Life Itself: A Memoir

by Roger Ebert

  “Jon,” said Abra, “I’ve never seen a strip show. Why can’t I see a strip show?”

  “Abra,” Jon said, “as you know, you can see a strip show.”

  We found that Raymond’s was closed on Mondays. Another taxi was waiting by the curb, with a driver who touted, “Evening, mates! Want to see the best strip show in town?” We did. As we were being carried through dark lanes, Abra said, “We’re doing the very thing they warn tourists to avoid. Isn’t it exciting?” We entered a lurid doorway and descended two flights of stairs to a neon-lit room with a small stage and a couple of dozen tables. It was explained that this was a private club, and it would cost us five quid to become members. Jon paid up. We were given a table in front of the stage and ordered our drinks.

  “Do you have an account?” asked the waiter.

  “Oh, we’re members,” Abra told him. “Jon, show him our card.”

  “Yes, madam, but we do not sell alcohol by the drink. Members maintain their private stocks.”

  Jon ordered bottles of scotch, vodka, and champagne. We wondered if we could take them home with us. There was a three-piece band. A stripper materialized and began to disrobe a yard in front of us. Abra’s eyes surveyed the shadows of the room.

  “Dodger,” Abra said, “why are all those men sitting alone at their tables?”

  “I think they’re lonely,” I said, “because they have to buy a girl her own bottle if they want her to sit with them.”

  “They all seem so sad,” Abra said. She took another look around the room. The stripper finished and left the stage to indifferent applause. Abra whispered something to Jon. He was a distinguished Canadian and knew how to handle these things. He rapped smartly on the table with a pound coin. “Waiter!” he said. “Blow jobs for everyone!”

  Such, such were the days. There was adrenaline in the city room when a big story broke. The resignation of Nixon. The death of Mayor Richard J. Daley. The time when an L train derailed and we could see it from the office window. The afternoon when Jay McMullen, then the Daily News city hall reporter, later married to Mayor Jane Byrne, commandeered the paper’s suite at the Executive House across the river and phoned the office to tell us to check out a balcony on the seventeenth floor. There he was, the phone to his ear, waving, standing next to a woman. They were both stark naked.

  One day our columnist Bob Greene heard a five bell alert ring on the AP wire and walked over to the machine. I looked up to see if it looked like anything. He walked over with tears in his eyes. “Elvis just died,” he said.

  21 MY NEW JOB

  ONE DAY IN March 1967 Bob Zonka called me into the conference room and told me I was being named the paper’s film critic. This came as news to me. He said Eleanor Keen, the current critic, was taking early retirement. When I walked back into the newsroom, Ellie was smiling across from her desk. She said she would finally not be asked five times a day if she’d seen any good movies lately. Actually, what people are more likely to ask is, “How many movies do you see in a week?” They ask as if no one had ever thought of that question before. Gene Siskel told me that as an experiment he tried answering, “Ten.” He said people mostly just nodded and said, “Thanks.”

  I’d written a few reviews for the Daily Illini, but being a movie critic was not my career goal. If I had one at all, it was to become a columnist like Royko. Now I had a title, my photo in the paper, and a twenty-five-dollar-a-week raise. Eleanor Keen and Sam Lesner of the Daily News were notable in Chicago for writing under their own names. The Tribune had an all-purpose byline, “Mae Tinee,” under which any staff number could write. The New York Daily News used the pseudonym “Kate Cameron.”

  I got attention from the start because I was young, part of Hoge’s plan to cultivate new talent. I was first-person and often autobiographical from the start, and it’s interesting (or depressing) that my reviews from 1967 are written in roughly the same voice as my new ones. I’ve always written in the same style, which seems to emerge without great pondering.

  In those days the Chicago movie business was still centered in the Loop. New movies opened on Fridays in vast palaces altogether seating perhaps fifteen thousand people. To name them is to evoke them: the Chicago, the State-Lake, the Oriental, the Roosevelt, the Woods, the United Artists, the Cinestage, the Michael Todd (then owned by Elizabeth Taylor), the Bismarck Palace, the Loop, the World Playhouse, the McVickers. On the Near North Side, there were the art deco Esquire, the Carnegie, the Cinema. All of the great neighborhood theaters were still open, including the Uptown, said to have more seats than Radio City Music Hall.

