Tribute to Ebert

"All of us in the College of Media are saddened by the passing of our dear friend and loyal alumnus, Roger Ebert. The loss of this champion of film and journalism reverberates throughout the world. But his roots are here at Illinois, and this is where his legacy will continue to grow."

"And he's just getting started."

Ebert and Russ Meyer in 1970.

"The death of beloved, vastly influential Pulitzer-winning critic, author, and screenwriter Roger Ebert at 70 following a long, public battle with cancer has inspired a wave of appreciation of his life and work. So we asked our writers—some of whom had the honor of sharing the Chicago screening room with the esteemed critic—what Roger Ebert meant to them. 

"The new age of movies—an age in which overt art films became common coin, in which the director came out from behind the curtain at the same time as did the open and populist striving for commercial success, in which the world of movie-making became, at all levels and in all varieties, frankly, unabashedly, passionately, intimately personal—is Ebert’s age, and, with his distinctively humanist approach, he sought it out in all its wild new varieties and did crucial, yeoman work to make sense of it and to preserve it, and to preserve his own distinctive experience of the movies."

Ebert's seat at the Lake Street screening room on April 5, 2013. 

“The Last Airbender is an agonizing experience in every category I can think of and others still waiting to be invented. The laws of chance suggest that something should have gone right. Not here. It puts a nail in the coffin of low-rent 3D, but it will need a lot more coffins than that."

"The role of critics has been marginalized by the growth of the Internet and the empowerment of self-made bloggers who are eager to share their opinions. But few, if any, of these wannabes will ever come close to Roger Ebert as an essayist, and I doubt that anyone will ever have the enormous impact he and Gene Siskel had on the moviegoing public."

"Ebert was brilliant and inspiring to his last days. A lesson for us all."

"But none of that is why I’m recalling our early spat. My point is that Roger was both a zealous defender of the standards of film criticism — as a way of thinking and as a writing discipline that demanded as much knowledge and rigor as any other — and a gracious and generous supporter of anyone who wanted to practice it."