I'd been a fan of Ebert's reviews since At The Movies premiered on television back in 1982. I was only 12 years old at the time but his straight-forward, unpretentious approach to analyzing movies engaged me in such a way that I actually started dissecting the characters and storylines I was seeing on the screen with my buddies Saturday afternoons.
A movie was no longer cool just because it had mind-blowing effects or exotic locales. I started paying attention to photography, how deeply layered the story was and if the characters were memorable and actually had three dimensions. Ebert's reviews made me aware I was seeing a bad movie and gave me the wherewithal to know when I was sitting in the dark with a really good one.
When I started working for the student newspaper my freshman year in college, film reviews were some of the first things I wrote. Now I'd probably read a couple hundred print reviews prior to high school graduation but it was Ebert's television voice that guided me through my first written critique. Give a little background on the director or star, lay out the story and convey how well or poorly the film was executed. Pretty simple. It's a recipe I follow when writing reviews to this day.
It's pretty obvious the passion Ebert had for the cinema. What some may not realize is that he had an equal or greater passion for writing. We began his career writing film reviews for the Chicago Sun-Times back in 1967 and became so astute at it, he actually won a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism at age 33. He kept writing while enjoying a successful television career and even seemed to double his output after cancer robbed him of his vocal cords back in 2006. I remember a co-host asking him on an award show what advice he would give to someone wanting to make a career from reviewing movies. His response: "Love writing."
Roger Ebert may have lost his ability to speak, but he never lost his voice. It will continue to inspire future journalists and filmmakers for generations to come.