  Then there was a revival house, the Clark Theater, which showed a different double feature every day. Bruce Trinz, its owner, was a serious movie lover and would show programs of John Ford, Hitchcock, Preston Sturges, or MGM musicals. It was at the Clark that I did some of my catching up, because unlike the acolytes of Doc Films at the University of Chicago, I hadn’t grown up seeing every film. The Clark offered a $2.95 special: a double feature, a three-course meal at the Chinese restaurant next door, and free parking. It was open twenty-three hours a day. They advertised “Our Little Gal-ery for Gals Only.” It was there one Sunday, while sitting in the balcony watching Help! with the Beatles, that I saw a fan run down the aisle, cry out, “I’m coming, John!” and throw himself over the rail. Strangely, there were no serious injuries.

  The movie studios started shutting down their regional film exchanges, and Bruce switched the Clark over to first-run art films. His competitor was Oscar Brotman, whose Carnegie was on Rush Street next to the nightclub Mister Kelly’s. In my first week on the job, Oscar took me out to lunch and gave me two rules: (1) “If nothing has happened by the end of the first reel, nothing is going to happen,” and (2) “The definition of a good movie is, a tuchus on every seat.”

  Being a movie critic meant interviewing the stars who came through town, and this often meant having lunch or dinner at the Pump Room, where the Sun-Times columnist Irv Kupcinet famously had a telephone installed in booth #1. I was by then twenty-five years old, naïve for my age, inexperienced, but representing an important newspaper, so the stars and directors were kind to me. It was so new to me that I took it very seriously indeed—not just my job, but their fame and glamour. Zonka gave me all the space I wanted in the paper, which was gorged with ads.

  The big events of that period were the movies like Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. The French New Wave had reached America. TIME magazine put “The Film Generation” on its cover. A few months later they did a piece about me in their Press section, headlined “Populist at the Movies.” Pauline Kael had started at the New Yorker, and movie critics were hot.

  It was a honey of a job to have at that age. I had no office hours; it was understood that I would see the movies and meet the deadlines. I loved getting up from my desk and announcing, “I’m going to the movies.” A lot of my writing was done at night and on weekends. I saw about half of the movies in theaters with paying audiences, sinking into the gloom to watch John Wayne fighting flaming oil wells in Hellfighters at the Roosevelt, or Pam Grier inventing blaxploitation at the Chicago. There were also experimental and indie films showing at the Town Underground—John Cassavetes, Andy Warhol, Jonas Mekas, Orson Welles’s Falstaff.

  Lacking a formal film education, I found that on-the-job training was possibly more useful. Every director I interviewed taught me something, and I don’t mean that as a cliché. I mean that when I asked, they actually sketched out shots on a piece of paper and told me what they were trying to do, and why. My teachers included Norman Jewison, Richard Brooks, Peter Collinson, Stanley Kramer, and Otto Preminger. They seemed to have an instinct for teaching, and I soaked it in.

  There was more direct contact. Stars were less protected and cocooned, and sets were less private. I spent full days on sound stages during movies like Camelot and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, watching a scene being done with a master shot and then broken down into close
r shots and angles. I heard lighting and sound being discussed. I didn’t always understand what I was hearing, but I absorbed the general idea. I learned to see movies in terms of individual shots, instead of being swept along by the narrative.

  I’d read Dwight Macdonald’s movie column in Esquire starting in high school, and now I studied his book On Movies. In the introduction he wrote that when he began writing reviews he made a checklist of the things a good movie should contain and then found it growing shorter as good movies came along that didn’t contain them. Finally he did what Pauline Kael once told me she did: “I go into the movie, I watch it, and I ask myself what happened to me.”

