It’s been a week since Roger died. And I still have a knot in my stomach.

I have wanted to make impersonal tribute, but I have failed. There is nothing about my experience of the man about which I can be fully objective. I know too much. And I know too little. So I will try to be clear, be true, and not cross any of the lines that should not be crossed.

My 15 year relationship with Roger – I can’t speak for his relationship with me – was complicated. He was both spectacularly generous to me and, at times, agonizingly withholding. I was, I think, as lucky to have the withholding part as the generosity because, added up, there would be nothing to withhold had he not been so generous in the first place.

I think I had Roger’s respect, most of the time, and a modest amount of affection. I think that much of what drew him to my work would ultimately keep me at arm’s length.

He never allowed me the honor of really dueling with me. I was 33 when we (really) met. He was 55 and at the top of the movie media food chain. I was not of his generation and though he was incredibly respectful and kind to my work, I don’t think he was ever to see the playing field as even. And it wasn’t. But to really do the dance, both partners have to go there. There has to be respect and the respect that is disrespect.

I think this reality, far beyond my personal experience, and Roger’s intense commitment to a stable work environment are what defined most of Roger’s professional efforts from the time of Gene’s illness until his forced aural silence. We had an exchange a couple of years into Ebert & Roeper about what I thought might be a better road for him and legacy (sounds silly writing that now) and he made crystal clear that he wanted to shoot his show in the same city in the same studio on the same day on the same schedule and write every movie review that ran in the Sun-Times forever and that this was his idea of a perfect professional life. He was a man of habit. He took joy and solace and safety from those habits. So I stopped poking.

In this relatively short period of 15 years, I feel as though there were 5 eras of Ebert. There was:

1. The Established Siskel & Ebert Roger, in which Roger had height of fame and fortune while he looked for things – often online – to challenge him beyond the limitations of the weekly show and Herculean task of writing every single movie review for the Chicago Sun-Times.

2. The Gene Is Sick And/Or Dying Roger, in which he had to start considering and living with real change that was not of his choice.

3. The King Roger Era, in which after the death of the only real professional partner in his career, he was no longer “The Fat One” or competing with Gene on decision making, but was alone on top of the mountain, with all the benefits and troubles of holding that ground.

4. The Silent Roger Era, in which he found off cancer heroically and finally was silenced by a complication that would take his voice, and for a while, his greatest power.

5. Resurrected Roger, in which Roger not only found a strong and clear voice via the Internet, but in which he ultimately chose transparency in a way that was virtually the polar opposite of his public choices back in the earlier eras of his life.

It’s hard to express how uncomfortable I am with the many tributes to the man that start with first-person knowledge/memories of this last part of his life followed by wikipedia boilerplate about the history. Almost everyone who has written who really had a relationship with Roger has been on point, both in what they have said and what they have not. Almost every writer who met him once or twice or admired his resurrection from a distance got it, pretty much, wrong… at least in terms of drawing a truthful picture of the man’s full history.

There is a lot to love and admire about Roger Ebert’s professional life. But it’s almost as though in lavishing praise on the man, they forgot what Howard Beale forgot and was reminded of by Arthur Jensen in Network. Why was Roger SO beloved? Because he was on television, dummy.

Acknowledging this does not diminish his achievements. Other people have been and are on television and didn’t become Ebert (or even Siskel). There was something in the pairing of these two men… something that was not intended or designed by the men, but which came to life in a way that it rarely does, not just for film critics, but for any pairing of characters on any kind of television.

If you made a list of the great pairings in the history of the medium, Siskel & Ebert would be in the Top 50 for sure. (I as going to write “Top 20,” but I haven’t thought about it enough to be sure that it would not be an overreach.) And it was certainly one of the 10 longest enduring pairings, not far down the list from Lucy & Ricky.

There are three big reasons why it will be surprising if we see the likes of Roger Ebert again. First, the very nature of television does not encourage it, though Jon Stewart happens. Second, no one has ever been a harder worker than Roger. Others may match him. I did for a while. But after 5 or 6 years, I tired and found ways to do less for greater personal benefit. Not Roger. Until he literally was incapable of working the remarkable schedule he worked, he carried more bricks up the hill than anyone.

