger co-wrote in his 20s. As the go-to movie savant, he’s been on hundreds of TV shows, sometimes alone, sometimes with his review-show partners; who can forget that night in the ’80s when David Letterman persuaded Roger and Gene to toss basketballs at a makeshift hoop? And there’ve been countless speaking engagements, most of them to proselytize for the art and pleasure of movies. At some of these events he leads an in-depth discussion of some classic film — Citizen Kane, Vertigo, The Third Man and most recently In Cold Blood — stopping the action to analyze each frame and study the elements that contribute to the best movies.

Indeed, he’s done so much that I sometimes suspect there’s more than one Roger Ebert. And now I may have proof. The Amazon sites in the U.S., France, Japan and China list Roger Ebert as the author of a German economics treatise, Die Zustandigkeit Der Tarifvertragsparteien Zum Abschlub Von Verbands- Und Firmentarifvertrag (which translates as “The competence of the Rate of Collective Agreements to the conclusion of federation and firm collective agreements”). Roger is expert in many fields, but Ebert could be someone else.

Last June, Roger’s Nile or Niagara of words stopped, as he directed his energy to fighting complications of cancer of the salivary gland that had been troubling him for a few years. He spent a lot of time being treated in hospitals and recovering at home. Last month he missed his first Cannes Film Festival in, I’m guessing, 30 years. But in late April he did show up, resolute and cheerful, at the Roger Ebert Overlooked Film Festival — yes, he also runs his own Ebertfest, or uberfest — at his alma mater, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, flanked by his brilliant, loving attorney-wife Chaz Hammelsmith and surrounded by a thousand well-wishers. His appearance had changed, but, he wrote on his website, “I still have my brain and my typing fingers.”

And now he’s using them, hurrah hurrah, to produce reviews. He’s covered mainstream movies like Shrek the Third and Bug, and artier fare on the order of Guy Maddin’s Brand Upon the Brain and Hal Hartley’s Fay Grim. Today he has a review of A Mighty Heart. It’s a phrase that certainly applies to Roger, and Chaz too, for their year-long battle against his debilitating illness. With open arms ready to embrace a trusted friend — which Roger has been to Mary C. and me for three decades, and is to any reader or viewer of his work — we can say: He’s back!

THE THUMB THING

I don’t know how Roger feels about this, but it makes me uncomfortable to think that, of all the millions of words he has written and spoken, the one most associated with him is “thumb.” As in his and his TV partners’ shorthand for a favorable review, “two thumbs up!” This tactic is handy for branding the show, and an effective marketing tool (it’s the words all movie publicists want to banner at the top of their ads), but as critical discourse the slogan has its limits. More Manichaean than the star rating system he and other newspaper critics use to gauge a picture’s quality (which, in the 2- or 3-star range does account for the great gray middle most movies occupy), it restricts the critics’ appraisal of a film to “I liked it” and “I didn’t like it.” To express special enthusiasm, the critics can say, “Two thumbs up! Way up!” or, I guess, “That was thumb movie!” It’s a pity; the shadings of Roger’s thoughts on a movie deserve a wider vocabulary, which of course he provides in his print reviews.

Of the four or five films up for review on his weekly TV show, he typically would give a thumbs up to two or three of them, making me wonder who in the civilian community has time to see all these movies. But as one of the few critics with a practical familiarity with filmmaking, Roger knows that the machinery of film production is so cumbersome, the pressure for commercial success so great and the odds against making anything good near-astronomical, that the best intentions often get dashed on the rocks of compromise. So he’s nearly as sympathetic to the attempt to make a good film as to the achievement in bringing it off. He errs, if erring it is, on the side of generosity.

When he doesn’t like a movie, he will often go out of his way to mention some attractive element amid the carnage, giving what amounts to a review that says, “Yes, but! Big but!” And when he decides that a movie rates a pan — a “Bah, thumbug,” if you will — he tends to approach the task not with the hot rage of a jilted suitor, or the curled lip of contempt that is the occupational habit of other critics (this one included), but with the fretful brow of a knowing, caring family doctor. He diagnoses the symptoms, then calmly and compassionately explains the nature of your ailment.

