Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert (5 page)

A year or so later, I finally met Martin Scorsese; the two of us and Pauline Kael got half hammered in a hotel room and he talked about Season of the Witch, the screenplay that would become Mean Streets. Another time he took me to the loft where Woodstock was being edited; he was working under Thelma Schoonmaker, who would become the editor of all of his films. Another time we went to Little Italy on the Feast of San Genaro, and in an Italian restaurant where he had eaten since childhood he told me of the kinds of people who would populate his films; the opening narration of GoodFellas is a version of the way he remembered his childhood during that dinner.

I went to Cannes. There were only five or six American journalists covering it at that time. The most famous was Rex Reed, then at the height of his fame, and I remember that he was friendly and helpful and not snobbish toward an obscure Chicagoan. Andrew Sarris and Molly Haskell were there, Richard and Mary Corliss from Time, Charles Chaplin from the Los Angeles Times, Kathleen Carroll from the New York Daily News, George Anthony from Toronto, and the legendary Alexander Walker from London. I remember a night in 1979 when the Machiavellian French publicist and cineaste Pierre Rissient took us all by motorboat to Francis Ford Coppola's yacht, where Coppola made his fateful statement that he didn't know whether or not the ending of Apocalypse Now worked. By not defining what he meant by "ending," he skewed half of the original reviews of his masterpiece; critics felt compelled to provide an opinion about the "ending" even though, in fact, he was talking only about the end titles. He said he would show "both versions" at Cannes, because he considered the festival "an out-of-town tryout." Andrew Sarris asked: "Where's town?"

I visited many movie sets. In those days there were no ethical qualms about the studio paying the way, and I flew off to Sweden to watch Bergman and Bo Widerberg at work, to Rome for Fellini and Franco Zeffirelli, to England for John Boorman and Sir Carol Reed, to Hollywood for Billy Wilder, Henry Hathaway, Otto Preminger, Norman Jewison, John Huston, countless others, most memorably Robert Altman, who struck me as a man whose work and life amounted to the same thing. Those were the days before publicists kept their clients on a short leash and reduced "in terviews" to five-minute sound bites. I walked with Zeffirelli and Nino Rota in the garden beneath Juliet's balcony while the composer hummed the movie's theme to the director. On assignment from Esquire, I spent a day with Lee Marvin in his Malibu Beach house, days with Groucho Marx, Kirk Douglas, Robert Mitchum. The Marvin interview, included in this book, is my personal favorite. If you read it, consider that he liked it, too.

In about 1968 the Wall Street Journal ran an article about Russ Meyer, and I wrote them a letter, describing Meyer as an auteur worthy of praise. He wrote me, we met, and he asked me to write the screenplay for Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. This began a great adventure and a long friendship. Twentieth Century Fox had fallen upon hard times, and the veteran publicist jet Fore would visit our offices to moan that only we could save the studio: "Every producer in town has his nephew out in the desert with a camera and a motorcycle, trying to remake Easy Rider," he said, "and what do we have? We're stuck with two war movies and a Western." The war movies were M*A*S*Hand Patton, and the Western was Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, so the studio was in better shape than he thought, but for a short time the inmates were left in charge of the asylum. Russ and I improvised our way through the screenplay in six weeks, and the result was a film much loved and loathed; Corliss picked it as one of the ten best films of the 1970s, and when the Sex Pistols punk rock group and their manager, Malcolm McLaren, saw it in London, they hired us to do a movie I titled Who Killed Bambi? The movie was never finished because McLaren ran out of money, but to meet Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious for story conferences in London was an experience I would not have done without.

In late 1975, I received a telephone call from Eliot Wald, a producer at Chicago's PBS station. It led, through several intermediate steps, to the creation of Opening Soon at a Theater Near You, a show on which I reviewed new movies with Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune. Thea Flaum was the producer who gave the show its shape, renamed it Sneak Previews, put us in the balcony, came up with Spot the Wonder Dog, and mediated the endless disagreements between Siskel and myself. With Gene I had arguments involving more anger and passion than with anyone else in my life. In the process he became one of my best friends, and knew more about me than anyone else would learn until I married Chaz Hammel-Smith in 1992.

The history of the show, which was also known as At the Movies and Siskel & Ebert, belongs in another place. Its function as film criticism is debated in this book in articles by Richard Corliss, Andrew Sarris, and me. After Gene's death Richard Roeperjoined me in the balcony for Ebert & Roeper, now in its sixth year. It was a difficult assignment, which Richard met with grace, wit, and a remarkable knowledge of the movies and popular culture in general.

But let me back off from the chronology to make some general observations about how I seem to function as a critic. This book surveys my written work from the beginning. (With the Daily Illini piece, it goes back, in the words of my favorite speech from Citizen Kane, to "before the beginning.") John Tryneski and Rodney Powell of the University of Chicago Press are the onlie begetters of this volume, since it was their idea, they made the initial selection of material, and they overcame my doubts that such a book was possible. They were correct, I believe, to suggest that in many cases my first review of a movie be included, rather than a later or more informed Great Movie essay or other reconsideration. Those original pieces are journalism written on a deadline, recording what I thought immediately after seeing the movies. Some of the films became famous and familiar, but I wrote about such titles as 2001, Hoop Dreams, My Dinner with Andre, E. T., Apocalypse Now, Monster, and Million Dollar Baby before any critical consensus had formed and before they were officially masterpieces.

