We all are born with a certain package.
We are who we are.
Where we were born, who we were born as,
how we were raised.
We're kind of stuck inside that person...
...and the purpose of civilization and growth,
is to be able to reach out
and empathize a little bit with other people.
And for me, the movies are like a machine that generates empathy.
It lets you understand a little bit more
about different hopes, aspirations, dreams and fears.
It helps us to identify with the people
who are sharing this journey with us.
Exactly five months before his death,
Roger and Chaz and I met to plan
the beginning of an ambitious schedule of filming,
including interviews and critic screenings.
Roger mentioned in passing that his hip was sore.
The very next day he entered the hospital.
So now I got a hairline fracture to the femur bone.
I didn't fall and have no idea how it happened.
It's bloody painful.
This is my seventh time at rehab.
This table is weird.
I type much, much better at home in my usual chair.
Show Steve the new chair.
It reclines.
He will see more of it.
So Roger, did you not pay your insurance premiums,
and so you didn't get the chair till now?
Steve, I'll do the jokes here.
This is Flora.
Also, this is Sonya Evans, my stepdaughter.
I do what they tell me to do.
You wanna rest a little bit, or work a little bit?
Steve is the director.
I'm just gonna sit down.
Although Roger had supported my films over the years,
this film was the first chance to really get to know him.
Steve, shoot yourself in the mirror.
There he is.
Hi, Carol.
I'm Carol. I'm Roger's assistant
for over 20 years, Roger and Chaz.
And Zero Dark something is winning all the awards, Roger.
It won another big award.
And the Bears lost.
"My daily..." What?
"briefing."
Okay, Roger.
And then Mayor Daley's, you know, nephew
went to court today. Remember, for the Koschman thing
that the Sun-Times really uncovered...
I always worked on newspapers.
There was a persistent need,
not only to write, but to publish.
In grade school, I wrote and published the Washington Street News,
which I solemnly delivered to neighbors in Urbana, Illinois,
as if it existed independently of me.
At the News Gazette, a line-o-type operator
set my by-line in lead: "By Roger Ebert."
I was electrified.
When I went home with it, you could take a stamp pad,
you could put your by-line on everything.
My parents finally had to take it away from me.
Everything was by Roger Ebert.
And I went to work full-time for the local newspaper
when I was 15, first as a sports writer,
general assignment, working late,
being there with the newspapermen back in the '50s.
It was unspeakably romantic.
I can write, I just always could.
On the other hand, I flunked French five times.
In the spring of 1960, I announced I wanted to go to Harvard,
like Jack Kennedy and Thomas Wolfe.
"Boy, there's no money to send you to Harvard," Daddy said.
The Urbana Champaign campus of the University of Illinois:
to provide knowledge for a better tomorrow.
I would go to my hometown university.
I wouldn't be an electrician like my father.
He told me one day his father said to him,
"Roger, there's professors over there,
that's what you oughta do some day.
You wanna sit there with a pipe,
and a cardigan sweater with your feet up on the desk."
I think his father recognized early on that Roger had a gift.
I joined The Daily Illini, and I ran into him then.
During my years at Illinois,
I spent more time working on The Daily Illini than studying.
It was in every sense a real newspaper,
published five days a week, on an ancient Goss rotary press
that made the building tremble.
As editor, I was a case study:
tactless, egotistical, merciless, and a showboat.
And he was.
But it worked because he could back it up.
It was intimidating to the members of the staff
because he was like a mature writer at that time.
Now here, when those four children were killed
in the church bombing in Birmingham,
there was a huge protest around the country.
Four hundred students gathered on the university quadrangle
to protest the bombing of an Alabama Sunday school.
And Roger was the voice of outrage on this campus.
He started off his column by quoting Dr. Martin Luther King,
who said to George Wallace,
"The blood of these innocent children is on your hands."
That ended the quote.
Then Roger began his column by saying,
"That is not entirely the truth.
And it is not new blood.
It is old, very old.
And as Lady Macbeth discovered,
it will not ever wash away."
That began a column written by a 21 -year-old guy,
and he said it better than anybody said it all week.
Roger was editor on November 22nd, 1963,
when John F. Kennedy was shot.
At around two o'clock in the morning, the presses rolled,
gigantic presses, two stories high,
chug and chug,
and Ebert was doing what editors do
at the end of the day: check out the pages.
And he opens it up and there's a picture of John F. Kennedy,
and an ad of a pilgrim with a musket
pointed at Kennedy's head.
Ebert said, "We gotta switch this."
The pressman said like, "Hear that sound, Roger?
That's the sound of newspapers being printed."
Unlike in movies, you didn't stop the presses.
And Ebert said, "We're not gonna print that tomorrow.
We gotta stop the presses."
Ebert became famous to us for that,
because, you know, here was a kid
taking control of an adult situation
and making a news judgment, an important one.
Chicago was the great city over the horizon.
We read Chicago's newspapers
and listened to its powerful AM radio stations.
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,
it's midnight here in Chicago.
Long after midnight,
I listened to Jack Egan broadcasting live.
Chez Lounge and the world famous Chez Paree.
Chatting with Martin and Lewis, or Rosemary Clooney.
I'd been accepted as a PhD candidate in English
by the University of Chicago, but I needed a job.
I got a part time job at the Sun-Times,
and then five months later,
the film critic retired and they gave me the job.
I did not apply for it.
Newspaper film critics had been interchangeable.
Some papers had by-lines that different people wrote under.
For example, the Tribune had Mae Tinee,
and that could be whoever went to the movies that day.
Because Mae Tinee really spelled out "matinee."
I was at that time the youngest daily film critic in America.
And it was a real good time to be a movie critic.
Armed robbery.
Bet you wouldn't have the gumption to use it.
Now, come here.
It is also
- Hey! What's your name, anyhow? - Clyde Barrow.
Hi, I'm Bonnie Parker.
Pleased to meet you.
"The fact that the story
is set 35 years ago doesn't mean a thing.
It had to be set sometime,
Roger was the most facile writer I ever came across.
Anybody that has ever seen him work.
He could, he could knock out
a full thought out movie review in 30 minutes.
Fast and furious.
There were so many reporters that formed
easy quick friendships because they were smart,
they were good writers, they were literate,
and they could tell a good story in a saloon.
O'Rourke's was our stage,
and we displayed our personas there nightly.
It was a shabby street corner tavern on a dicey stretch of North Avenue,
a block after Chicago's Old Town stopped being a tourist haven.
When a roomer who lived upstairs died,
his body was discovered when maggots started to drop through the ceiling.
For many years, I drank there
more or less every night when I was in town.
So did a lot of people.
We all sat at the same place.
The newspaper guys here,
the druggies in the middle,
the surly staff at the very end of the bar.
Roger has always been attracted to weird types.
I mean, you should see some of the women
that he's hauled in to O'Rourke's over the years.
Back in the old days,
Roger had, probably the worst taste in women
of any man I've ever known.
They were either gold diggers,
opportunists, or psychos.
Yeah, I met Roger one time with a woman
that looked like a young Linda Ronstadt,
and when she was gone from the table briefly,
I said, "Who is that?"
And he said, "She's a hired lady."
And I said, "A hooker?"
And he said, "Now you take care of her when I leave."
And he left town. And anyway...
Roger, he used to hang from the lamppost at the end of the bar.
When he got going,
Roger was one of the finest storytellers
that I have ever come across.
He would hold court,
and it's not like everyone was invited to join in
and have a colloquy with him.
Since he bought drinks for everybody
when he had the money, who's not to listen?
His great friend was John McHugh.
And I remember a famous argument
over who was the more cosmopolitan of the two.
And Ebert was saying, "John, I travel the world.
I go to every country in Europe.
I go to Cannes.
I'm a cosmopolitan person."
John said, "Ebert, you don't even speak a foreign language."
And Ebert said, "I speak enough to be able
to order two Johnny Walker Blacks anywhere in the world."
Any sober human being looking at the two of them
would have decided neither was actually a cosmopolitan figure.
I discovered there was nothing like drinking
with a crowd to make you a member.
I copied the idealism and cynicism of the reporters.
I spoke like they did.
Laughed at the same things.
Felt that I belonged.
Studs wasn't a Chicagoan.
Nelson Algren wasn't born here.
Saul Bellow wasn't born here.
But there's a certain kind of Chicago character
that Roger really came to believe that he was.
Roger was not just the chief character
and star of the movie that was his life.
He was also the director, and he brought in the cast,
and the scenario, and he orchestrated it.
He loved it!
Those characters, what they did.
John the garbage man. Hank the communist.
I remember the night that Jim Touley punched J. Robert Nash,
knocked him down to the bar room floor,
and Nash looked up and he said, "Nice punch, Jimmy!"
When O'Rourke's closed he would go down to the Ale House,
because that was a four o'clock bar.
The mood got rougher and rougher
as people got drunker and drunker.
Roger was good at dishing, but he also could take it.