That is, unless he doesn’t. Roger’s latest book is called Your Movie Sucks — a collection of his thumbs-down reviews — and the anecdote that inspired the title is worth recounting. In an Oscar preview story two years ago, Los Angeles Time writer Patrick Goldstein made a joke about Rob Schneider’s Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo, “a film that was sadly overlooked at Oscar time because apparently nobody had the foresight to invent a category for Best Running Penis Joke Delivered by a Third-Rate Comic.” Schneider, in a response that ran as a trade paper ad, wrote: “Well, Mr. Goldstein, I decided to do some research to find out what awards you have won. I went online and found that you have won nothing. Absolutely nothing. No journalistic awards of any kind. . . . Maybe you didn’t win a Pulitzer Prize because they haven’t invented a category for Best Third-Rate, Unfunny Pompous Reporter Who’s Never Been Acknowledged by His Peers….” Ebert’s take on this exchange: “Schneider is correct, and Patrick Goldstein has not yet won a Pulitzer Prize…. As chance would have it, I have won the Pulitzer Prize, and so I am qualified. Speaking in my official capacity as a Pulitzer Prize winner, Mr. Schneider, your movie sucks.”

Even the butts of Roger’s “buts” understand that there’s nothing personal in his negative reviews — as indicated by a comment Roger made last year on his website: “A bouquet arrives… A beautiful bouquet of flowers was delivered to the house the other day. A handwritten note paid compliments to my work and wished me a speedy recovery. Who was it from? A friend? A colleague? An old classmate? The card was signed, ‘Your Least Favorite Movie Star, Rob Schneider.'”

ROGER AND ME

Movie reviewing is the solitary evaluation of a communal medium. Critics watch films in small screening rooms, or alone on DVD players, then retire in solitude to write up their opinions and insights, to recollect passion in tranquility. Roger does all that; but more than any critic I know, he brings the informed discussion of film out from under the lamp, into daylight. He has used his fame to elevate the conversation, challenging audiences to attend not just to the dramatic and ethical aspects of films but to their visual strategies. (Roger is one of the few film critics who actually, and knowledgeably, looks at movies.) And unlike a lot of people in the public eye, he’s amazingly comfortable with his celebrity. I’ve never seen Roger rush past a fan who tugged his sleeve and asked about a movie. He actually listens to people.

That comes from his voracious interest in the world of ideas. If he had read only his own stuff he’d be one of the best-read people I know. But he’s as insatiable a reader as he is a writer. The time he’s spent watching movies, and thinking and writing about them, is only a sensible portion of his sentient life. He seems to have consumed every English-language novel written in the 19th century, and many from the centuries before and after. And somehow he retains it all. He has a memory that’s both photographic (enabling him to recall virtually every shot from every film he’s seen) and phonographic. On one indelible occasion at the 2002 Floating Film Festival, he and cinematographer Haskell Wexler sang Woody Guthrie’s “The Union Maid” — and Roger performed not just the chorus (“Oh, you can’t scare me, I’m sticking to the union, / I’m sticking to the union ’til the day I die”) but every verse. Roger had picked it off a Pete Seeger record he heard when he was younger and repeated it decades later, word-perfect.

I go back with Roger to the early 70s, when he wrote a long, fine piece on Russ Meyer for Film Comment, the magazine I edited. He also did an important analysis of the action-film audience’s disconnect from narrative — how they would simply ride from one sensational episode to another, without caring about any continuity of narrative or character. When the magazine needed a smart story, Roger would write one. By now TV had made him a star, but he was never a prima donna.

Mary and I really got to know Roger at the Cannes Film Festival in 1979, when he got us onto the yacht of Lew Grade, the Lord (literally; he’d been knighted) of ITV, and brought us into star-studded cocktail hours at Cannes’ posh Majestic Bar; in one conversation about Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, the smartest comments were made by actor James Woods. (“MIT grad,” Roger whispered knowingly.) In between the partying, he managed to keep sending pieces, mostly interviews, back to the Sun-Times. That Cannes, he said, he saw seven movies and wrote 11 columns. And naturally he wrote a book about Cannes, Two Weeks in the Midday Sun, with drawings by… Roger Ebert. Uh-huh, he’s also an illustrator.

It was in Cannes that I noticed how Roger looks everywhere, beyond the screen, for signs of outrageous vitality. He loves characters who are larger than life, larger even than movie life. One such was Billy “Silver Dollar” Baxter, the Broadway producer who carried a sachel of dollars coins with him and would summon waiters at the Majestic Bar in Cannes with a shouted “Irving!” Another was, is, Dusty Cohl, the cowboy-hatted Canadian lawyer who helped found the Toronto Film Festival. Roger became close friends of Dusty and his wife Joan; and when they launched the Floating Film Festival (nonstop movies and movie talk on a cruise ship), Roger eagerly signed on as a presenter. Mary and I came along for the ride, and the Festival has now sailed 10 times. The Corlisses and the Ebert-Hammelsmiths have made every one.

