He was the first film critic to win a Pulitzer, and he’s written voluminously: film guides, yes, but also a novel, a history of the University of Illinois, a walking guide to London, a copious blog, and now a memoir culled from that blog, sometimes word-for-word. He collaborated with Russ Meyer on the cult hit Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and other films. He wrote deadpan new journalism-style interviews for Esquire, where he astutely championed a first-time filmmaker named Martin Scorsese. He practiced journalism alongside Chicago Sun-Times legends like Jim Hoge and Mike Royko. Life Itself, a beautiful memoir of staccato sentences and chapters, covers the height of Ebert’s televised fame and the transition of his medium, his industry, and his health, and it shows that the heart of Ebert’s life lies offscreen.Įbert began as a writer and remained a writer.
Since Ebert’s prime, everything has changed: television is facing death by a thousand channels, TiVos, and webisodes film criticism has become largely crowdsourced and, most devastatingly, thyroid cancer has drastically narrowed Ebert’s face and taken his ability to speak, leaving him only the written word with which to communicate. Ebert was Costello to co-host Siskel’s Abbott: shorter, heavier, rounder. It defined film criticism for over a decade, transforming it, to the frustration of anyone who considered criticism an exalted and solitary and written practice, into a popular onscreen pastime for two, comprehensible to most anyone, and condensable into a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down.” The show also defined Ebert in our minds: blazers, sweater vests, oxford shirts, unmoving eyes behind glasses, authoritative but dryly delivered pronouncements. Ebert’s show - co-hosted first, and most famously, with Gene Siskel, and later with Richard Roeper - could make or break a flick. Television images are hard to shake, particularly when they’re nationally syndicated.
FOR MANY PEOPLE, Roger Ebert was, is, and always will be a television personality.
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