"I'm a fat guy, I'm gonna have to learn how to take fat stuff."
Roger could hold his own with all of them.
Everybody kind of says that deep down he's a nice guy.
He is a nice guy, but he's not that nice.
He's not that nice.
The last week he was drinking,
I even realized that there was a serious problem going on.
Watching him when he pulled out that night
in front of O'Rourke's, and almost, you know,
ran into the North Avenue bus.
I remember being in the drug store
that was on the corner there one morning,
and Roger came in, and he looked like absolute hell.
And I'm like, "Are you okay? What's the matter?"
"I'm on a bender. Can you come have a drink with me?"
He said to me one time,
and I don't think he'll regard this as a betrayal,
that he would walk home late at night,
after O'Rourke's had closed,
and he would wish he was dead.
I found it almost impossible once I started,
to stop after one or two. I paid a price in hangovers.
Without hangovers, it's possible
that I would still be drinking.
I would also be unemployed, unmarried, and probably dead.
In August 1979, I took my last drink.
It was about four o'clock on a Saturday afternoon.
The hot sun streaming through the windows.
I put a glass of scotch and soda down on the living room table,
went to bed, and pulled the blankets over my head.
I couldn't take it anymore.
He says, "I quit."
And then I realized it's time for me to quit, too.
The next time I saw Roger Ebert, he was in AA.
I was drinking very heavily.
When I decided to out myself as a recovering alcoholic,
I hadn't taken a drink for 31 years.
And since my first AA meeting I attended,
I've never wanted to.
Since surgery in July of 2006,
I haven't been able to drink at all, or eat or speak.
Unless I go insane and start pouring booze into my g-tube,
I believe I'm reasonably safe.
That's it.
By the time I got home from this shoot,
there was an email waiting for me.
Did we get it?
I hope so, too.
When I mentioned in my blog
that I could no longer eat, drink, or speak,
a reader wrote, "Do you miss it?"
Not so much, really. I lived in a world of words
long before I was aware of it.
The new reality took shape slowly.
My blog became my voice, my outlet.
It let loose the flood of memories.
They came pouring forth in a flood of relief.
One day in the spring of 1967,
I noticed Faster, Pussycat! Kill Kill!
playing at the Biograph on Lincoln Avenue.
The posters displayed improbably buxom women,
and I was inside in a flash.
That was when it first registered
that there was a filmmaker named Russ Meyer.
In 1969, the 20th Century Fox studio invited Meyer
to the lot for an interview.
They owned the rights to the title
Beyond the Valley of the Dolls,
and offered him the title unattached to any story.
Meyer offered me the screenwriting job,
and I fell into a delirious adventure.
The most impossible question for me to answer is,
"How on earth did Roger Ebert write
Beyond the Valley of the Dolls?"
Or be interested in writing such a script?
Or be involved with Russ Meyer?
I have no answer.
What did he love about Russ' films do you think?
Boobs.
The fact that there were large breasted women involved
probably was a plus.
You know, we can talk a lot about the art of cinema,
and what we find in it,
and the sort of the magic
and the dreams and the glory of it,
but there are also other, kind of, earthier appeals.
You wanna make love?
Then let's make love.
Here?
- No, in L.A. - L.A?
- Where is that? - We'd get crushed.
Meyer wanted everything in the screenplay
except the kitchen sink. The movie, he explained,
would simultaneously be a satire,
a serious melodrama,
a rock musical, a comedy,
a violent exploitation picture,
a skin flick, and a moralistic exposé
of the oft-times nightmarish world of show business.
- It's a no talent town. - Don't put it down.
I had to review for the Chicago Sun-Times,
and I think I gave it three stars, because Roger was my friend.
And somewhere deep in the piece said,
"This is a new rating system, ten stars,
so this gets three out of ten."
This is my happening and it freaks me out!
I reviewed the film in National Review.
And listed it as one of the 10 great films of the 1960s.
It was funny, it had a pulse that raced past
Howard Hawk's film from the '40s.
But with the wild who-gives-a-shit air,
it was perfect for the late '60s.
You're a groovy boy.
I'd like to strap you on sometime.
Beyond the Valley.
It's beyond it.
You know, this is a title, because you're gonna go beyond it.
It went over my head.
That doesn't mean I didn't enjoy it.
I did like her having sex in the Bentley.
It's my first time in a Rolls.
Because of the way he cut to the grill.
There's nothing like a Rolls.
Not even a Bentley.
Bentley! Rolls!
A Rolls. A Rolls!
But I did like that editing in the Bentley.
I don't really have any new confessions.
It is true that the first 10 years I came to the conference,
I came primarily hoping to get laid.
That didn't work out.
I lived more than nine months of my life in Boulder, Colorado,
one week at a time.
It all happened at the sleep-inducingly named,
"Conference on World Affairs."
It's a conference that comes together once a year at Boulder.
Astrophysicists, sociologists, experts of the Middle East.
Free wheeling... and engaging.
Roger was an absolute star.
He was the longest running panelist in history of the CWA.
I was in my 20s when I first came to the conference.
There, I was on a panel about the Establishment
with Henry Fairly, who coined the term.
I discussed masturbation
with the Greek Ambassador to the United Nations.
There I asked Ted Turner
how he got so much right and colorization wrong.
He would hold what was called Cinema Interruptus.
On Monday of World Affairs week, Roger would show a film.
Tuesday through Friday he would conduct
a shot by shot discussion of the film.
To listen to Roger talk for upwards of five hours
about In Cold Blood, or The Third Man,
or Vertigo, or Citizen Kane,
he was enlightening with every new frame.
It was a theatrical experience of the highest order.
And anybody who wanted to, at any moment,
could yell out, "Stop,"
to ask a question or make a statement.
Stop!
Look at that.
Every year we find something absolutely amazing,
totally amazing in the films.
It's not there, but we find it.
There was a limit to Roger's democratizing of film criticism.
A student asked, "Who do you think you are
that you get to have all these opinions?
I saw Porky's and I think Porky's is great,
so why don't I get to talk about it?"
And Roger said, "I have two things to say.
First, Marshall Field, who owns the Chicago Sun-Times,
appointed me film critic... that's who I am."
And he said, "My other thing is a question.
Would you wanna listen to you?"
After the year that Roger came
and worked with a voice synthesizer,
he decided not to come again.
He said it was too hard.
I won't return to the conference.
It is fueled by speech, and I am out of gas.
But I went there for my adult lifetime,
and had a hell of a good time.
The move is taking place,
and they are loading up the medical car
to take us over to RIC.
Will you send an email for me, please?
Come in.
Is there a special back elevator that we go down here or?
Well, actually, yeah.
Because the last time we took him from this hospital,
we had to push the chair past the morgue.
Everything. And we got lost down there.
He's excited because he gets to see a movie he wants to see.
It should be coming over later today.
So he's happy about that.
I'm glad we don't have to go under that...
the underground anymore.
Past the morgue.
We're not ready for it!
You've been working away, huh?
You have a lot of writing to do.
I was hoping you could see
at least one of them on a big screen.
When he was in the hospital before,
we took a semi-not sanctioned trip out of the hospital.
Bundled him up and took him to the movies.
But I don't know if... I don't think the doctor will let you out.
Oops.
Chaz is a strong woman. I never met anyone like her.
I think it'll be easier. You can...
She is the love of my life.
Just wanna make sure that you don't get cold.
She saved me from the fate of living out my life alone,
which is where I seemed to be heading.
The first time he actually saw me was at an AA meeting.
And it's the first time I've ever said it publicly.
Roger became very public about his...
but I felt that it was, you know, more private for me.
If it doesn't fit, you must acquit.
Roger weighed 300 pounds when we first started dating.
He didn't care that he was fat.
He thought he was great.
And that was so sexy.
I take it this is not yours.
If my cancer had come, and Chaz had not been there with me,
I can imagine a descent into lonely decrepitude.
That I am still active, going places,
moving, is directly because of her.
My instinct was to guard myself.
I could never again be on television as I once was.
She said, "Yes, but people are interested
in what you have to say, not in how you say it."
With Roger now headed
for at least a couple of weeks of rehab,
he suggested I email him questions in advance
of our major interview when he gets back home.
I sent him the first third of nine pages of questions.
He emailed me back.
- Hello. - Hi, how are you?
Welcome to RIC. My name's Jackie and we're going to go in this room.
- Okay. - How are you?
I am politically my father's child,
and emotionally more my mother's.
My mother supported me as if I was the local sports team.
But she was fatalistic.
She was permanently scarred by the Depression,
and constantly predicted she would end up in the county poor home.
My parents so strongly encouraged my schoolwork.
We even took a third paper at home,
the Chicago Daily News, for me to read.
When I stood in the kitchen door,
and used a sentence with a new word in it,
they would look up from their coffee and cigarettes
and actually applaud me.
This is the memorable occasion
that Roger was given the Pulitzer Prize.