A FRIEND INDEED

Roger is a man with a tough hide. (And, according to my mother, a smooth one. She once stroked his face and said, “You have beautiful skin.”) He’s one of the few critics who can take it more than he can dish it out, as I know firsthand. In 1990, for Film Comment, I wrote a piece called “All Thumbs,” about what I saw as the devolution of film criticism, and cited the Siskel-Ebert TV show (not their other writing) as an example of movie reviewing being reduced to opinion. In the next issue, Roger responded to these charges with a dispassionate grace that acknowledged some of my points, took issue with others, but never stooped to stridency. (The exchange was reprinted in last year’s Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert: Forty Years of Reviews, Essays and Interviews, which is the best introduction I know to his work.) His equanimity showed class.

Since 1994 Roger has devoted two Sunday columns a month to reviews of Great Movies. In 2001, when he decided to collect 100 of these critiques into a book, he asked Mary, who had been running the Museum of Modern Art’s Film Still Archive since 1968, to choose the photos for each film and write an essay about the glamour and preservation of movie stills. In early 2002, just as the book was to be published, Mary was abruptly laid off by the Museum in a move many saw as punishment for her very active role in a strike of MoMA staff members 18 months earlier. (For a fuller discussion of this story, see here.) Mary’s layoff, and the closing of the Still Archive, became a cause celebre, and many film professionals rose to her defense; but the first one was Roger, who wrote an outraged letter to the New York Times the day after she was laid off. It was both a valued act of friendship and the declaration of a union man that the workers of the world had to stick together.

A few weeks later, on that year’s Floating Film Festival, he brought Mary into a Q&A on the book, again championing her cause (and on karaoke night sang “The Union Maid” in her honor). He volunteered to testify for Mary in the National Labor Relations Board trial that followed; and when he was ready to issue a second volume of Great Movies, he asked Mary again to do the photo selection, though she was no longer in charge of a picture archive. It happens that, five years later, the Museum has reopened in much larger quarters, but its 4 million stills remain in cold storage in rural Pennsylvania, and Mary stills waits for both the Archive and her job to reopen. But Roger would probably agree with a quote from one of his favorite movies: that lost causes are the only ones worth fighting for.

ROGER WILL

In the year since last June, Roger, who has fought good fights for so many others, now had to fight for himself. The cancer that had troubled him for a few years returned, and he endured months of operations, complications, confinement. He missed the Toronto Film Festival in September, and might have skipped Ebertfest if he hadn’t learned that all tickets sold out within a few days of their becoming available. His fans needed him as much as he needed to get better.

First, he had to prepare the Ebertians for his depleted appearance. “To paraphrase a line from Raging Bull, I ain’t a pretty boy no more,” he wrote in a pre-festival note on his website. “What happened was, cancer of the salivary gland spread to my right lower jaw. A segment of the mandible was removed. Two operations to replace the missing segment were unsuccessful, both leading to unanticipated bleeding. A tracheostomy was necessary so, for the time being, I cannot speak. I make do with written notes and a lot of hand waving and eye-rolling. The doctors now plan an approach that does not involve the risk of unplanned bleeding. If all goes well, my speech will be restored. So when I turn up in Urbana, I will be wearing a gauze bandage around my neck, and my mouth will be seen to droop. So it goes.

“I was told photos of me in this condition would attract the gossip papers. So what? I have been very sick, am getting better and this is how it looks…. We spend too much time hiding illness. There is an assumption that I must always look the same. I hope to look better than I look now. But I’m not going to miss my festival.”

There’s no word for Roger’s determination but heroism. His appearance at Ebertfest had the impact of the climax from some inspirational movie — of the triumph over daunting odds and the public display of steely humanity — except that it’s still the beginning of his recuperation. It was a heartening and therapeutic event, not only for Roger and Chaz but for the audience who had learned so much from him.

For Roger knows that, whatever else they may be, movies are stories people tell us; and a review is a conversation the critic has with both the filmmaker and the audience about the power and plausibility of the tale. No one has done as much as Roger to connect the creators of movies with their consumers. He has immense power, and he’s used it for good, as an apostle of cinema. Reading his work, or listening to him parse the shots of some notable film, the movie lover is also engaged with an alert mind constantly discovering things — discovering them to share them. That’s what a great teacher does, and what Roger’s done as a writer, public personality and friend to film for all these years. And, dammit, keep on doing.

So here’s a wish for a continuing recovery, long life and happy birthday week to Chicago’s, and the movies’, Mr. Chips.