Ebert Remakes His Voice With Help From Technology And Friends
By Steven Pate in Arts & Entertainment on May 20, 2011 7:45PM
It's far too easy to take things for granted. Roger Ebert, for example. Surely his 15 books, Sun-Times column, television programs and expanding online empire have made the Urbana native the most famous movie critic in America. Though his recovery from cancer has been recounted, the fact that he is not only still with us but in fact able to communicate as well as ever with an ever-greater number of people is a marvel for which we are very fortunate.
When Ebert was invited to give a presentation at TED2011 in March, enlisting his wife Chaz and friends Dean Ornish and John Hunter to supplement the text-to-speech software he uses to communicate regularly, what he ended up with was a revealing account not only of his triumph over illness but also the victory of science and technology in the battle to improve the lives of everyone suffering from disabilities. His candor about his own medical travails reveals rarely-disclosed details here and the decision to have Chaz read his words aloud results in genuinely touching moments as Ebert hams it up with some pantomime to help the presentation along.
Ebert may have spent a long time taking his own ability to speak for granted, but we won't make the same about the man himself. Here is a critic blessed with quick critical instincts and the ability to communicate reasoned opinions frankly and with immediacy. While not known as a prose stylist, the clarity and directness of his tone place him in the tradition of the most celebrated voices of American film criticism such as James Agee, Manny Farber and Pauline Kael. His forthrightness further bears the mantle of a "Chicago" voice, a tell-it-like-it-is-ness full of reverberations of Studs Terkel, Mike Royko and every other Chicago wordsmith whose brain seemed to bear the imprint of a hardhat. He is a critic with the virtue of an awareness of his own predilictions without the vice of self-indulgence and, as with any critic, our appraisals don't always jibe with his. He has straddled the line betwen criticism and consumer guidance with more self-consistency and fairness than anyone, which is why he's still standing at the top of the heap.
And yet, watching this makes it obvious how little of what makes Roger Ebert dear to us has to do with the subject of movies. At sixty-seven, he is a well-traveled, well-read and well-regarded man who has realized how important communicating his ideas is to his own happiness. More than through print or television, it is through blogging and through social networking that Roger Ebert finally found his definitive voice, and not a moment too soon. "The blog, email and Facebook have given me a substitute for everyday conversation," Ebert confesses in this presentation. Moreso than with the Sun-Times, it is with Chicago itself that Ebert is everywhere associated, and for that we should be proud. His twitter handle, isn't @rogerebert, after all. It's @ebertchicago.