  That was useful, and from another critic I found a talisman. Within a day after Zonka gave me the job, I read The Immediate Experience by Robert Warshow. He wrote, “A man watches a movie, and the critic must acknowledge that he is that man.” By this he meant that the critic has to set aside theory and ideology, theology and politics, and open himself to—well, the immediate experience. More than once in my early years his words allowed me to find an approach to writing about movies I didn’t understand, like Bergman’s Persona the first time I saw it. I wrote about what happened to me.

  All the major studios had their own publicists in Chicago. The legendary figure was Frank Casey, the man from Warner Bros. who told Zonka he should make me the film critic. Casey was a hyperactive ginger-haired guy with a conspiratorial smile who knew the angles. It was said he got his studio job because his family was obscurely connected politically. Mayor Martin Kennelly called him in, said he had a call from Jack Warner, and was recommending Casey for the Chicago studio job.

  “I don’t know,” Casey said.

  “You don’t know what?”

  “I already have a good job at Coca-Cola.”

  “This is Warner Brothers!”

  “Coke provides me with a uniform.”

  It was said that the richest people in Chicago didn’t all know one another, but they all knew Casey. He seemed to have placed himself more or less in charge of distributing new Cadillacs on loan from Hanley Dawson, which had a big showroom near Rush Street. Irv Kupcinet once paid tribute at a roast: “Frank has opened a lot of doors for me, especially on Hanley Dawson Cadillacs.”

  It was my opinion Casey had never seen a movie all the way through. He was too restless. Unlike other publicists, who mostly used screening rooms, Casey liked to take over a theater like the World Playhouse for the Chicago preview of a big movie like Batman and invite all his friends from the worlds of business and politics. Only at a Warner Bros. movie were you likely to see Mayor Daley, several aldermen, and various Pritzkers.

  Many Casey stories involved the Warner star Ronald Reagan. Once when Casey picked up Reagan at Midway Airport, it was said, the flight was delayed and they were running late for a schedule of interviews. Casey wanted to pull over and get some gas. “You can make it, Frank,” Reagan told him. They ran out of gas. Casey took an empty gasoline can out of the trunk, handed it to Reagan, and said, “There’s a station about two blocks up there.” It was also Casey who fixed up Reagan on a date with Nancy Davis, the pretty daughter of one of his North Shore physician friends.

  The secret of Casey’s appeal was perhaps his irreverence. In an industry devoted to ass-kissing, he just didn’t care. One morning he called me and said, “Whozis wants to know if you want to talk to Whatzis.”

  The night of his funeral, friends gathered in an upstairs room at Gene & Georgetti, his favorite steak house, right behind the Merchandise Mart. Rob Friedman, the publicity boss at Warner and later a studio chief, told stories that mostly involved how Casey defrauded the studio. He recalled how Casey convinced his friend Pat Patterson, president of United Airlines, to lend the studio a surplus passenger jet so stars would always be seen with the United logo behind them. Then Casey rented the jet to Warner for $8,000 a month: “We all wondered how he negotiated such a low price.”

  In the early days, he said, publicity field men were paid tiny salaries and told, “Make it up on your expenses.” Few publicists took this encouragement as sincerely as Casey. After the dinner was over, one of the waiters at Gene & Georgetti pulled me aside.

  “This is the special credit card machine we used when Casey took you to dinner here,” he said.

  “When did Casey ever take me to dinner here?”

  “Every night. Even on Mondays, when we were closed.”

  The first film I reviewed for the Sun-Times was Galia, from France. I watched it from a center seat in the old World Playhouse, bursting with the awareness that I was reviewing it, and then I went back to the office and wrote that it was one more last gasp of the French New Wave, rolling ashore. That made me sound more insightful than I was.

  I was more jaded then than I am now. At the time I thought that five years would be enough time to spend on the movie beat. My master plan was to become an op-ed columnist and then eventually, of course, a great and respected novelist. My reveries ended with a deep old wingback chair pulled up close to the fire in a cottage deep in the woods, where a big dog snored while I sank into a volume of Dickens.