Usually, when somebody won a Pulitzer Prize,
it was, "Who is he to win a Pulitzer?", you know.
"Yeah, I'll go congratulate him, yeah."
But for Roger, there was real joy.
You know, it was our Roger.
One of us.
The only Pulitzer Prize, for years and years,
ever given to a movie critic.
Roger wrote his movie reviews
as if he were sitting in the 15th row,
taking notes with one hand and eating popcorn with the other.
But he didn't simplify things.
It envelops us in a red membrane of passion and fear.
And in some way that I do not fully understand,
it employs taboos and ancient superstitions to make its effect.
I think the way that he writes,
that sort of clear, plain, Midwestern newspaper style,
conveys enormous intelligence,
encyclopedic learning,
but doesn't condescend, doesn't pander.
Roger would become the definitive mainstream film critic
in American letters.
He made it possible for a bigger audience,
a wider audience to appreciate cinema as an art form.
Because he really loved it.
Really, really loved films,
and he did not get caught up
in certain ideologies about what cinema should be.
After he won the Pulitzer,
if he had a mind to go to The New York Times,
he could've done that, The Boston Globe,
The LA Times, no problem.
Ben Bradley, editor of The Washington Post,
of Watergate fame, went after Roger hard.
Offered him the sun and the moon.
Ebert just kept saying no.
He said, "I'm not gonna learn new streets..."
...which is very Ebert-like.
The Sun-Times went through rough times.
So many regimes.
The Murdoch era which had crashed the paper.
So many people left.
And Roger remained steadfast.
I remember Roger saying, "I'm not gonna run away."
- Right. - These are my colleagues
and not everybody can get another job.
If someone went across the street for a job, they were selling out.
You didn't even say the Tribune.
You'd just say went across the street.
It was a huge clash in political difference
between the Sun-Times and the Tribune.
We were a working class paper.
And we reached the black community.
The Tribune was a very wealthy paper.
I mean, look at the Tribune tower.
This huge gothic structure studded at its base
with all the great art works of the world.
You know, here is part of the pyramid of Giza.
And you're thinking, what?
Did the Tribune guy go out with a chisel and steal this thing?
From the day the Chicago Tribune
made Gene Siskel its film critic,
we were professional enemies.
For the first five years we knew one another,
Siskel and I hardly spoke.
When Gene and I were asked to work together on a TV show,
we both said we'd rather do it with someone else.
Anyone else.
The name of our show is Opening Soon at a Theatre Near You,
two film critics talking about the movies.
And this is Roger Ebert from the Chicago Sun-Times.
And right over here is Gene Siskel
from the Chicago Tribune and Channel 2 news.
Gene and Roger were sitting kind of pinioned,
in director's chairs,
looking into the camera very seriously,
talking about the movie.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest just had the audience
tearing up the seats with joy.
Yeah, and also, tearing up a little my enjoyment of the film.
They were applauding even during the credits...
It was stiff, and wooden.
But when Foreman backs up and tries to make his big points
about the establishment and authority...
But there was something there.
It was interesting to hear two people
who knew what they were talking about, talk about a movie.
Bremen Freedom by Rainer Werner Fassbinder,
one of the new generation of West German directors...
Roger loved the idea of being on public television.
He had been on it before
on a show where he introduced films by Ingmar Bergman.
It was awful.
And in this movie his name is Spegel,
which is Swedish for "mirror."
It was a deer caught in the headlights.
What is real and what is illusion,
and who's being fooled by the art?
Is it the artist, or his audience, or both?
And the movie's ending, a confrontation
with the heavyweight champion of the world...
Roger needed to learn how to write for television.
...emotionally fulfilling scenes I've seen in a long time.
To keep sentences short.
He would get irritated and he would say,
"Thea, I have a Pulitzer Prize."
And I would say to him, "Roger, I know that,
but that doesn't mean you know how to write for television."
And right through that last scene I was really loving Taxi Driver,
because up until that point, the relationship between
De Niro and Cybill Shepherd has been electric...
Gene was a natural.
He was one of these people, he could talk to the camera.
He had a huge handlebar mustache.
And so I just said,
"That is a funny looking thing on your face, get rid of it."
I thought, these two guys
would never be on television.
These are unusual, odd-looking characters
for the medium, TV, that's all beautifully quaffed,
and beautiful teeth, and everything's fine.
And they dressed like a couple of clowns
if they wore these outfits today.
You couldn't make Siskel and Ebert if you were Dr. Frankenstein.
I think in the beginning it was very difficult.
Gene sat in the back row, Roger had his favorite seat.
They left without saying a word to one another.
We both thought of ourselves
as full service, one-stop film critics.
We didn't see why the other one was necessary.
Alone together in an elevator,
we would study the numbers changing above the door.
Their lifestyles couldn't have been more different.
Roger was single.
He was an only child.
Gene, in childhood, lost both his parents,
one after the other.
He was a philosophy major at Yale.
While Roger was, you know,
one of the good old boy news reporters.
Gene just was more of a...
for lack of a better word, elegant character.
He caught the eye of Hugh Hefner,
and he was adopted by the clan at the mansion.
And he traveled with Hefner in the Bunny Jet.
Even though Roger wrote Beyond the Valley of the Dolls,
I think Gene lived the life for a while.
The perfect matching of opposites, Siskel and Ebert,
Laurel and Hardy, Oscar and Felix,
really made Sneak Previews
a sitcom about two guys who lived in a movie theater.
And how Roger and I go to the movies as critics is the subject
of this special take two program on Sneak Previews.
- Hi, Gene. - Hi, Roger.
In every theater I have a favorite seat I like to sit in.
In the last row, sort of off to the side.
Not just kind of reading or speaking criticism,
but acting out these roles.
I always choose a seat that's twice as far back
from the screen as the screen is wide.
Then you must make a friend of horror.
Horror and moral terror.
I think we can save ourselves a lot of time
if I admit to you right now
that although I think the last half hour works,
I doubt if I can ever convince you of that,
and that the first two hours of the film
consist of some of the most beautiful, heartbreaking, tragic,
memorable footage of war that I've ever seen.
I think that you can show almost anything to do with Vietnam,
and people feel, "Oh, my God, the human waste."
That may be true, but this movie is made
on such an epic scale.
And because they could get agitated,
that raised the temperature of the movies they were discussing.
Tremendously boring,
boring from the beginning of the movie.
- I just wanna compare this film... - Oh, no. Wait a minute.
- Now he's not boring at all. - Oh, yes. Fabulously boring.
- He is fabulously boring? - I would pass...
There was something almost transgressive and exciting
about seeing on TV somebody say about a movie,
you know what you might always want to say to your friend,
or your girlfriend or your mother or your sister,
"No, you're wrong. It's not a good movie."
That's the way people do relate to films,
is in that argumentative sort of way,
in which if you're right nobody can tell you that you're wrong.
I sit at the desk next to our music critic at the Sun-Times.
People are very worshipful of him.
"Oh, what did you think about Shulty's conducting last night?"
And then he will say, and they will nod like this and go away.
And then they'll turn around and come up to me and say,
"I totally disagree with your review in this morning's paper."
The success of the show was undeniable,
except we were not on in two major markets:
New York and Los Angeles.
Here I am at the little popcorn shop
a half a block from the screening room where I see all the movies.
This is the Chicago Theater on State Street.
Their position was, if there's gonna be a movie show,
it's not gonna be two guys from Chicago.
We're gonna have New York critics, or we're Hollywood.
Who are these guys, right?
This is not Andrew Sarris, and Pauline Kael.
And it's also not the kind of, the wised up players
who might be in Los Angeles.
What do these people have to tell us about movies?
The arrival of Pauline Kael on the scene shook everything up.
The New Yorker recognized that
maybe this was the time for a new kind of movie criticism.
Suddenly movie critics become new players in the game.
You weren't crazy about Prince of the City.
No. Prince of the City.
I thought, it really, as a piece of narrative,
it's almost a case study in confusion.
Kael's influence shaped how critics looked at movies...
...and how people read them.
Film was taken seriously and so were film critics.
Andrew Sarris was promoting
the idea of the director as the maker of the film,
and Pauline Kael, elevating film writing,
film criticism as an art.
But these were towering figures, clashing.
Rather like Siskel and Ebert,
but with more intellectual heft.
Uh-oh, Gene. This bowser in the balcony
means it's time for Dog Of The Week.
A regular feature where each of us picks the week's worst movie.
Well, Roger, you and Spot may not believe this,
but I have just seen my first nudie karate film.
- You're kidding. - No.
Roger once said, "Do you think Pauline Kael
would be working with a dog?"
I don't know Pauline Kael, I never knew Pauline Kael.
But fuck Pauline Kael.
Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel
were the most powerful critics of all time.
In any realm.
Finally, they had to cave in
and run the show in New York and L.A.
It was a victory we relished, I have to tell you.
Here to help us sort the blockbusters from the bombs
are the team At the Movies, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert.
You guys live in Chicago still, down there in Oprah-land?
