The Many Memorable Remembrances of Roger Ebert

He was corny. For years, Roger and Chaz would host massive Fourth of July parties at his home in Michigan, and Roger would always wear his wonderfully tacky American flag shirt while presiding over the karaoke contest and the barbecue and the dancing on the temporary floor installed in the backyard. You never saw him happier than when he was surrounded by family and friends.

Even though I didn’t really know him, Ebert began clipping out my columns from the paper and putting them on the desk of the editor at the Chicago Sun-Times, Jim Hoge. When I was a senior, I got a call from Hoge asking me to come to Chicago, where he offered me a job. I politely turned him down, saying I wanted to work for magazines.

That night, when I was back in Champaign-Urbana, I got this roaring call from Ebert, telling me that nobody in his right mind would turn down the offer of a job from a newspaper! Newspapers were where the most important writing in America was done!

Ebert also was a collegial presence in the downtown Chicago screening room where movies were previewed for critics, though you knew not to take his back-corner seat by the door, or either of the two in front of it. He'd banter before, after and on rare occasions during movies. In 1997's “Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery,” after Mike Myers' spoofy spy declared, “It's my happening, baby, and it freaks me out!” Ebert erupted in the screening room, “I wrote that!” Myers had lifted the line from Ebert's “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls” (1970) script for director Russ Meyer.

 “At times brutally sad, yet surprisingly funny, and always completely honest, I wholeheartedly recommend existence. If you haven’t experienced it yet, then what are you waiting for? It is not to be missed.” Ebert later said that while human existence’s running time was “a little on the long side,” it could have gone on much, much longer and he would have been perfectly happy.