At the Movies
Roger Ebert became the first movie critic in history to win a Pulitzer Prize. He began his journalism career in high school writing for the Champaign-Urbana News-Gazette and later served as the editor of The Daily Illini. (Images by Bettmann/Getty Images and U. of I. Archives)
Half a century ago, on May 5, 1975, the Chicago Sun-Times’ Roger Ebert, ’64 MEDIA, became the first movie critic to win a Pulitzer Prize. He soon joined his crosstown rival, the Chicago Tribune’s Gene Siskel, on a TV program that would make a pair of ordinary-looking newspapermen more famous than some of the movie stars they discussed. By the time he turned 60 in 2002, Ebert was a bestselling author and favorite guest on the Johnny Carson and David Letterman shows, the only film critic with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
The year 2002 also brought a diagnosis of thyroid cancer. The disease led to disfiguring operations that changed Ebert’s appearance but never affected his intellect or sense of humor. Unable to eat, drink or speak, he kept reviewing movies while detailing his efforts to live as full a life as he could—while avoiding mirrors. “I’m not a lovely sight…what the hell,” he wrote in Life Itself: A Memoir.
After Ebert’s death in 2013, President Barack Obama eulogized him. “For a generation of Americans, and especially Chicagoans,” Obama said, “Roger was the movies.”
Who was Roger Ebert?
According to Ebert himself, nothing but a townie with big dreams.
Growing up in Urbana in the 1950s, he dreamed of attending the school that dominated his hometown: the University of Illinois, where his father worked as an electrician. Walter Ebert, who never went to college, took his son to football games at Memorial Stadium. “See those electrical pipes?” he’d say. “I installed them.”
“On pleasant days, we would stroll after dinner onto the Quadrangle, lined with trees and the biggest buildings I’d ever seen,” Roger recalled.
“This is the greatest university in the world,” his father said. Then Walter would talk about a different set of pipes. He’d say, “Boy, I don’t want you to become an electrician. I was working in the English Building today, and I saw those fellows with their feet up on their desks, smoking their pipes and reading their books. That’s the job for you.”
They listened to Illini games on the radio, with play-by-play by Marc Howard and later Larry Stewart,’ 47 MEDIA. Walter remembered the first game ever played at Memorial Stadium: “I was there when Red Grange ran for seven touchdowns against Michigan.” (It was actually five, though Grange also threw for a touchdown and intercepted two passes in the 1924 game that made him a national hero.) Roger wasn’t athletic, but as a 15-year-old sophomore at Urbana High, he landed a part-time job at the Champaign-Urbana News-Gazette, covering sports and local news.
“Seeing Dick Butkus and Jim Grabowski close enough to get mud kicked in my face.” —Roger Ebert
He proved to be the best cub reporter the paper ever had. Assigned to write a squib on the opening of a bowling alley, he interviewed a pinsetter and the old-timer who rented shoes to bowlers.
His mother, Annabel, a bookkeeper and president of the Urbana Business Women’s Association who hoped her son would be a priest, discouraged his forays into the newsroom. “Those newspapermen all drink,” she said, “and they don’t get paid anything.” But Roger loved working late on Friday and Saturday nights, typing up high-school sports stories for 75 cents an hour, taking a break for a late-night bite at Vriner’s on Main Street with old-timers who seemed to live on bourbon and coffee.
After graduating from Urbana High in 1960, he made his parents proud by enrolling at the U. of I. What Ebert would call “a turning point in my life” came during his first morning on campus, when he reported to the English Building for professor Daniel Curley’s introductory class on literature. Curley, a novelist and short-story writer, introduced the 18-year-old freshman to the poetry of T.S. Eliot and E.E. Cummings and the novels of Dostoevsky, Fitzgerald and Faulkner. Ebert’s classmate, Larry Woiwode, who went on to a distinguished literary career, was Curley’s prize pupil, but the kid from the white stucco house at the corner of Washington and Maple streets soon made a name for himself. His first bylined story for The Daily Illini, a 1961 account of a mild controversy at the School of Music, featured the clear, straightforward style that would characterize his work. Soon he made his first appearance on The Daily Illini masthead, listed as “Night Sports Editor.”
During his senior year, the young scribe “watched the great 1963 [Illini football] team from the sidelines,” Ebert wrote in his memoir, “seeing Dick Butkus and Jim Grabowski close enough to get mud kicked in my face.” He assigned himself to help cover the Big Ten champions’ trip to the Rose Bowl. “I’d been as far west as Peoria,” he recalled of the railroad trek to Pasadena. On the way, “the bar car became like Saturday night in Campustown. I became friendly with a voluptuous young woman” on the train, and the chubby English major had the time of his life. “Illinois won the Rose Bowl, there was much celebration, and we boarded the train for the journey home.”