What I'd like to do is come to Chicago one night
and we'll just go nuts. We'll just get stinking drunk.
We'll go out and eat steaks all night.
My next two guests are regarded as the most popular
and most important film critics in the country.
They are the two most influential movie critics in the country.
Is there anybody more popular? We'll find out and ask them.
And ultimately,
I think they were on the Johnny Carson Show
more than just about anybody.
Is there something out there that is really so bad?
Roger?
I can't really recommend Three Amigos.
It's the Christmas picture I like the least.
- This is the happy hour. - Yes.
I don't think I'd ask you if I knew you were gonna say that.
Chevy Chase has made a lot of good movies,
and God willing, he will make a lot more good movies in the future.
- With your help. - Yes, well, I...
Yes, with your help.
There is a tendency for somebody...
...who is naturally funny,
as Chevy is, to try to get laughs
by standing there and ad-libbing
when somebody else is trying to talk.
That's right.
The movie studios went from helping us...
to hating us, to fearing us.
The circulations of all of the newspaper critics,
and all of the magazines, could not match
the reach of the show at its height.
It became quite clear very often
that the film companies cared a lot about Roger and Gene seeing it,
but not so much about the rest of us.
Two thumbs up became everything for a Hollywood movie.
Back when moviemakers still thought
critics' enthusiasm could sell a movie.
In 1991, Richard Corliss published
a piece in Film Comment about how the show
was ruining and vulgarizing film criticism.
"Will anyone read this story?
It has too many words and not enough pictures.
Does anyone read this magazine?
Every article in it wants to be a meal, not a McNugget.
Is anyone reading film criticism?
It lacks punch, the clips, the thumbs.
I simply don't want people to think that what they have to do on TV
is what I am supposed to do in print.
I don't want junk food to be the only cuisine at the banquet."
Yeah, etcetera.
Uh... I really did sound angry there,
but it seemed to me that the Siskel-Ebert effect
was that a film was either good or bad
and the rest didn't matter so much.
I am the first to agree with Corliss
that the Siskel and Ebert program
is not in depth film criticism.
As indeed, how could it be, given our time constraints.
But we would have to do it for our own amusement
because nobody would play it on television.
The program's purpose is to provide
exactly what Corliss says it provides:
information on what's new at the movies, who's in it,
and whether the critic thinks it's any good or not.
If you're talking about film criticism in a serious way,
consumer advice is not the same thing as criticism.
To assume that something is good for everybody,
or bad for everybody is insulting to everybody.
The subject of Crash left me feeling empty.
Crash has some beautiful bodies on view,
but also some ugly ideas.
The car crash is a fertilizing rather than a destructive event.
When we have an opinion about a movie,
that opinion may light a bulb over the head
of an ambitious youth who then understands
that people can make up their own minds about the movies.
I think I liked the movie a lot more than you did.
I'd like to make it clear that most people are probably
going to hate it, be repelled by it or walk out of it,
just as they did at the Cannes Film Festival.
- Why is that? - Because it's too tough to take.
The reason Roger loved being on television
is that at his heart,
he really is a populist.
Roger believes that everybody ought to be able to get a movie.
I think they were conscientious about trying to
do what they were doing as well as they could,
and as seriously as they could.
But invariably, a show like Gene and Roger's show
becomes a part of that mainstream system.
This week, Siskel and Ebert review
Arnold Schwarzenegger in Last Action Hero.
And by and large, the purpose of mainstream reviewing
is not just to valorize films
that get multi-million dollar ad campaigns.
... Jurassic Park.
But to eliminate everything else.
I think what Gene and Roger did was the opposite of that.
Roger went out and he looked for people like Michael Moore.
He looked for people like me.
As a film critic, he was somebody
who gave life to new voices, gave life to new visions,
that reflected all the diversity of this nation.
Different classes, points of view,
he wanted it all out there.
My assurance to the pet owner
that they will be reunited with their pet.
My first film, Gates of Heaven.
There was a newspaper strike.
And so the movie wasn't reviewed
by any of the New York newspapers, which is a disaster.
I miss that little black kitten so much.
I just thought, that's it, the movie's just going to vanish.
Both of them wanted to review it.
I was troubled because the number of theaters
in which it was playing was extremely small,
and here you have a show that's being shown
on 300 some-odd public television stations around the country.
How are people gonna get to see it?
Let's move on to a movie now
that I think is one of the most brilliant, weird, and unusual
American documentary films I've seen in a long time.
And then really out of nowhere,
those guys started reviewing Gates of Heaven.
Well, I agree with you completely. I think it's a superb film.
Then they found an excuse to review it again.
There are films that we call "Buried Treasures."
And a third time.
I don't think anyone who's seen this film can ever forget it.
I believe that I would not
really have a career if not for those guys.
I made my first film. I kind of made it alone.
I didn't know anyone in the industry.
I don't even know how I got Roger's email,
but I emailed, assuming no one would answer.
And he answered. And he said, "If your film gets into Sundance,"
tell me and I would watch it there."
So then later, the film did go to Sundance,
and I emailed him again, and he said,
"Yes, I'll come to see it." I said, "Here are the three times."
He didn't come to the first screening,
he didn't come to the second screening,
and the last screening was a Sunday morning, I think,
8:00 a.m., on the last day of the festival.
I said he's probably not even here.
In fact, he was one of the first people there.
And I was there with my actor, and he said,
"Do you mind if I take some pictures
with you and your actor, just in case I like the film?
If I don't like it, don't worry, I'll never use them."
I was, I think, I was maybe eight or nine or something,
and my Aunt Denise, who was a massive film geek,
who passed her film geekdom onto me,
found out about these rehearsals for the Oscars,
and one day he walked through.
And I remember saying, "Thumbs up! Thumbs up!"
screaming, screaming, and he came over.
I grew up.
I made this film when I was 34 years old.
It was the first film I ever made.
You're second generation.
Joshua Tree generation.
The film was about my aunt,
my aunt who took me to the Oscar's that day.
Nothing wrong with that.
And about losing someone that you love.
And it was Ebert's review that really got to the heart
of what I was trying to articulate.
And just touched me so much,
that I sent him the picture from the Oscar's.
His reply was, "We were both younger then."
The next day, a blog post turned up
where he wrote,
in a very heartfelt way, about his own aunt
who kind of gave him the gift of art and film as well.
You know, I broke down crying, and it was a mess.
It's dangerous as a black woman to give something that you've made
from your point of view,
very steeped in your identity and your personhood
to a white man whose gaze is usually the exact opposite,
and to say, you are the carrier of this film to the public.
You're the one that's gonna dictate whether it has value.
And you had a lot less fears around that with Roger.
Because you knew it was someone who was gonna take it seriously,
gonna come with some historical context,
some cultural nuance.
I mean, everybody knows Roger had a black wife.
You know what I mean? You know.
He's like an honorary brother.
I mean, you live with a sister.
That's a whole different understanding of black women, right?
So maybe you watch my film differently.
Every time I see him, I'll walk away with something new, you know.
And every time I sit down at the table to do the work,
I think about him,
because what if something happens and I don't get to see him again.
It was just a few days before Christmas.
I said, "Well, Chaz, can I come there?"
- So... - Merry Christmas.
Come on over and say hi.
How are you? Good to see you.
What are you doing in here?
Chaz is missing you at home, you gotta get out.
Oh, I like the glasses. Get off the road...
It was nice to see him interacting with his grandkids.
Grandpa Roger, do you think...
I know that he must be in pain physically,
but he ends up being the happiest guy around.
- From the Christmas stocking. - From Santa.
From Santa.
I just remember being so young,
and watching for the first time so many movies
and him sort of explaining to me, you know,
what's important about this one, or this is a really great movie.
Ever heard of this film?
This movie begins with seven children
who are seven, and check in on them
every seven years of their lives.
Are they 56 now? Really?
Oh, my gosh, wow.
All the great conversations and things that he taught me
about movies and life and family and books,
and you know, all this stuff, I just...
Those experiences mean a lot to me.
There's another chocolate bar, chocolate bars.
So I spoke to Werner, I said I was coming to see you,
and he sends his regards,
and he says you have to keep writing
because he's very worried about cinema.
Can you say it the way Werner would say it?
Oh, gosh. No.
- Roger... - Roger you must get better.
You must soldier on, Roger.
Really bad shape.
He's the soldier of cinema.
He's a wounded comrade
who cannot even speak anymore, and he plows on,
and that touches my heart very deeply.
I never dedicate films to anyone.
I dedicated a film to him where I ventured out
to the last corner of this planet...
to Antarctica,
to the ice.
And from there I bow my head in his direction.
He reinforces my courage.
One time, I went to see Roger.
He was kind of eager and bouncing to give me something.
He gave me this letter, actually from Laura Dern.
"Dear Roger, I want you to know
that your generosity and expertise
at the Sundance Tribute meant the world to me.
I've tried to come up with an appropriate way to thank you.
