Thursday morning the announcement came that famed film
reviewer Roger Ebert passed away, or in his own parlance, “took a leave of
presence”. We meet a lot of people
in our lives but very few actually affect your life in great ways. First, and foremost everyone’s
biological parents have the greatest effect since they gave you life and their
genes, whether they remain in your life or not. The parents or those who raised you, your siblings and
others very close are huge influences, teaching you life lessons that determine
who you are as an adult. Most of
us have teachers or coaches who motivated us or molded us or pushed us into a
certain career or direction in life that would determine a lot of what would
happen the rest of our lives. Then
there are people, many of which we may have never met in person, who sway us in
a way that causes us to do things that we may never have done without their
influence – Roger Ebert was such a person for me.
I did meet Mr. Ebert and spent an evening with him, along
with actor/director Dennis Hopper (Giant,
Easy Rider, Apocalypse Now, Blue Velvet) and David Carradine (Kung Fu, Kill Bill). It was 1982 and I was working with the
USA Film Festival in Dallas. I was
a film student at Southern Methodist University and after working for the
festival since I was a Freshman I was able to get the coveted student position
as a driver – we got to drive around movie professionals in donated luxury
cars. Not a bad gig. For film
students this gave you unprecedented access to those who could possibly help
your career or at least share a story or two.
For a couple of days I was assigned Dennis Hopper, who was
promoting an independent film that he directed called Out of the Blue. David
Carradine was also screening a film that he directed, staring himself and Barbara
Hershey called Americana and Roger
Ebert I believe was either acting as a host or mediating Q&A or a panel of
some sort, I don’t remember. Somehow
the three arranged to go to dinner that evening and Mr. Hopper invited me to
join them, which I thought was cordial of him. Through our conversations I learned that he had been out of
rehab and off drugs for about a year but that it had been a tough road. I had great respect for Mr. Hopper
after that – he was very intelligent and respectful of others and understood
that he had a disease he had to fight the rest of his life – addiction.
Joining us for dinner was Shannon Wynne, a Dallas club and restaurateur
whose father developed the original Six Flags
Over Texas amusement park. He had
invited himself, I believe, and asked to come along with us in the car, trying
to act as a host of sorts for the City of Dallas. We ended up at the San Francisco Rose, a bar-restaurant with
a back room where we ended up not too far from the campus. I don’t recall how the others got there;
only that Ebert was the last to arrive.
It’s been a long time so my memory is sketchy about the conversation
that evening but I do remember David Carradine was very odd – soft spoken and
quite personable – but went on and on about different topics in a kind of
stream of consciousness manner that probably only made sense to him. I have no idea if he was high or not
but something told me that he just had that kind of quirky personality where
you weren’t sure if he was a genius or simply off his rocker. Gary Busey’s behavior on Celebrity Apprentice this season,
reminds me of how Carradine acted that night.
Roger Ebert was very talkative and dominated the evening’s conversation. He fawned all over Hopper, treating him
like an anointed prince of film. I
could tell Hopper was annoyed but he never said anything. I remained mostly silent, soaking it
all up and enjoying the free steak – which for a college film student used to
eating Kraft Macaroni & Cheese made illegally on a hot plate in the dorm
room – was a great thing not to be taken lightly.
Also that evening I arranged with Mr. Ebert to pick him up
at his hotel early the next morning in order to transport him to DFW Airport to
catch his flight back to Chicago.
I had to get up extra early in order to pick up the Mercedes that had
been donated and then get downtown to the hotel by 6am. I got there an extra 20 minutes early
only to discover that Mr. Ebert had already checked out and had taken a cab to
the airport. Boy I was pissed
because we had talked in person about the arrangement and he knew I was going
out of my way to help him.
I had been a fan of Roger Ebert, along with his screen
partner Gene Siskel, from their original PBS show Sneak Previews, which later turned into the syndicated show Siskel & Ebert At The Movies. The next bit of influence Mr. Ebert had
on me had to deal with a film review show that was a direct rip off of his show
that appeared on the SMU campus cable channel and starred one of our
professors, Roger Burke, and the School of the Arts public relations director –
that show was called Movie Scoops. A year later I took over as producer of
the film review show but wanting to put my stamp on it changed the name of the
show to Let’s Go To The Movies. I know, I know, I probably should have
kept the original name. I loved
movies and that show, inspired by Mr. Ebert, was my first adventure into
producing a television show.
It would be years later that Mr. Ebert would change my life
again when I began writing movie reviews for some both print and online
publications. I tended to write
reviews in a similar style as he, being informative and straightforward, never
pretentious. He became America’s
film critic. Somebody who could
let you know what films to go see and though he loved what many would call
high-brow or intellectual films, he not only wrote the screenplay to Beyond the
Valley of the Dolls for Corman but many of his favorite films were populous,
popcorn movies made for the masses.
And really isn’t that what movies are for – everyone.
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