His first Daily Illini movie review showed an opinion-maker in the making. While praising Hayley Mills’ performance in The Parent Trap, he claimed the film’s plot “takes advantage of the supposition that all of its characters are idiots.” Perhaps recalling days and nights in Urbana’s Princess Theater, he wrote that the movie might appeal to “teenagers who will sit in the balcony and hardly care what it is about.”
Soon he was president of the national Student Press Association and editor-in-chief of The Daily Illini (“the best job I ever had,” he called it decades later). Yet he barely graduated. Despite exemplary grades in other subjects, he flunked French four times. With help from Curley, who wrote him a glowing recommendation, young Ebert was accepted as a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Chicago.
Established in 1999, Ebertfest is held at the Virginia Theater in Champaign each April. (Image by L. Brian Stauffer)
Meanwhile, Ebert took cub-reporter assignments from the Chicago Sun-Times. “My master plan was to become an op-ed columnist and then eventually, of course, a great and respected novelist,” he wrote in his memoir.
But Sun-Times features editor Robert Zonka had a plan of his own. On April Fools’ Day 1967, Zonka named 24-year-old Roger Ebert the paper’s film critic. Ebert dropped his graduate studies to focus on his new beat. During his first month on the job, he returned to Champaign-Urbana to promote his first book, An Illini Century, marking the university’s centennial. “Sales are booming!” he crowed during a book party at the Illini Union bookstore. “My mother came and bought 10 copies.” Better yet, “Walt Disney Productions bought the movie rights,” he joked. “They’ve cast Dumbo in the author’s role.”
He was on his way—typing up influential raves for Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate and 2001: A Space Odyssey. A honey of a job, he called it. What could be better than leaving the newsroom at noon and saying, “I’m going to the movies”?
“I continue to write about the movies,” he told Curley in a letter from Chicago. “I think a lifetime of such work would make a moron.”
He was joking about that, but dead serious about his beat. He believed that in those rare instances when a script, director, actors and movie magic meet, cinema could be art. His nationally syndicated reviews, framed in his plainspoken Midwestern prose, brought serious film criticism to millions of readers.
In 1975, the year he won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, Ebert joined Tribune movie critic, Gene Siskel, on a public-TV program on Chicago’s WTTW. After Sneak Previews went national, they became the most influential duo in the history of their trade. Studios built Oscar campaigns around their thumbs-up verdicts. More than one blockbuster flopped after getting a thumbs-down from them.
The best of “frenemies,” Siskel & Ebert (their billing decided by a backstage coin flip) often quarreled. They had a rule not to discuss movies off-air, so Roger would needle Gene about his dwindling hairline. Gene, mocking Roger’s ample waistline, told him not to wear a brown sweater. “It makes you look like a mudslide.” Much of their feuding was shtick; as the years passed and their uneasy partnership made both men rich, they put their rivalry aside. In the end, Ebert wrote in his memoir, Gene Siskel was “less like a friend than like a brother.”
Siskel was diagnosed with brain cancer in 1998. “I’m in a hurry to get well,” Siskel said, “because I don’t want Roger to get more screen time.” Ebert mourned Siskel when he died in 1999. Three years later, Ebert got his own diagnosis: “a cancer in my right salivary gland,” perhaps caused by radiation treatments he’d received for boyhood earaches. Multiple surgeries would cost him most of the lower part of his face. “Today I look like an exhibit in the Texas Chainsaw Museum.” In 2011, movie-minded as ever, he described his appearance as “about 72 percent of the way along a timeline between how I looked in 2004 and the thing that jumps out of that guy’s intestines in Alien.”
Ebert was brave and good-humored to the end. He had “accepted and grown comfortable with my maimed appearance,” he wrote in his memoir. “Many people have problems much worse than mine…Don’t lose any sleep over me.” Looking back on his formative years, he recalled football games, campus walks and The Daily Illini. “I loved the University. It took me from my childhood to my life.”
Today’s movie fans celebrate Ebertfest every April. Dedicated to Ebert, the fast-growing film festival is organized by the U. of I. College of Media and held at the Virginia Theater in Champaign. Outside the theater is a bronze statue of Ebert delivering a thumbs-up. Fans can sit in empty seats on either side of him. Over the years, they have rubbed his upturned thumb so many times that it gleams a brighter gold than the rest of him.
In March 2013, 10 days before he died, Ebert typed out a message to his readers. “Thank you,” his last blog post on rogerebert.com began, and ended, “I’ll see you at the movies.”
Source: Life Itself: A Memoir by Roger Ebert (Grand Central Publishing, 2011)