This box and its contents, a jigsaw puzzle,
I have treasured for some time.
It was given to me by the Strasberg family
when Lee Strasberg passed away.
It was Marilyn Monroe's, who collected puzzles,
and it had been given to her by Alfred Hitchcock.
That night at Sundance you inspired me
about film and contribution and I wanted to pass along
film and connection in some way. Thank you again.
Love to you and Chaz. Laura."
And then Roger gave me this gift, which I refused.
I said, "You cannot give me this gift.
I cannot accept this gift."
And then he said, "You're going to accept the gift,
because you have to one day give this
to somebody else who deserves it."
What's it a jigsaw puzzle of?
I've always been terrified to make it.
I mean, this is the jigsaw puzzle
that Alfred Hitchcock gave Marilyn Monroe.
In the autumn of 1967,
I saw a movie named I Call First,
later to be retitled, Who's That Knocking at My Door.
The energy of the cutting grabbed me.
It was the work of a natural director.
I wrote a review suggesting in 10 years
he would become the American Fellini.
I said, "You think it's gonna take that long?", and I was serious.
I'm just like, it's over here. What are you talking about?
It was the first real strong encouragement.
Yes, there are defects in the movie.
But he saw something special and that had to be nourished.
As you know, I carried your review around with me
when I was in Europe in 1968. It made me...
I kept reading. Is that really about me? You know, wow.
So refreshing to find a director and an actor
working right at the top of their form.
I think Raging Bull is one of the great American pictures of the year.
His greatest film is an act of self-redemption.
In the period before it, he'd become addicted to cocaine
and told me that after an overdose, he was pronounced dead
in an emergency room and resuscitated.
During the '80s was extremely... I was gone, basically.
Broke, and I'd gone through some bad, bad periods.
My third marriage had broken up,
and I was basically alone.
The only thing that saved me
or made me want to...
continue just like living, in a way, was my agent called
and said, "You know, there's this festival up in Toronto."
I said, "Yeah."
"Roger Ebert, Gene Siskel,
they wanna give you this tribute."
I was kind of scared.
Could I walk down this theater aisle
and go up on a stage, knowing who I am?
But I knew that they believed in me,
and I have that in my house now,
in a special place where only I can see it,
that I pass by every maybe, five to six minutes, I see it.
But that night changed it.
And I started my life again, you know.
It was...
I didn't feel inhibited with Roger.
He was that close.
Roger has, unlike just about any of the rest of us,
arrived at this point where he is
kind of the peer of the people,
of some of the people that he writes about.
It's very complicated, I think, when you have
personal relationships and friendships with these people,
because it cannot but cloud your judgment.
I am infinitely corruptible.
I do not want to get to know these people as people.
I want to think of them as fictional characters.
I mean, my obligation is to write
what I think about a movie,
and not to worry about someone I know
perching on my shoulder saying, "No, I wouldn't say that."
When you look at the nineteenth century
and the great critics in music,
they hung together, critics and artists.
They were in the same circles.
And that helped the critics and it helped the composers.
Roger brought back that concept and he was criticized for it.
That was real distracting for me there,
the way all those pool balls bounced around like that,
and the scene gets even worse as it goes on.
And it's all the more disappointing
because The Color of Money was directed by Martin Scorsese,
who is one of the two or three best movie directors around today.
Devastating.
It doesn't have the interior energy, and the drive,
and the obsession of most of the best Scorsese films.
- The script isn't good. - It's just a standard,
sort of predictable narrative.
I said, I know, but beautiful... Michael Ballhouse, Paul Newman.
But you know, they wouldn't accept it.
That was a way of condemning and helping.
In other words, you've done this now, once,
you may have done it twice, but watch yourself.
As opposed to toxic, poisonous, unkind,
ungenerous, lack of charity, on so many others.
I think he was a tougher critic when he was younger.
He could be really cutting, and relentless,
and ruthless, and sarcastic.
You motherfucker!
Not a bad movie, but it's not original,
- and it's not a masterpiece. - I think it's very original
and very close to being a masterpiece.
I have never felt a kill in a movie quite like that.
Not in Apocalypse Now, not in The Deer Hunter?
No, not like that. Not like that.
In that case, you're gonna love the late show
because they have kills like that every night
in black and white starring John Wayne.
They would get into their cross talk.
The camera would stop, they would still be at it.
And I disagree particularly about the part that you like.
They truly felt it in their soul.
They could still show them the error of their ways,
the folly of their thinking.
Benji the Hunted exhausted me.
This is the first time I wanted to tell a dog
to slow down and stop to smell the flowers.
I don't know, Gene. Your review is the typical sort of
blasé, sophisticated, cynical review...
I'll take the word "sophisticated."
...I would expect from an adult.
You're wrapping yourself in the flag of children.
You're wrapping yourself in the flag of the sophisticated film critic.
- No, boredom. - You've seen it all.
Boredom with Benji running.
I don't think that any child is gonna be bored by this movie.
It was not you know, gentlemanly, it was not,
"Well, I see you have a good point."
It was I'm gonna crush you.
And this is the show where you give Benji The Hunted
a positive review and not Kubrick's film?
Now, Gene, that's totally unfair,
because you realize that these reviews are relative.
Benji the Hunted is not one-tenth the film...
- Roger... ...that the Kubrick film is
but you know that you review films within context.
And you know it, and you should be ashamed of yourself.
- No, I'm not. - Now let's take another look...
They almost didn't care what anyone else thought about anything,
as long as they could try to persuade the other.
And I'm not talking about just, about movie reviews.
I'm talking about anything in life,
the tie you're wearing, what you think of that person,
a book, a restaurant.
When there was, and when wasn't there disagreement,
the coin of the realm was the quarter.
It's hard to think of anything
that wasn't decided by a coin toss.
Were we going to get tuna fish sandwiches for lunch?
Who would get one movie, who would get another movie.
Who got to sit next to Johnny Carson on the couch.
They actually wanted us
to change the opening of the show every week
so that Roger would be first one week
and Gene would be first the next week, and we said no.
Why is the show Siskel and Ebert?
And by the way will it ever be Ebert and Siskel?
No.
You've signed on to Siskel and...
There's a long story about that.
A long story. You know, I'm older,
I've been a movie critic longer,
E comes before S in the alphabet,
I've got the Pulitzer Prize,
and yet it's called Siskel and Ebert.
And if you wanna know why that is, you can ask Siskel.
A flip of the coin.
Gene Siskel was among the most competitive people
on the face of this planet.
But Roger always could lord it over Gene
that he had a Pulitzer Prize.
Roger was a bit of a braggadocio.
He was a great raconteur.
But frankly, he was full of himself.
Roger was a bit of a control freak.
He could not direct Gene Siskel.
He was a rogue planet in Roger's solar system.
Gene was a source of madness in Roger's life.
Roger is an only child.
He was used to getting his way. Absolutely.
And he could be a real big baby
when he didn't get what he wanted.
Gene, on the other hand, would just go in there
and pummel you until you agree with him,
until you just say, "All right, Gene!
Okay, you're right. Got it."
It wasn't a game with him.
He saw something, he wanted it to happen.
He made it happen.
Gene was very good
at reading Roger's date book upside down.
As soon as he saw L.A. and the date,
he knew what films were coming out.
He knew what big star
that Roger would be going out to interview.
And that's all it took for him to make sure
that he got the interview before Roger got it.
Fumes you could almost see coming out of Roger's head, you know.
Gene had done him in again, that wascally wabbit.
Roger, who was the picture
of equanimity for most of his life,
did all of a sudden, produce a petulance that I hadn't seen before.
I thought this movie was awful.
- Oh, no, Roger. - Dreadful, terrible,
stupid, idiotic...
- No, no. ...unfunny, labored...
...forced, painful, bad. - Oh, Roger, Roger.
What happened to your sense of humor?
I don't think Roger was, by nature, a fighter.
But it's like, if you have a brother
who likes to fight all the time, so then you learn how to fight.
And Gene had his number.
Gene knew the buttons to push and everything else.
They're in a first class cabin,
Gene's in one of the front rows.
Roger's behind him, and Gene hears
the same old stories that he's heard over and over again.
And he's just annoyed.
He writes a little note
and he gives it to the flight attendant.
Said, "Would you pass this to Mr. Ebert?"
So Roger gets the note, and it says, "Dear Mr. Ebert,
we in the cockpit have noticed that you are on our flight.
Frankly, we both agree more with you than your partner,
and we would be so honored if you would join us
in the cockpit for a bit of the flight."
I mean, Gene knows that Roger was really excited.
He gets into the aisle, and Roger was a big guy then,
he just kind of bounds down the aisle,
and gets ready to knock on the door of the cabin.
And you know, the flight attendants
and people are horrified, and Gene says,
"Dear Mr. Ebert, we in the cockpit."
Gotcha.
And he finally tells Gene Siskel, you know, "You just hate me.
You just don't like me," you know.
