Abstract
Fittingly introduced by “I was born into the movie of my life,” the opening eight pages of Roger Ebert’s Inside Life array bits of prose like snippets of acetate lying randomly on a cutting-room floor, and serve as an inviting trailer to the 55 chapters (mini-chapters, really; only a handful run more than 10 pages) his memoir contains. The 415 pages they comprise offer an intimate, honest prose “selfie” of a life unbelievably rich in both rewards and tribulation.
The term name-dropper never enters the reader’s mind while encountering the book’s far-too-many-to-count names of persons and places, many famous, others not. But should one wish to run a tally, they are helpfully listed in a 17-page index. Achievements and accomplishments, far beyond what most men can claim, are frankly presented. You’ll find no false modesty in these pages. He points to himself as a “cocksure asshole” as a University of Illinois student, even being “a little jerk” as far back as in St. Mary’s Grade School in hometown Champaign, Illinois, noting, “That pattern has persisted.” Ebert is his own severest critic in coping with years of alcoholism, and falling temptation to short-cuts in his fight with cancer. Possible evidence of excess ego in 16 pages of photographs is quickly dispelled by the unsparing closing images of the author after his years of surgeries.
It is a straightforward narrative. Those bits of prose detailing a multiethnic background, largely German, Dutch and Irish, do not make for particularly entertaining reading. What you see is what you get.
Paralleling the youth of more than a few noteworthy journalists, Ebert first dipped into journalism at an early age, writing first for his grade-school and high-school newspapers, then stringing on a local daily, where he won a first-place Associated Press award for a sports story. He even got an early teen’s taste of broadcasting when a hometown WKID radio disk jockey let him go on air reading the weather report.
Ebert gives more space, though, to his years with his college paper, the Daily Illini, where he became editor in his senior year, in his words, “tactless, egotistical, merciless and a showboat.” When the football team won a trip to the Rose Bowl in 1963, Ebert assigned himself to cover it, making his first of what would become many trips to Hollywood.
Hollywood and its denizens, of course, play large. There are mini-chapters on actors (Lee Marvin, Robert Mitchum, John Wayne) and directors (Woody Allen, Robert Altman, Ingmar Bergman, Werner Herzog, Russ Meyer, Martin Scorsese). The film-festival centers of Boulder, Colorado, and Cannes in France, figure prominently.
Then there’s Chicago, home of both Ebert’s Sun-Times and his print rival and broadcast partner Gene Siskel’s Tribune, providing an abundance of colorful characters populating lively vignettes. There are Bob Zonka, the editor and father figure who moved the 25-year-old reporter to film critic, and the much-better-known fellow Sun-Times journalists Mike Royko and Jack McPhaul, all at the core of the Windy City’s mid-20th-century journalism.
Readers with a global interest will enjoy the considerable attention and displayed affection devoted to three of his favorite cities abroad: Cape Town, Venice, and London, especially, London, which he visited repeatedly over 25 years, staying in the same Jermyn Street, 16-room Eyrie Mansion Hotel of his first stay—and some of the characters he encountered there, most notably one Oikonomides (Al the Greek) Alcibiades. Movie critic Ebert makes a fine travel writer.
As one might expect, he gives ample treatment to his job. How he went about it. Its pluses, its minuses, both in his Sun-Times reviews and subsequently the television show with Gene Siskel that brought much wider audiences and fame. In one of their Sneak Previews TV programs, titled “Gene and Roger Go to the Movies,” they dissect their reviewing process, using the 1980 film, The Black Marble, a whodunit/comedy they sharply disagreed on. It was so useful as a teaching tool, that this reviewer made it obligatory viewing in his Ohio University course, “Reviewing and Criticism.” The students loved it.
Just as there is more to life than just work, so too this book. It bares the person. You need not have an interest in journalism or the movies to feel the pain of the socially awkward fat kid or that of his lifelong problem with weight, and worse the decades of struggle with alcoholism, finally beaten with help from AA, and worst of all, the cruel cancer which was to take his life, as it did Gene Siskel’s a decade-plus earlier. All is treated with unstinting candor.
Best offsetting the gloom and doom are the chapters “My Romances” and “Chaz,” especially the latter, focusing on Chaz Hammel Smith, the love he found relatively late in life in a biracial marriage, becoming Chaz Hammelsmith Ebert. She pervades the volume in 21 contexts between pages 2 and 405.
Displaying love of another kind, canine love, are five pages about Blackie and Ming, Ebert’s childhood pets, and the neighbor’s four-legged tail-wagers, Pepper and Snookers.
Ebert, born into Catholicism, gives the final 10 pages to thoughtful discussion of what he had too much cause, for much too long, to think about: death. And what, if anything, comes next. They are worth perusal, in and of themselves.