Roger Ebert is dead. Well, this sucks. Let’s remember him for all of the awesome stuff he did. Legendary movie critic Roger Ebert’s battle with cancer didn’t seem to slow him down one bit. Even with most of his lower jaw removed, he still took aim at the fallacies and foibles of Hollywood up until his final day. The Chicago Sun-Times is reporting that Ebert passed away today at the age of 70, soon after announcing he was going to reduce his workload to deal with a recurrence of his illness.
Ebert attended the University of Illinois and published his first review in that school’s student newspaper in 1961 – Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. In 1966, he was hired at the Chicago Sun-Times, the paper that he would stay affiliated with for the rest of his life. In 1975, he started Sneak Previews with Gene Siskel, and the rest was history. Ebert watched and reviewed thousands of films in his lifetime, sometimes publishing as many as nine reviews in a week. And he approached each one fairly and honestly, evaluating it on its merits and intentions. Sure, he could open up on the garbage, but he also treated
My favorite thing about Roger Ebert was his one and only outing on the other side of the moviemaking process. In 1969, legendary schlock director Russ Meyer approached Ebert asking him for help writing a sequel to Jacqueline Susann’s smash hit Valley Of The Dolls. Ebert and Meyer spent six weeks writing a vile, hallucinatory fantasia of a movie that skewered all of late-60s Hollywood’s sacred cows. Here’s one of the best clips, where the insane promoter “Z-Man” (who later turns out to be a woman) throws a party.