Ebert: ‘So what?’ on his inability to talk at Virginia
April 27, 2007
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – What film critic Roger Ebert couldn’t say Wednesday night at the opening of his Overlooked Film Festival, his smile said for him.
A tracheostomy has left the 64-year-old unable to speak. But at his first public appearance since surgery last June, Ebert smiled widely as he walked through the Virginia Theatre, accepting handshakes, hugs and a couple of standing ovations from movie buffs and friends.
Last November, confined to a Chicago hospital bed, Ebert considered canceling the festival, said his wife, Chaz Hammelsmith Ebert.
But festival officials told them a number of passes already had been sold, and he committed to coming to the festival in Champaign and nearby Urbana, his hometown.
“You know, I think it did him a world of good,” she said in an interview backstage. “It helped to energize him.”
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Ebert, considered the dean of American film critics, has been largely out of action since last summer. He has written occasional reviews, but hasn’t appeared on the “Ebert & Roeper” TV show.
Friends like Jim Emerson of Seattle say they’ve missed his voice and work. Emerson has worked with Ebert in various capacities since 1994 and now edits his Web site.
“When you work with somebody every day and you’re e-mailing back and forth every day, and all the sudden it just stops – it’s like there’s this huge, yawning gap in your life,” said Emerson, who said he hadn’t seen Ebert in a year.
Ebert on Wednesday showed the effects of that first surgery, in which doctors removed a cancerous growth from his salivary gland and right jaw, taking part of the jaw in the process.
Two weeks later, a blood vessel burst near the site of the operation, forcing an emergency operation.
His mouth often hung open Wednesday night, just above his heavily bandaged neck. And he walked slowly through the 86-year-old movie house, where he said through his wife that he had watched “Gone with the Wind” and his father saw Marx Brothers films.
In an e-mailed note to reporters and a column in the Chicago Sun-Times earlier this week, Ebert spoke frankly about his appearance, saying he’d been warned by friends that showing up would invite both unflattering photos and unkind coverage.
“So what?” Ebert wrote. “I have been very sick, am getting better and this is how it looks.”
He wrote that he now awaits another operation that he hopes will restore his speech.
Festival organizers set up a brown, leather recliner at the back of the theater for Ebert. He wrote in his column that he needed it for back pain, but said through his wife Wednesday that the recliner served another purpose.
“I will fulfill a lifelong dream to have my own La-Z-Boy chair in a movie theater,” she read.
