Roger Ebert: Chicago Sun-Times By Siskel

Roger Ebert is a famous Chicago Film-Critic who was born on June 18, 1942 and passed away on April 4, 2013. He also worked as a journalist, and a screenwriter. He worked for the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 up until he passed away. He was very popular in the movie business and won many awards and had very high regards from his coworkers and peers. Some even consider him the most famous movie critic in the world. He was married to his wife Chaz Ebert for 21 years. Although he did get married his very first love definitely had to be films, the movie making industry, and journalism. He struggled with many things throughout his historic career as a movie critic and fought numerous battles throughout his long and vast life.

Ebert’s high school

days really molded him into the writer he became today. He didn’t even begin looking at movies till later on in his career. At this point in his life he was just writing for his towns paper The News Gazzette. This time in his young career was crucial because this is where he was able to begin to create his “style” and really was able to figure out what he really wanted out of writing.
After graduating he began attending the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in 1960. There he was able to obtain a more wide-spread column to write for The Daily Illini. This was his first real gig in which he was able to make an impact on a bigger scale. After a couple of years writing for the column he eventually rose to the senior editor of the gazette itself.

His decisions to write lead him down a path he would never have imagined. It actually ended up working out for him, the fact that he just stuck to writing. He was hired by the Sun-Times’ Magazine to write for them. Then about a half year later, the main reporter passed away leaving a vacant position for Ebert to take advantage of. From the very beginning of his new position he portrayed that he was excited and passionate about being a film critic. He proved that he had a persona about himself that he brought to the paper that not many people had. On his first day at his new job he gave readers a look at the French film Galia, using the film to advance his overall opinion about the entire genre of French “New Waves” movies. His reviews of theses foreign movies received loads of praise from everyone and jumpstarted his movie critic career. It’s doubtful anyone could have predicted the prestige and longevity Ebert would bring to the position. He then made the transition to Television and being a movie critic on television for some television stations.
Ebert decided to make the move to television which proved to be one of his greatest decisions. The decision to move to television put his name on the map and on the wider scene of movie critics. Ebert began to show that he had an influence on movies, their audience, and even the producers. He contributed a wide variety of things to the movie industry. With extremely popular show Opening Soon at a Theatre Near You and his partner in crime the much more reserved, Gene Siskel, their shows popularity flew through the roof. By the end of its first season it was on hundreds of public television stations. With the rise of their movie critiques and a brand new show they started becoming a couple of household names.
The pair and specifically Ebert, had a huge contribution to the movie industry by campaigning for the creation of the NC-17 rating. Additionally they fought for and supported independent and foreign language films, as well as documentaries otherwise doomed to fall through the cracks. These movies then began receiving recognition and it began a whole new boom of under the radar documentaries to rise and be able to compete with the big name movies and the big name movie companies and producers.

Ebert also began writing an assortment of books that expanded his thoughts on film.

This really gave an insight to what movie critics go through mentally when they are evaluating a movie. Some say that this helped movie producers get an inside edge on what they “should” produce for the audience and for the critics themselves. This changed the game for most producers, but his real impact was on the television screen.

The idea of the thumbs up thumbs down technique when it comes to reviewing movies is an everyday concept that seems as if it has always been around, but it hasn’t. Ebert and Siskel brought the concept to their show thinking it would be good to have a visual aid and something for the audience to get a feeling of participation in so they created the idea and it stuck. The concept is used on Internet movie review websites, on talk shows about movies, and even in everyday conversation. Giving a movie a “thumbs up” could technically be traced back to the Ebert and At the

Movies.

Ebert received high praise by being added to the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2005. But, when it came to rating movies Ebert was brutally honest and up front about all the moviews he reviewed, which presented mixed feedback from people. In the movie business, movie producers were sometimes terrified to have Ebert do a review or hear about an Ebert review on their film because of his brutal honesty. He gave a review on the movie “Catwoman” and in the review he said, “There are three things good in it; Halle Berry’s Face, Halle Berry’s body and Halle Berry’s costume.” (LATimes) These were the types of things that helped Ebert gain status as the golden standard in movie critique.
Then the man who was the golden standard and a “God” in the movie business then became human. He was stricken with cancer in his mouth. This forced surgeons to cut out part of his lower jaw. So the man who made a living with his words and voice settled into this new phase of life.
The surgeries may have destroyed his television career, but not his writing. He decided to return to the Sun-Times and kept reviewing films. He was then able to move his writing and reviews to an online medium. He really felt that he could still use his knowledge of the movies to put out there his opinion and provide society with his true feelings towards movies. This new transition for him was a revelation and it changed
When Ebert was towards the end on his career he started something in his hometown of Champaign, Illinois, his own movie festival.

The festival is called Roger Ebert’s Film Festival, but is usually referred to as Ebertfest, but Ebert wanted to originally call it the “Overlooked Film Festival”. This fest is a lot different than many other film festivals because as opposed to accepting submissions for movies to be played during the festival Ebert and the organizers of the fest would personally select the films. These were all films, as previously stated, as smaller no name films that had received no recognition. This reflects the type of person that Ebert was and showed his true stance on movies. He always felt that the smaller movies deserved a chance as well as the bigger ones and he did anything he can to fight for this sort of

thing.

His greatest contribution has to be the developments that took place in early 2010. After several years of speaking with a computer-generated voice that he activated by a keyboard, Ebert stumbled across the work of CereProc, a Scottish company that analyzes prior recordings of a person’s voice to recreate a computer generated sound that is extremely similar to how a person actually speaks. For Ebert, there was no shortage of archived sound to draw from, and on March 2, 2010 after months of work, he debuted his old voice on the Oprah Winfrey Show. This work will help patients like him be able to communicate even without a jaw.
He planned to go throttle New Media: Facebook, Twitter, Ipads every new sort of media out possible. The deteriorating of the old show and the old Ebert allowed him to recreate a whole new self, and image. He said that he had adapted to the times of technology and it actually helped him in his work. “My web site and blog at the Sun-times site have changed the way I work, and even the way I think. When I lost my speech, I speeded up instead of slowing down.”