  There is something unnatural about just… going to the movies. Man has rehearsed for hundreds of thousands of years to learn a certain sense of time. He gets up in the morning and the hours wheel in their ancient order across the sky until it grows dark again and he goes to sleep. A movie critic gets up in the morning and in two hours it is dark again, and the passage of time is fractured by editing and dissolves and flashbacks and jump cuts. “Get a life,” they say. Sometimes movie critics feel as if they’ve gotten everybody else’s. Siskel described his job as “covering the national dream beat,” because if you pay attention to the movies they will tell you what people desire and fear. Movies are hardly ever about what they seem to be about. Look at a movie that a lot of people love, and you will find something profound, no matter how silly the film may seem.

  I have seen untold numbers of movies and forgotten most of them, I hope, but I remember those worth remembering, and they are all on the same shelf in my mind. There is no such thing as an old film. There is a sense in which old movies are cut free from time. I look at silent movies sometimes and do not feel I am looking at old films; I feel I am looking at a Now that has been captured. Time in a bottle. When I first looked at silent films, the performers seemed quaint and dated. Now they seem more contemporary. The main thing wrong with a movie that is ten years old is that it isn’t thirty years old. After the hairstyles and the costumes stop being dated and start being history, we can tell if the movie itself is timeless.

  What kinds of movies do I like the best? If I had to make a generalization, I would say that many of my favorite movies are about Good People. It doesn’t matter if the ending is happy or sad. It doesn’t matter if the characters win or lose. The only true ending is death. Any other movie ending is arbitrary. If a movie ends with a kiss, we’re supposed to be happy. But then if a piano falls on the kissing couple, or a taxi mows them down, we’re supposed to be sad. What difference does it make? The best movies aren’t about what happens to the characters. They’re about the example that they set.

  Casablanca is about people who do the right thing. The Third Man is about two people who do the right thing and can never speak to each other as a result. The secret of The Silence of the Lambs is buried so deeply that you may have to give this some thought, but its secret is that Hannibal Lecter is a Good Person. He is the helpless victim of his unspeakable depravities, yes, but to the limited degree that he can act independently of them, he tries to do the right thing.

  Not all good movies are about Good People. I also like movies about Bad People who have a sense of humor. Orson Welles, who does not play either of the Good People in The Third Man, has such a winning way, such witty dialogue, that for a scene or two we almost forgive him his crimes. Henry Hill, the hero of GoodFellas, is not a good fella, but he has the ability to be honest with us about why he enjoyed being bad. He is not a hypocr
ite. The heroine of The Marriage of Maria Braun does some terrible things, but because we know some of the forces that shaped her, we understand them and can at least admire her resourcefulness.

  Of the other movies I love, some are simply about the joy of physical movement. When Gene Kelly splashes through Singin’ in the Rain, when Judy Garland follows the yellow brick road, when Fred Astaire dances on the ceiling, when John Wayne puts the reins in his teeth and gallops across the mountain meadow, there is a purity and joy that cannot be resisted. In Equinox Flower, a Japanese film by the old master Yasujiro Ozu, there is this sequence of shots: a room with a red teapot in the foreground. Another view of the room. The mother folding clothes. A shot down a corridor with the mother crossing it at an angle, and then a daughter crossing at the back. A reverse shot in a hallway as the arriving father is greeted by the mother and daughter. A shot as the father leaves the frame, then the mother, then the daughter. A shot as the mother and father enter the room, as in the background the daughter picks up the red pot and leaves the frame. This sequence of timed movement and cutting is as perfect as any music ever written, any dance, any poem.

  I also enjoy being frightened in the movies, but I am bored by the most common way the movies frighten us, which is by loud noises or having something jump unexpectedly into the frame. Such tricks are so old a director has to be shameless to use it. Alfred Hitchcock said that if a bunch of guys were playing cards and there was a bomb under the table and it exploded, that was terror, but he’d rather do a scene where there was a bomb under the table and we kept waiting for it to explode but it didn’t. That was suspense. It’s the kind of suspense I enjoy.