I mean, that relationship was absolutely radioactive.
Two thrillers this week on Siskel and Ebert.
First, we'll review Michael Caine and Pierce Brosnan
- in The Fourth Protocol. - And then, Gene Hackman
and Kevin Costner star in No Way Out,
and we have a third thriller, too if you're interested.
What do you mean, two thrillers?
How about something like this: It's thriller week
on Siskel and Ebert and we've got three big ones.
Okay. Ready?
- I guess you're gonna do it. - We have to rewrite it, don't we?
- No. Let's... - You can't ad lib, Gene.
Can we for the last week, and next week we'll do it?
No, every week counts.
You read it then, you ad-lib it.
I'll do nothing. Let him do whatever he wants.
It's thriller week on Siskel and Ebert and the Movies,
and we've got three new ones.
Gotta have energy up and the movie's out.
- Why don't you read both parts? - I'd like to.
- I know that. - Please get your energy up.
It's thriller week on Siskel and Ebert and the Movies,
and we've got three new ones.
Dennis Quaid in The Big Easy,
Michael Caine in The Fourth Protocol,
and Kevin Costner and Gene Hackman in No Way Out.
- Sound a little excited, Gene. - Sound less excited, Roger.
That's why we're re-doing it because of what you did.
It's thriller week on Siskel and Ebert At The Movies.
And we've got three new ones...
It's called And The Movies, not At The Movies.
And that's why we're re-doing it this time.
It's thriller week on Siskel and Ebert and the Movies.
And we've got three new ones.
Dennis Quaid in The Big Easy,
Michael Caine in The Fourth Protocol,
and Kevin Costner and Gene Hackman in No Way Out.
That's this week on Siskel, and Ebert,
And the Movies, and the asshole.
Great.
They were still, in their hearts,
little boys fighting it out on the playground
and both of them expecting to win.
I've been in here a little more than a month.
Can we stand?
I came in expecting to repair my walking ability
after the hairline fracture, but have discovered
that it wasn't that simple.
...two, three, push up.
Bigger step with that right foot.
Bigger step, Roger.
I can no longer take good health for granted.
I hate that.
Big step.
- Pardon? - He's saying no.
Are you okay?
Do you want me to stop? Okay.
- That was good. - That was good.
That was good. That was good.
Relax.
I never thought he'd have to be here again.
He's at the best place...
but it's just overwhelming
to think that he's been here five times.
If he gave up, then it would be very difficult.
Do you want your speakers plugged in?
You know what, let her suction you first.
Please, Roger.
Can you let the nurse do that first?
Roger, can we set this up after?
Roger.
He loves his music.
Ready?
Sounds good.
Sometimes, I just stare at him
and say where did this determination come from?
Roger had an inner core that was made of steel.
How have you kept your spirits up?
I've zeroed in on my work.
When I'm seeing a movie, or writing the review,
that makes me feel good.
You know how they talk about being in the zone?
When you're doing something you're good at,
you get in the zone.
It sort of pushes your troubles to the back of your mind.
You have this tremendous body of work.
He's been writing for half of the history of feature films.
And that's just one slice of the cake.
A novel in weekly installments.
Just like Dickens. Not quite of that level.
He wrote a book about how to keep your computer bug-free.
Strolls through London.
A book about the Cannes Film Festival.
The Cannes Film Festival is one of those events
like the Super Bowl, Wimbledon, or the Kentucky Derby
that comes cloaked in its own legend.
This is Cannes on the French Riviera,
a fishing village since Roman times.
And every year in the month of May,
the population grows by forty thousand
for the world's most famous film festival.
It's been called the world's biggest party.
The town of Cannes is bursting to the seams
with directors, producers, and stars.
Hi.
It wouldn't be a Cannes Film Festival
without a beautiful blonde here on the terrace of the Carlton Hotel.
Here was this kid from Southern Illinois
hobnobbing with all of the international movie stars.
That's me with Robert De Niro.
Yes, your faithful correspondent
is getting an exclusive interview.
And De Niro was telling me he's just happy to be here.
He loved that. He did, and they loved him.
Roger! Roger Ebert!
I always wake up very early in the morning after I arrive.
I walk down the Rue Félix Faure, passing the flower sellers,
the fishmongers unloading iced oysters,
and at particular cafe, at a particular table,
I order, in shameful French,
a cafe au lait, a Perrier, and a croissant.
Such returns are an important ritual to me.
He stayed at the same frickin' little hotel in Cannes,
the Splendid, which is a dump. But he loved it.
I'd go over and see him at the Splendid,
and he'd say, "Tomorrow, be here at ten."
And so we go over to the Swedish Film Institute's hotel suite,
and there's Erland Josephson the actor lying on the bed,
and he and I talk about Ingmar Bergman for an hour.
You know, no interview, no formality.
Just yacking.
If I am lucky,
something extraordinary will happen to me during this festival.
I will see a film that will make my spine tingle with its greatness.
And I will leave the theatre speechless.
It was at Cannes that I saw Bresson's
precise, unforgiving L'Argent.
L'Argent.
A film that was
so cold on its surface,
that I finally realized that no man could make
such distant and austere films
There are Dantean levels to this festival.
At the top level is the official selection,
films chosen from all over the world.
But down, down, down, down here
in the basement of the Palais, this is the movie supermarket.
This is where they sell porno and exploitation
and horror and action and violence.
You take out ads in Variety saying we will buy movies
- sight unseen. - Right.
- Last year, 350 movies. - How do you sell them?
By the title, by the foot, by the inch?
By the pound.
Most of us were writing our stories
after the festival was over.
Roger, anticipating the Internet,
or recalling daily journalism,
was filing stories all through the festival.
For best film, Kagemusha, which is the Akira Kurosawa film.
While photographers are trying to get
pictures of stars at the festival,
would-be stars and hopefuls are trying to get their pictures
taken by photographers.
In the dreams of the starlet,
there's always that scene where the cigar-chomping producer
spots a lovely young woman on the Carlton terrace
and shouts, "Who is that girl?
I must have her for my next picture."
So much of what we did was not me as the producer
saying do this, do that, do that, was Roger.
He had fabulous ideas.
...topless beaches, starlets, interviews.
Whenever we were doing something on the show
that required some creativity...
I don't know why you keep... that isn't the issue.
It was Gene who would usually win out that argument,
and Roger would say, "Well... fine."
The Cannes Film Festival was only Roger.
He loved that he didn't have to convince someone else.
Roger had everything he needed.
Gene was just afraid that at some point
Roger would go it alone and quit.
And this literally haunted Gene.
When the next contract would come up,
would Roger not be there?
Joe Antelo just sat down and did the math.
In syndication, we can put commercials around it.
So he offered Gene and Roger a tremendous amount of money.
Roger didn't go out and buy a new car or anything.
He moved out of that garage apartment he had.
I know that I would hear them sometimes talk about money,
like "Hey, big boy, did you get that check in the mail?"
These guys were Siamese twins joined at the rear end.
And they were gonna make this thing work.
Gene would say, and this is as they became
more and more of a team,
"He's an asshole.
But he's my asshole."
This week on Siskel and Ebert and the Movies,
the science fiction adventure, Robocop.
Why don't we do that again?
Did you know that for Gene, speech is a second language?
Roger's first language is,
"Yes, I'll have apple pie with my order."
He asks the McDonald's girl
if he can have apple pie with the order,
before they ask him.
And you know what Gene says when he goes into McDonald's?
Can I have a apple with thei... with their order?
Okay, ready?
You know they don't get enough shit basically raw. They don't.
They don't. They're called yuppies now.
They run the goddamn country, and all of us, all of our...
I'm speaking to everyone who's eavesdropping right now.
Come on, band together, people, let's overthrow the country.
Protestants, people who sort of want a religion.
- Let's stick together. - I know...
The Catholics and the fucking Jews,
we go back a few years together.
Come on, we're real.
We're real. We get down and get dirty.
- I'll take it. - We were burning each other
when Martin Luther was only a gleam in his mother's eye.
I'll take a Bap... I'll take a Baptist.
I go back 6,000 years.
I mean Ba... Somebody that has some goddamn passion,
some blood coursing through their veins.
- Case closed. - Anything.
Right.
Steve Martin's new comedy, Roxanne.
This week on Siskel and Ebert and the Movies.
You said it a little too fast.
The greatest day for Gene was when Roger came in
to say that he was going to get married.
I remember Gene saying to me,
"Can you believe this is happening?"
He's gonna have a mortgage.
He's gonna have to buy furniture.
He's gonna have all the same things
that we do to have to deal with.
He's gonna need the show.
He'll never leave now.
Chaz was probably more life-altering
for him than his TV show.
She really, really liked him
for what he was and not who he was.
She changed his life immeasurably.
She changed his personality.
Hey, I was eight months pregnant and Roger
grabbed the cab in front of me in New York.
It's not that kind of guy now.
I think Gene was so happy
that Roger found his mate.