I find that I love movies more now than I did when I started. To say of someone that he "loves the movies" is said to be praise, unless he "loves them too much." But to love the movies is not in itself praiseworthy, it is simply a fact. One can dislike the movies or be neutral and nevertheless write valuable criticism. What you must do is take them seriously, and consider them worthy of attention. You cannot be a useful critic if you dismiss them or condescend to them. Every movie was made by people who hoped it would fulfill their vision for it, and is seen by people who hope to admire it. If you believe a movie is bad or wins its audiences dishonorably, that can be a splendid beginning for a review, but you must remember that the people making it and seeing it have given up part of their lives in the hope that it would be worth those months or hours.

What does it mean to love the movies? It does not mean to sit mind lessly and blissfully before the screen. It means to believe, first of all, that they are worth the time. That to see three movies during a routine workday or thirty movies a week at a film festival is a good job to have. That your mood when you enter the theater is not very important, because the task of every movie is to try to change how you feel and think during its running time. That it is not important to have a "good time," but very important not to have your time wasted. That on occasion you have sat before the screen and been enraptured by the truth or beauty projected thereon. That although you may be more open to a movie whose message (if it has one) you agree with, you must be open to artistry and craftsmanship even in a movie you disagree with. A movie is not good because it arrives at conclusions you share, or bad because it does not. A movie is not about what it is about. It is about how it is about it: about the way it considers its subject matter, and about how its real subject may be quite different from the one it seems to provide. Therefore it is meaningless to prefer one genre over another. Yes, I "like" film noir more than Westerns, but that has nothing to do with any given noir or Western. If you do not "like" musicals or documentaries or silent films or foreign films or films in black and white, that is not an exercise of taste, but simply an indication that you have not yet evolved into the more compleat filmgoer that we all have waiting inside.

These observations accepted, we can now consider movies that affect us with the same power as experiences in our real lives. Such movies can be comedies as well as tragedies; to laugh deeply and sincerely is as important as to weep. What must happen is that, for a scene or for a whole film, we are swept up in thoughts and emotions not of our own making. They can reinforce our own beliefs or oppose them; which they do is not the point. During those moments we are in intimate communication with the makers of the film. We share their thoughts and feelings as if working beside them. We are being guided through an empathetic experience by those who have felt it already and now seek how best to share it with us. Consider in this context not films that are universally valued, such as the beloved silent comedies, but a film that represents values we despise, such as Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will. To watch her glorification of Hitler and the Nazi party is to feel what Riefenstahl felt, and therefore to understand more immediately how Hitler's appeal worked and his influence grew. You can see any number of films against Hitler and understand he is a villain, but you must see him through the eyes of his admirers to fully understand the quality of his evil and the emotions that he engendered. Without that understanding you will see him as a spectacle but not as a fact.

It is not necessary to choose such extreme examples. Consider a movie like Singin' in the Rain, which was made on the musical assembly line at MGM, or Casablanca, a product of the Hal Wallis production team at Warner Brothers. These films did not set out to be great. Those making them were not impressed by their prospects. No one on the set could have guessed that they would someday he considered among the best of all films. They begin with standard ingredients: a backstage musical, a wartime melodrama. They do not arrive at great truths. Yet they both achieve perfection of their kind because they were made by artists who found themselves at the top of their personal abilities in material perfectly suited to them, and because for reasons both deliberate and accidental, nothing happened to obscure that process. There is joy in them. There can also be joy in a perfect film that is uncompromisingly sad, like Robert Bresson's An Hasard Balthazar, a film that achieves extraordinary emotional power even though its protagonist is a donkey who has little understanding of the world and no power in it, and is never in the slightest degree made "human." Balthazar functions simply as the acceptance of what happens to Balthazar.

It is a common quality of the films we "love" that we can see them an indefinite number of times. Most good films need be seen only once (films that are not good need not be seen at all). Raiders of the Lost Ark achieves what it intends with admirable skill and artistry, but when you have seen it, it remains seen. I have seen Citizen Kane perhaps a hundred times, perhaps sixty of those times with the shot-by-shot approach, and I could happily start watching it again right now. That is also true of Vertigo, The General, Nosferatu, Aguirre: The Wrath of God, Ikiru, Pulp Fiction, Touchez Pas an Grisbi, Raging Bull, The Third Man, Rules of the Game, La Dolce Vita, and for that matter Errol Morris's Gates of Heaven, a documentary about the owners and customers of pet cemeteries which I have seen dozens of times and which I think is truly bottomless; the deeper into it I look, the more humanity and sadness and truth I see, but I never get to the end of its mystery. I do not believe Errol Morris ever has, either. Something happened during the making of that film that is beyond planning or comprehension. Something like that happens in one way or another with all of the films we love; Auden wrote about Yeats that "he became his admirers," and in some way we become these films and they become us.