By Michael Miner
Who can say how close Ebert came to that? The Sun-Times hired him after he graduated from the University of Illinois, but he was a PhD candidate in English at the University of Chicago in 1967 when the movie reviewer retired and Ebert was told to take over. That’s when he dropped out of school. “It wasn’t that I wanted to be a film critic,” Ebert told me. “I wanted to work for a newspaper.”
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He told me, “One of my editors suggested to me a few months ago, ‘Wouldn’t you like to take on a young intern and get some help on the beat?’ I said, ‘No, I wouldn’t.’ As long as I can, I want to be the movie critic. I met Paul Theroux last fall–he was on the jury of the Hawaii film festival. We were talking about his latest book, which is called My Other Life. It’s a fictional autobiography, it’s his whole life, but none of it happened to him. It was written as if it did. And there’s a chapter in there about writing. His wife and his kids go off to school–this was in London, when he was still married to that wife–and he has a room on the second floor, under the eaves, with a view over some rooftops in the back of some row houses in London. And he sits at his desk looking out over them, and he writes. At a certain time he has his cup of tea, and then he writes some more. Then it’s time for lunch. He said when he started writing he was writing so people would know his name, he would be famous, and he’d be able to meet girls and make money and see his books on the shelves, and because he had something he wanted to express and he felt maybe his contribution was important. These were all ideas that he had. And now–he’s 50 years old–he realizes the real reason he writes is to write. And I know what that means. When I’m actually writing–not when I’m getting ready to write or I’m researching or I’m doing an interview, when I’m thinking about it–I am content. I am happy.”
“No, I’ve never agonized over a lead,” Ebert said. “I used to.” As a teenager in Urbana he’d covered prep sports for the News-Gazette, and an older kid on the same beat–an 18-year-old sage named Bill Lyon, who today writes a sports column for the Philadelphia Inquirer–watched him flinging balled-up leads into the wastebasket. Ebert said Lyon told him, “Don’t revise until you’re finished. Make it a discipline that you go all the way to the end before you go back and rewrite. And the second piece of advice is, the muse visits during composition, not previous to it. You are inspired as you’re writing. You don’t wait for inspiration before you write. That never works.”
Ebert rejects the idea that he’s what I told him he was–the franchise at the Sun-Times. But he does understand that he carries an enormous amount of water. If he’d taken a Friday off to be at Cannes he’d have eviscerated Weekend Plus. The more he writes, the more his editors like it. “I suggested the Answer Man to them,” he said, “and I suggested the Great Movies series to them. They embraced both of those ideas. The Great Movies is one of the best things I’m doing because I feel that people today are losing out on any sense of movie history. Movies for them started with E.T. Or they may have even started with Twister, for all I know. So I suggested those two things so there’d be something by me every Sunday to help out the Sunday paper, and they went along with it.”
I told Ebert that his reviews seem inhabited by someone who has a life. He allowed to reading books, going places, meeting people. “The biggest thing that’s happened to me in the last two or three years is Darwinism,” he said. “I read River Out of Eden by Richard Dawkins and I was thunderstruck. It’s the most amazing book I’ve read. It’s a popularization of modern Darwinian thought. One thing I realized is that I really knew nothing about what the evolution of the species and the survival of the fittest meant. And in a sense, the Darwinian insight is the most amazing insight in all of science, even more so than anything Einstein came up with. Because Einstein came up with what there was, and Darwin came up with a theory to explain what it did.
A pleasant afternoon, I said. We chatted at the Cliff Dwellers, which is his club, then contemplated Chicago’s verdant majesty out on the terrace.