He was 50 years old when we got married.
He used to tell me,
"I waited just about all my life to find you.
And I'm glad I did.
And I'm never gonna let you go."
I mean...
Our wedding was like a fairytale.
Gene Siskel's daughters Kate and Kali,
they were our beautiful little flower girls.
And Roger's idea of a wedding was like Father of the Bride,
where the father says,
"Can't you just have the wedding in the backyard
and put some brats on the grill?"
People who knew me then would be very surprised
that I would marry a white man...
because I felt that African-American men had gotten
such a raw deal in this society.
In college, I was the head of the black student union.
I marched with Martin Luther King.
I talked to my mother about it.
"Mom, what do you think people would say,"
and she said, "Doesn't matter, doesn't matter.
What do you say? What does your heart say?"
Chaz and Roger, you have come together
according to God's wonderful plan...
And as sophisticated as Roger was,
he didn't know how his family would take this.
He used to say,
"You know, maybe my Uncle Bill, um...
or my Aunt Mary, you know, because you're not Catholic."
I said, "Roger, come on,
if we're gonna have this relationship, we have to be serious.
Not Catholic, or not white?"
He said, "Yeah, probably some of that too."
After a while though,
his family accepted me with open arms.
He was on a lifelong quest for love.
He found romantic love with Chaz.
Hey, I'm just about to beat up...
And he loved that family, her kids and her grandkids.
Hey, you better not drool on me.
Oh, he fit right in, I mean, perfectly.
Grandpa Roger. Grandpa Roger.
Oh, I forgot what I was gonna say.
There were no strangers in her family.
- Howdy, cowboy! - I love and am loved.
Okay, try to get that pole.
And as a member of another race,
I have, without exception, been accepted and embraced.
The greatest pleasure came from annual trips
we made with our grandchildren, Raven, Emile, and Taylor,
and their parents, Sonya and Mark,
where we made our way from Budapest to Prague,
Vienna, Hawai'i, Los Angeles,
London, Paris, Venice twice, and Stockholm.
What do you have to say about the trip?
We are having a wonderful time,
and right now we're about to take the garden walk,
which is a great tradition of all of our vacations
when we go on nature walks.
Emile announced that, for him,
there was no such thing as getting up too early.
And every morning, the two of us would meet in the hotel lobby
and go out for long walks together.
And there are some flowers.
One morning in Budapest, he asked me to take a photo
of two people walking ahead of us and holding hands.
"Why?"
"Because they look happy."
Those times seem more precious
now that they're in the past.
I don't walk easily anymore.
Nice job, Roger.
Beautiful.
One more step.
I walked everyday in the years before my troubles,
aiming for 10,000 steps with a pedometer.
The Caldwell Lily pond had a special serenity.
I usually had it to myself.
I chose it as the perfect location
to make a little film featuring my friend Bill Nack
reciting the last page of The Great Gatsby,
which he has recited to me several times annually
since we first met in the 1960s.
"It's vanished trees,
the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house,
had once pandered in whispers
to the last and greatest of all human dreams..."
Every time I see Bill,
I ask him to recite for me, from memory,
the closing words of Gatsby. And every time, he does.
"Compelled into an aesthetic contemplation...
...he neither understood nor desired.
Face to face for the last time in history,
with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder..."
We're both conscious of the passage of time,
of its flow, slipping through our fingers,
like a long silk scarf.
I think this was Roger's favorite passage from all of literature.
It was really a passage about the American Dream.
You can be anything you want.
You know, Roger went from this small town kid in Urbana
to this huge national celebrity.
His father was an electrician. His mother was a housewife.
But I think The Great Gatsby was also, for Roger, about death.
Death might have obsessed him a bit.
You know, his father died fairly young.
I knew he adored him.
There's an inescapable parallel between us.
Both my father and I have cancer.
My disease may have been started
by childhood radiation treatments for an ear infection.
I got those because they loved me.
In my case, recently discovered tumors
of the spine have metastasized.
The doctor said it was these tumors
that caused the hip fracture.
Roger emailed me that sharing the news
of the cancer's return could anger Chaz.
We don't know.
We haven't really fully discussed this.
It's so new that we, we really don't know,
and I'm uncomfortable talking about it.
Just sort of taking it a day at a time,
like I do everything else.
So, what do the doctors say?
Six to sixteen months.
It is likely I will have passed when the film is ready.
We'll see.
The radiation could do its job so well
that he's around a lot longer.
So we'll have the radiation, and we'll hope for the best.
I mean, here he is in 2013,
and in 2006, there were times when they said
he wouldn't be here the next day, so...
I have no fear of death.
We all die.
I consider my remaining days to be like money in the bank.
When it is all gone, I will be repossessed.
When the pain gets to be unbearable,
I may not be so jolly.
My senior English teacher asked me,
"Ebert, why are you always writing about death?"
I think it began in Catholic grade school
where they place so much attention on mortal sin and dying.
I found it kind of exciting.
I would have been infuriated if I missed this
because of an accident, or sudden death.
This is the third act and it is an experience.
So you see, little Ebert has always been a macabre sort.
Most people probably don't know that about him.
Maybe that's why he's jolly, maybe it's just like, "Okay!"
It makes for a better story.
"Gatsby believed in the green light
and the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us.
It eluded us then, but that's no matter...
tomorrow, tomorrow we will run faster,
stretch out our arms farther,
and one fine morning so we beat on.
Boats against the current,
borne back ceaselessly into the past."
On April 30th, 1998,
Gene was asked to throw out the first ball of the season
at the White Sox game.
And he had had a headache for some weeks.
May 8th, he was diagnosed,
terminal brain cancer.
And, um, pretty much...
you don't live more than a year.
But on April 30th, he threw out a damn good pitch.
He didn't really want the folks at Disney
to know how sick he was.
He was afraid that if they heard the words "brain tumor,"
they would put in a substitute for him,
and that would be the end.
Our mothers knew,
and Gene's siblings,
and my two sisters knew.
That's it.
And Roger didn't know.
And that really wounded Roger.
I don't think it's that he didn't trust Roger personally.
Nonetheless, when something like that happens,
you take it personally, how else is there to take it, you know.
Even though he may have been a few years older than Gene,
Gene was like the older brother he never had.
And I was so sad for Roger for not...
Really, for not being able to tell his brother goodbye.
Gene didn't want to be seen as a victim.
But more importantly, he didn't want
to watch the effect of his dying on his children.
And my children celebrated many things that year,
and had a happy year,
instead of watching the clock,
which they would've done.
He wanted to do just what he was doing.
He wanted to be with his family,
and go back to work.
Our next film is Meet the Deedles.
And boy, is this an annoying experience.
To the point that from now on, for the rest of my life,
I may have a negative physical reaction to hearing the word...
Well, it's the title word in the film.
- Deedles? - Oh. Roger, don't.
Toward the end, I said, "We should go see him."
And we were gonna go and visit him that Monday,
but he passed away that Saturday.
It was a friendship that he cherished,
and it was a horrible pain for him.
This year on Gene's birthday,
Roger tweeted every hour on the hour
with links to memories high and low.
I was really touched, and I wrote him a thank you,
and he sent me this response.
"Dear Marlene, I'm sick and old
and find myself thinking about Gene more than ever.
My stupid ego and maybe his, complicated the fact
that I have never met a smarter or funnier man.
We fought like cats and dogs.
But there were times often unobserved,
like after a long hotel dinner we had once in Boston,
when I've never felt closer to a man."
I think their relationship evolved.
They grew to respect each other.
And I do believe they did love each other.
After Gene's funeral, Roger vowed
that he was never gonna keep any secrets about his health.
He said, "If anything like this ever happens to me,
I don't want to hide it,
especially from the people who mean something to us."
I've been coming to this conference for 35 years,
and this morning I confessed that I am a sick person.
About two and a half or three years ago,
I found a lump under my chin, and I went to the doctor,
and it turned out to be associated with thyroid cancer.
He was in the hospital maybe two days at the most,
ready to get out.
Went back to the show. He's such an optimist.
And he thought, this was probably the end of it.
We didn't know that was just the warm up act.
A few years later, I went in for a routine scan
to check for any new problems.
The news was not good.
Cancer had been seen in my right lower jawbone.
Again he had surgery.
We were going home.
We were all packed up and ready to go home just like today.
Chaz and I had a Leonard Cohen song
we both really liked called I'm Your Man.
It's sort of long but I wanted to play it one last time.
As it was playing,
I had a sudden hemorrhage of an artery.
The doctors rushed me into the operating room.
The whole thing had burst.
His neck, it just was gushing blood.
There was about 15 doctors standing there.
They were grabbing towels, squeezing to get the blood stopped, and...
If he hadn't been playing that song,
we would've been out of the hospital already.
If that song had been shorter
and I had left, I would be dead.
Bye-bye.
"Probable. Workable."
We are told the next surgery will not be life threatening.
