Legendary movie critic Roger Ebert hardly needs an introduction: for almost 45 years, he has been writing reviews for the Chicago Sun-Times, picking up a Pulitzer Prize for criticism (the first movie critic to do so), hosting television shows like At the Movies with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, and, just this year, producing a new series called Ebert Presents at the Movies. Movies form the focus of his 13-volume bibliography (with a 1993 stab at serial fiction, Behind the Phantom's Mask, and a travelogue in 1986 called The Perfect London Walk), but this September will see the launch of Ebert's first autobiographical work, Life Itself: A Memoir. The famously prolific critic, who lost the ability to speak from complications of thyroid cancer, spoke to Show Daily over e-mail about Life Itself (Grand Central) and his first visit to BEA. Ebert will be at the Author Breakfast today at 8 a.m.
How long have you been working on Life Itself?
Two years, but in August and September of 2010, I did a great deal of the writing by taking a leave from the Sun-Times and critics' screenings and holing up in our house in the Michigan woods.
Had you considered writing a memoir before that? Is there a particular memoir (or memoirs) you looked to for guidance in writing your own?
I'd always thought I "should," but I didn't want it to be another one of those tiresome books of Hollywood anecdotes. When I got sick and was in hospitals for about a year total, I started blogging. That gave me permission to write about myself and not the movies, and I found in the process that my memories of my own life were reawakened, some of them after many years.
I have read so many memoirs. When I was in grade school, I read Ben Franklin's Autobiography many times, and also the incomplete early version of Mark Twain's autobiography. In high school I was much taken with Act One by Moss Hart. I read Thomas Wolfe as if it was autobiography. I loved every one of James Thurber's memories of his early life.
Do you enjoy the break from writing about movies?
Yes, and I still do. My blog entries are about a great many things, including life, death, the theory of evolution, politics, 3-D, reading, sickness, poetry, and yo-yos. I regularly enjoy comments from readers advising me, "stick to the movies," as if movies aren't about all of those things (yo-yos, less so).
Do you expect your fans to find Life Itself more shocking or less shocking than your book The Pot and How to Use It?
Now there's a good question. Not everyone who can't speak, eat, or drink has written a cookbook. In April at Ebertfest, my film festival at the University of Illinois, two students actually told me they were using little rice cookers in their rooms to start the day with a healthy breakfast. It's not a gourmet book. It's more of a DIY handbook for cooking in one square foot of space.
Who would you like to see direct the film version of Life Itself, and who would you cast to play you?
I cannot imagine such a movie. Still, it could work like Cinema Paradiso, if you threw in a lot of scenes from great films. When Phillip Seymour Hoffman plays characters who look red-faced, pudgy, frustrated, petulant, and convinced of their genius, he reminds me of myself.
