But it was Ebert who shared that story, chuckling.) (Siskel, a lean fellow, once cracked that producers asked the overweight Ebert never to wear brown on screen “because he looked like a mudslide”. Their combat was great TV and, as fellow Chicagoan Steve James’s documentary portrait Life Itself shows, their often prickly relationship evolved in the years before Siskel’s death in 1999 into grudging fraternal love. I was too promiscuous a moviegoer to let critics keep me away from any film but I noticed that my tastes lined up more often with Ebert’s than Siskel’s. Each Sunday the show covered the next Friday’s movie releases, offering two hefty clips from each movie, followed by spirited, sometimes contentious and ill-tempered debate upon its merits, and a final verdict: thumbs up or thumbs down. He gives career advice to the young Oprah Winfrey, hangs out with the old Robert Mitchum, and scripts the movie Beyond the Valley of the Dolls for skinflick meister Russ Meyer, whose own account of their collaboration makes you suspect that Ebert is giving us the PG version.A s a film-crazy teenager who spent unholy amounts of time in darkened rooms watching movies in the arthouses and multiplexes of early 80s Washington DC, I grew up on Sneak Previews, the movie-review show hosted by rival Chicago film critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert. His career took off quickly - he'd won the Pulitzer Prize by age 33 - and he began accumulating a vast storehouse of anecdotes. He was all of 25 years old, and he seized the job like a brass ring.
But his life took a very different turn in 1967 when, much to his surprise, he was named film critic for The Chicago Sun-Times. The drinking problem was one Ebert himself would share - and eventually conquer.Ī lifelong liberal, Ebert had dreamed of being a feisty newspaper columnist like Mike Royko. He had an electrician father, Walter, whom he obviously adored and a mother, Annabel, who treated him kindly but also scared him with her anger, especially once she became an alcoholic. He was born 69 years ago in Urbana, Ill., and enjoyed a classic Middle American childhood, idyllic but tinged with darkness. Your purchase helps support NPR programming.
Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Life Itself Subtitle A Memoir Author Roger Ebert
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