Roger Ebert responded to my e-mail.

I had become a fervent reader of his website in the late 90’s. A single destination that could give me every movie review written since 1985 by the first and (at that time) only Pulitzer Prize-winning movie critic was a treasure on the Internet, and I could spend hours paging through year after year, absorbing his thoughts on every movie I had seen as well as a few more that I just wanted to hear him talk about.

He always seemed to be talking about them. Maybe it was because I, like many others, first came to recognize him from his weekly television thumb duels with the late Gene Siskel. But his voice – cultured, dry, passionate, sometimes giddy, sometimes stubborn or even helplessly self-amused – was always there, even when the words were just in print, or hovering on a computer screen.

That quality inspired me. Ultimately, this was a man with a bottomless love of movies who wanted to talk about them. I was a film critic for my college newspaper, and that sure sounded like the right way to go about the job. I published tens of thousands of words, one discourse about one movie at a time. It’s what made a writer out of me, and I wonder if any other subject on Earth would have made it so easy to write so much as my muscles and mind developed.

Now that I work in the film business, I sometimes observe a phenomenon where someone encounters a “famous” person – someone whose work has moved or excited them. They have only a small window to express this, and the task is impossible; because the famous person has never met you but has meant so much to you. Is it ever a surprise that the brain jumps tracks in these conditions? I always remember the delicious non-sequiter in Stardust Memories, where a fan meets Woody Allen (playing, in one of his least-veiled alter egos, a world-famous filmmaker), shakes his hand, and then, awkwardly, blurts out “I was born Caesarian.”

I often thought about writing to Roger Ebert, but didn’t know what to say. My appreciation of him had gone beyond his abilities as a movie critic. I loved the philosophy you could glimpse in the body of writing; I loved his “Great Movies” Series where he re-visited film classics with a fresh and dedicated focus. I loved his enthusiasm, and the volume of his work that only seemed to increase when others would be thinking of retiring and, as I once heard an actor say, “just having good long lunches with friends”.

But when I finally wrote to him, it didn’t contain any of that. Roger had championed an unapologetic B-movie, a prison boxing picture directed by Walter Hill called Undisputed. Not many other critics were out there on that limb with him, but he was never afraid to stand alone – he’s the reason Speed 2: Cruise Control has a 2% “Fresh” rating on Rotten Tomatoes instead of a “0%”.

On his recommendation, I saw the movie, and really enjoyed it – but I’m an easy mark for Walter Hill; always have been. Then, when the movie was released on video, I saw that the cover art – about a prison boxing movie, mind you – showed Wesley Snipes’s big head over a helicopter and an exploding fireball. The latter two elements appear nowhere in Undisputed.

I found this hilarious. So indescribably hilarious that, for some reason, I had to write to Roger Ebert about it. He was the reason I saw the movie after all, maybe I owed him that.

And he wrote back. This is what he said: “You’re right! Total fabrication. Best, RE”.

That was it. No extensive explanation needed, just an acknowledging aside. No force in the world required him to reply to my e-mail, but there it was, and it felt like a laugh between friends. It felt…conversational. Like two people talking about movies. I didn’t need to write more, and he didn’t need to say more. Because if I had to sweep away everything but what was most important – that was what should have remained – the friendly bond between two people who would otherwise be strangers, based in what we loved; and an enjoyment in sharing a moment’s humor with each other.

I think there are a lot of people out there who have those stories – whose letters and e-mails got answers when none were expected or required. And why not? It was a chance for more words; friendly words that you could always trust reflected his feelings of the moment. When asked to describe why he was my favorite movie critic, I always said that even when I disagreed with him, I believed him. He was reporting his reactions with integrity and incredible skill; and if you could do that, the rest would fall into place.

If all Roger Ebert had ever done was talk about movies, he would have still been a national institution and an inestimable contributor to the world body of great writing on cinema. But then, through that website, there came more. Biographical sketches, musings on life and our purpose, confessions about his past alcoholism, unapologetic political posturing, Steak ‘n Shake – OH, the way he wrote about Steak ‘n Shake.

And he was doing all this, this astonishing outburst of creativity and wit – after he could no longer speak.

This is a man who brawled with cancer for over a decade, and did it with the same humor, candor, and distinctly humble courage with which he disputed filmmakers. It seemed like, if he was awake, he was writing. Later, when he joined Twitter, this seemed all-but confirmed.

His archive now reaches back to his earliest days with the Chicago Sun-Times – 1967. Over forty years’ work; one review, article, or interview at a time. When he lost the power to speak, an ambitious tech company used his extensive archive of television episodes and DVD commentary tracks – seriously, listen to his track on Dark City to hear someone who has fallen in a deeply-personal love with a film – to create a speech synthesizer which would allow him to communicate with “his” voice. It was the first time anyone’s voice had been made so accurately-reproducible; and it was possible because of just how much vocabulary he had shared with us.

In the last full year of his life, besides co-producing a TV show, publishing multiple books, and blogging extensively (as well as frequently replying to some of the hundreds of comments his entries received), Roger Ebert broke his personal record for criticism, publishing reviews of over 300 films. He did this despite that he couldn’t speak, ate through a tube, and could barely walk. I have no doubt that the love of his wife and friends sustained him; but, taking nothing away from what they gave him which he always praised and cherished, I believe the movies helped keep him going. I believe that his words helped keep him going. And with so many works in the world and on-line, an echo of his voice captured in a synthesizer box, we have a 21st-century example of a man whose words, his impassioned, comprehensive, always personal and conversational words, made him just a little bit immortal. Can you see why that example would give a fellow writer some comfort; some final inspiration?

When I heard the news of his passing, I went to his website. It was down, overwhelmed with hits, and so in the auto-generated lingo of web browsing, I saw only a white screen and plain text reading: “This service is not available”. An unintentionally-ironic way for death to signal itself, but it was the final product of a man who made a compact to always have good words to share with us, and millions of people who appreciated him for that.

He was all his words
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