Saturday, August 3, 2013, 2:00 to 3:15 p.m., San Leandro Main Library

Life Itself by Roger Ebert

1957 Studebaker Golden Hawk advancing

Be sure to check the video marquee in the lobby for the room for our meeting, as they switched rooms on us last month.

Roger Ebert Lives

One of the things I noticed as I was reading Life Itself was how it felt like Roger Ebert was present in person and telling me his story. You can get that same feeling at his blog, "Roger Ebert's Journal," which contains much of the material used in the book along with a whole lot more. His wife Chaz also has a blog. Needless to say, a number of clips from Roger Ebert's various television shows with Gene Siskel ust for the heck of it, I went to YouTube to see what was the most popular Siskel and Ebert clip, and for some reason, this was it.



Ebert didn't dislike every movie he saw though. At his journal site, you can also click a link which takes you to written reviews of movies he considers to be great movies.

Odds and Ends about Roger Ebert

University of Illinois and "Chief Illiniwek": One of the times I found myself disagreeing most with Roger Ebert was not about a movie review but was about the campaign by Native American student activists to retire the University of Illinois sports mascot, "Chief Illiniwek." I remember Ebert defending the mascot. Apparently, he eventually came to "intellectually" accept the reasons for the retirement of "The Chief" as a mascot, but only reluctantly, and continued to view the mascot as a tragic romantic figure. I wish I could give you some links about this, but every link to anything solid that Ebert actually said on the topic appears to be broken.

On Betraying Your Mentor: It was particularly interesting for me to read in the chapter about his time at the University of Illinois (see specifically page 95) that Ebert had once published a review of a book by his mentor, Daniel Curley, a man he spoke of as a second father, having called Curley's book the work of a "first-rate second-rate writer." This stood out for me, because right at the time Roger Ebert died earlier this year, we had been in the middle of reading The Paris Wife and had discussed the way in which Ernest Hemingway always seemed to turn on almost anybody who had ever helped him. Thus, my attention was captured by one of the many online tributes to Roger Ebert, this one written by Will Leitch, a sportswriter who attended the University of Illinois and who had been given encouragement and advice by Roger Ebert during his university days and early in his career. You can read this post about how he eventually repaid Ebert's kindness and how Ebert reacted to that. Now, having read the book and realizing that Roger Ebert had had his own similar moment early in his career, I wonder how much of Ebert's response was informed by his own moment of weakness when he was young.

1957 Studebaker Golden Hawk retreating