The perfect ending would be
that I regain the ability to speak well,
eat and drink, but I would settle
for drinking coffee and having milkshakes.
There were a series of surgeries,
and his plan was to return to the show,
to return to broadcasting.
It is a major surgery.
Yes, it is.
Is it worth it?
Excuse me.
He's very brave about it, but I'm not.
I think it's going to be successful
and everything's gonna turn out fine.
And the first day or two he looked in the mirror...
he was very pleased with what he saw.
But just like all the other surgeries,
there was an infection and they had to undo everything.
That left him more debilitated than ever,
and he just decided no more surgeries.
No more.
Roger's not one to look back and say,
"Oh, coulda, woulda, shoulda."
But there were times when he wrote a note that said,
"Kill me."
I mean, I have that note.
"Kill me."
And I said, "No. No."
I told him that was not an option.
Oh, you want to walk until there, or you wanna?
Okay.
But you know, getting over there, over that bump...
Okay, who's gonna help him stand to go up to the stairs?
I know he wants to write instructions.
Do you want the walker?
Yes or no, do you want the walker? No.
Okay, then let's get...
Yeah, but we have to get up and get going.
People would say, "Don't you get tired?"
You have to trust us.
You have to trust that we know what we're doing.
Yeah, I get tired sometimes.
"Move this chair so it faces stairs."
You know, no, no, guess what, it's a few steps.
You can get out of the chair and you can walk up the stairs.
That's what you've been practicing every day.
You can do this.
But I never got so tired
that I wanted to give up.
Come on, Uncle Roger.
No, he's not gonna do that. Let me handle it, please.
I'm gonna pull the chair out of the way.
There's so many people out there
taking care of people who are sick or disabled.
We all go through the whole gamut of emotions.
Two, three, up...
Okay, now hold.
You know, it's been a long road.
- I think it's hard. - All right.
It's always been hard, but it's even harder now.
He calls her "my angel." And he means it.
Valentine's Day wreath I got for you.
This woman never lost her love.
Now do you want to go upstairs?
She was always there believing I could do it.
And her love was like a wind pushing me back from the grave.
And I told him if you promise me
that you will give it your all,
I promise you that I will try to make life
as interesting for you as possible...
so that every day,
you have something to look forward to.
How does it feel to be back in your own chair?
Okay.
Today is a big day,
coming home after two months is very difficult.
It's a joy,
but it's also very stressful.
"Especially for you."
Is that... Are you trying to be a smart alec?
Are you trying to be a smart alec?
We have a saying in the Latino community,
"Make your heart your face."
Oh, now. Aw, okay.
More than anybody I have ever known,
his heart is his face.
That photograph that was on the cover of Esquire says it all.
This is me. Right?
And I want you to know
who I am and what I'm going through.
I may have things to be depressed about,
but I am not depressed.
My life seems full again.
Here we are full screen.
As we start to bring the screen size down,
eventually getting towards iPhone size,
it's gonna drop, it's gonna break.
And now, look at this...
My attention is focused on my new website,
which will provide a home for my life's work
and has an enduring life of its own.
"Josh, this is beyond my wildest dreams."
Well, I'm glad. I like to make you happy.
Roger has been ahead of the curve,
becoming an early and massive adopter of social media.
He has almost 800,000 followers on Twitter
and 100,000 followers on Facebook.
"Nice links to IMDB and Wikipedia."
If you look at the other people who have
like 850,000 Twitter followers, it's like Kardashians.
Beyond the search widget...
Right now, there's an argument about the Internet.
Some people say film criticism is at the end,
the art of cinema is at the end.
Roger sees it in a much more positive way.
It's a renaissance.
It's a renaissance in film appreciation and film criticism.
The roving reporters that he uses,
like on his blog, for example,
is giving a critical birth to lots of other points of view.
The passionate fan culture, or movie geek culture,
that exists on the Internet, when people are really,
get really, really worked up,
is something that the Siskel and Ebert show helped to seed.
It follows from Roger's understanding of criticism,
which is it's a mode of conversation.
It's the public square.
This is allowing your fans to access
this database of your reviews going back to 1967
that has never been available in this form before.
When I am writing, I am the same person I always was.
In April 2008, I wrote my first blog entry,
and began this current, and probably final stage of my life.
My blog became my voice, my outlet,
my social media in a way I couldn't have dreamed of.
Into it, I poured my regrets, desires and memories.
Most people choose to write a blog. I needed to.
Racism was ingrained in daily life.
It wasn't the overt racism of the South,
but more like the pervading background
against which we lived. We were here...
I've never held a handgun in my life.
The theory is that gun ownership makes us safer.
That doesn't seem to be working out for us.
The body count rises.
He took all of that energy he put into television,
and he transferred it to his blog,
and the Internet, and to his movie reviews,
and wrote better than he ever had in his life.
Bless these boys.
I don't know when a film has connected more immediately
with my own personal experience.
That's how you grow up.
Surrounded by the realms of unimaginable time and space.
We are now seeing the polymathic genius
that those of us who knew Roger always saw.
His voice was stilled,
but of course he's talking more than ever.
In the past 25 years, I have probably seen
ten thousand movies, and reviewed six thousand of them.
- She threw them there. - I understand, but why?
I have forgotten most of them, I hope.
But I remember those worth remembering.
And they are on the same shelf in my mind.
Look at a movie that a lot of people love...
Match me, Sydney.
and you'll find something profound...
no matter how silly the film may seem.
Sing!
What I miss though, is the wonder.
Open the pod bay doors, Hal.
People my age can remember walking into a movie palace...
I'm sorry, Dave.
when the ceiling was far overhead...
I'm afraid I can't do that.
balconies reached way into the shadows.
We remember the sound of a thousand people
laughing all at once,
and screens the size of billboards,
so every seat in the house was a good seat.
"I lost it at the movies," Pauline Kael said,
and we all knew just what she meant.
Charles Foster Kane.
Only two days after he'd returned home,
Roger was readmitted to the hospital with pneumonia.
Chaz thought this was a brief if frustrating setback,
and so Roger and I resumed our email interview
with the plan to film him as soon as he returned home again.
Roger was energetic and answered questions
about a variety of subjects.
My favorite places in the city are the used bookstores.
You can't get me out of one.
Those standard places with standard menus
and breakfast 24 hours a day.
I asked him about one of his most controversial reviews
for Blue Velvet, and his moral indignation
at director David Lynch.
But he asked Isabella Rossellini in this movie
to be undressed and humiliated on the screen...
Drama holds a mirror up to life,
but needn't reproduce it.
Attempts to film Roger in rehab were rebuffed by doctors.
Then suddenly one day his email output slowed to a trickle.
I'm trying to figure out what questions would engage you most fully.
Fearing the worst, I called Chaz. She dissolved into tears.
Roger seemed determined to give up.
He said he was beginning to feel trapped inside.
And he said, "You know, I don't wanna fight this time.
I don't wanna... I don't... I don't wanna fight cancer."
He said, "I am ready to go.
I've had a beautiful life and death is a part of life.
And I'm ready to go,
and you must let me go, you must let me go."
He had signed a DNR,
a do not resuscitate order.
He signed it...
while I wasn't there one day.
And usually we make those kind of decisions together.
But I think he knew...
that that wouldn't have been my choice.
And so...
when we realized that he was leaving
I wanted them to use the defibrillator.
And they said no.
And short of going over
and taking it and doing it myself, you know...
And I could've screamed
and made a fuss and forced them to do it.
But you know what, something came over me.
Roger calls it a wind of peace
just kind of flowed over me,
and I knew it was time to accept it.
And accept that he was leaving.
And so...
I put on Dave Brubeck music in the room.
And I had everyone just settle down.
I was sitting next to his bed,
holding his left hand,
and other people held my hand,
and gathered and formed a circle around and held hands.
Until the doctor...
said that he was going to call it,
1:40 p.m. as the time of death.
I have never seen anything so beautiful
and so serene.
It became... It was so peaceful in that room.
And he... everything just...
everything just relaxed.
He looked young, he looked happy,
and those warm hands, and, you know...
What in the world is a Leave of Presence?
It means I am not going away.
Forty-six years ago, I became the film critic
for the Chicago Sun-Times.
However you came to know me, I'm glad you did,
and thank you for being the best readers
any film critic could ask for.
He had a heart big enough
to accept and love all.
I have to keep... He loved this hat,
that's why I wore it today.
I felt that as long as Roger was alive,
a little bit of Gene was too.
He was the first person I met
who actually walked out of the television.
Famous people have died before in Chicago.
Famous writers have died.
But what I thought marked the stories about Roger
was a genuine affection.
I mean, thousands of people came out
and thousands more wrote tributes on the Internet,
which are still continuing.
I like to walk down on Hollywood Boulevard
because I know it's his star coming.
I set my gaze straight,
I don't look down at the star. I know it's coming.
Looking straight at the horizon into the future.
So on this day of reflection,
I say thank you for going on this journey with me.
I'll see you at the movies.