When i noted early last year that Roger dad “given up being the only critic writing on film at the Chicago Sun-Times,” he shot back in an e-mail, “Last year the Sun-Times fired all free lancers. I review everything that gets reviewed. In 2011 I filed 292 reviews, a lifetime record.”

That’s Roger. Super worker… profoundly house proud.

Is Roger the greatest critic? No, because no such thing exists. Like movies, criticism is a matter of personal taste.

Was Roger the most read critic? Probably at times. But others have been syndicated as he has, like Roger Moore for the Tribune Syndicate or Jeffrey Lyons by (I think) Gannett. Does that make them Ebert? No.

And yes… the third reason we may never see another Ebert. Magic.

Some things are just beyond analysis (heavy on the anal). When you meet someone and just feel that warmth and affection, it isn’t a series of intellectual steps. It’s magic. It’s Kismet. It was Roger.

I truly loved the man. He came into my life soon after my father died. And he wasn’t really a father figure. He was more like an older brother who was really nice to his noisy, obnoxious, unplanned-for kid brother. He included me in so many ways that I can’t be anything less than thankful, even if, at times, I felt like Moses left behind for some sin (criticizing Roeper was surely my greatest blasphemy) as God shepherded the Jews into Israel. (I guess Roger is God in that metaphor… and I’m eating matzoh and wearing sandals in the desert… oy.)

Roger was a brother to so many. A parent to others. An icon to countless millions.

He did, after Gene died, exactly what I wished that the person who’d end up sitting next to him on the aisle would do… he preached the love of movies. And yes, he was already on TV expanding the view of arthouse movies and writing beautifully in print even as “thumbs” became too much the shorthand for good and bad films. But in these last 15 years, he got on the pulpit, he pushed harder and more publicly for the festivals he had always attended and added more to his schedule. He got up in the pulpit and sang, loud and strong.

And when he lost his aural voice, it was, after a time, like he was born again. The Far-Flung Correspondents was Roger leading the way to seeing a world of movie voices a different way. he didn’t just tell us what to do about it… he did it. Ebertfest started out as The Overlooked Film Festival, focusing not just on films that Roger felt were overlooked, but film formats as well. It’s become near impossible to get 70mm (and Todd-AO-Vision) prints that he hasn’t already shown, but the festival – which ran out of films on Roger’s overlooked list after a few years – still pays homage to oddities and the unexpected and a silent film shown every year.

I remember the first festival well. April 1999. Autumn Tale had not gotten US distribution out of the Fall 1998 festivals. And then, during the festival, it was announced that it would be distributed in the US by October Films. It did $2.2 million that summer.

That festival also brought Scott Wilson to Urbana-Champaign (as Roger called it) with Shiloh, his first trip of four to the festival. Roger also did a Floating Fiim Festival event with Scott, frame-by-framing In Cold Blood together. (Scott’s in Chicago today for the memorial, his shooting schedule keeping him from Ebertfest this year.)

Roger even showed a black & white 16mm film, Surrender Dorothy, balanced by the 70mm glory of Tron (long before Disney rebooted).

The second year, Australian Paul Cox brought his mighty film about an aging woman with undying spirit, A Woman’s Tale, to the fest. Paul will be back again this year.

Also appearing was The Castle, directed by Rob Sitch and produced by Michael Hirsch, which gave Ebertfest a recurring meme, “This is going straight to the pool room,” to be used onstage every year, almost every time an Ebert thumb was given to a filmmaker.

And there was the screening of Chris Smith’s American Movie and Coven, which was so popular/beloved that Mark Borchardt and Mike Schank would make multiple trips back to Ebertfest and have extra screenings at the Art Theater.

Plus the legendary Charles Lane and a live phone hook-up to Dark City director Alex Proyas from the set of Garage Days long before Skype.

Anyway…

I could go on. I’m sure I will. As for Roger…

Big footprint. Much love. Lots of great movies.

Be Sociable, Share!

• 
•