Roger Ebert dies, Roger Ebert had the most-watched thumb in Hollywood.
With a twist of his wrist, the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic rendered decisions that influenced a nation of moviegoers and could sometimes make or break a film.
Ebert, film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times since 1967, died Thursday at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, two days after announcing on his blog that he was undergoing radiation treatment for a recurrence of cancer. He was 70.
“So on this day of reflection I say again, thank you for going on this journey with me. I’ll see you at the movies.” Ebert wrote Tuesday on his blog.
Despite his wide influence, Ebert considered himself “beneath everything else a fan.”
“I have seen untold numbers of movies and forgotten most of them, I hope, but I remember those worth remembering, and they are all on the same shelf in my mind,” Ebert wrote in his 2011 memoir titled “Life Itself.”
After cancer surgeries in 2006, Ebert lost portions of his jaw and the ability to eat, drink and speak. But he went back to writing full time and eventually even returned to television. In addition to his work for the Sun-Times, he became a prolific user of social media, connecting with hundreds of thousands of fans on Facebook and Twitter.
Ebert’s thumb — pointing up or down — was his trademark. It was the main logo of the long-running TV shows Ebert co-hosted, first with Siskel of the rival Chicago Tribune and — after Siskel’s death in 1999 — with Sun-Times colleague Richard Roeper. A “two thumbs-up” accolade was sure to find its way into the advertising for the movie in question.
The nation’s best-known movie reviewer “wrote with passion through a real knowledge of film and film history, and in doing so, helped many movies find their audiences,” director Steven Spielberg said. His death is “virtually the end of an era, and now the balcony is closed forever.”
In early 2011, Ebert launched a new show, “Ebert Presents At the Movies.” The show had new hosts and featured Ebert in his own segment, “Roger’s Office.” He used a chin prosthesis and enlisted voice-over guests or his computer to read his reviews.
Fans admired his courage, but Ebert told The Associated Press that bravery had “little to do with it.”
“You play the cards you’re dealt,” Ebert wrote in an email in January 2011. “What’s your choice? I have no pain. I enjoy life, and why should I complain?”
Scott Jordan Harris, a British man who wrote for Ebert’s website, said he was moved that the critic lost his voice but “never let that make him silent.”
Always modest, Ebert had Midwestern charm but stuck strongly to his belief that critics honestly tell audiences “how better to invest two hours of their lives.”
On the air, Ebert and Siskel bickered like an old married couple and openly needled each other. To viewers who had trouble telling them apart, Ebert was known as the fat one with glasses, Siskel as the thin, bald one.
Via washingtonpost
