'Don't fake it'

Get this.

You're down in Georgia, there to meet not just a movie star, but an American icon. He walks up to you in combat fatigues, looking every bit as big as his 6 foot, 4 inch frame. Although he's known to millions around the world, he sticks out his hand and smiles.

"John Wayne," he says by way of introduction, as if you didn't know.

Such was Roger Ebert's life.

Don't feel too well tonight. I think I've caught some kind of stomach bug. So, instead of making medicine with my buddy Matt Shelton -- I'm sure we would have screened yet another good bad movie -- I'm at home, finishing up Ebert's autobiography, "Life Itself."

Sometimes you don't realize just how much a person means to you until they're gone. That's how I feel about Ebert.

He was always there, on TV, bickering with Gene Siskel and, later and less successfully, with Richard Roeper; guesting on Carson or Letterman; ubiquitous with those two thumbs up (or down!). His movie reviews showed up in my email inbox about 9 a.m. every Friday, like clockwork.

Even after surgery silenced his voice, he was still there, tweeting and blogging away. I thought he'd live to be a hundred.

And then he died.

That weekend -- I'm sure I told you about it -- I watched "Citizen Kane" complemented by Ebert's commentary. And, you know what? A movie I've seen at least 20 times, discussed, enjoyed, mused over, loved, hated, taught to a high school class, learned about from UT professor Chuck Maland -- despite all that, Ebert taught me things I'd never noticed. Such was his gift.

Shelton has a collection of reviews of movies Ebert despised. One night, prompted by peer pressure and potent potables, I read a few of them in William Shatner's cadence. They are classics. Especially the one about a doomsday movie. Is it "Armageddon"? Bruce Willis on an asteroid? Anyway, it's a masterpiece.

In "Life Itself," Ebert writes about his Midwest childhood, about losing it at the movies, about newspapering in Chicago with Mike Royko and a true cast of characters, about drinking too much and sobering up, chatting on film shoots with Lee Marvin and Robert Mitchum, musing on mortality with Martin Scorsese.

As usual, I've collected a list of films to watch. Scorsese's first picture. Ebert's infamous attempt at a screenplay, "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls." Bergman's "Face to Face."

And you know what? He taught me something about writing that I've always believed but never heard verbalized.

"Focus on what you saw and how it affected you. Don't fake it."

I've always tried to write conversationally, sharing a story, telling the truth. I don't think readers are dumb. I think they can spot phony a mile away. But nothing sells like sincerity.

Leave it to Roger Ebert to say it best. He always did. 

'A leave of presence'

Roger Ebert still had things to do.

He was scaling back on his movie reviews. He planned to do what he had always dreamed: review the movies HE wanted to see. He was relaunching his website. Ebertfest 2013, his annual film festival, was scheduled to begin April 17.

But the credits rolled before the film was finished. Roger Ebert died today, of unspecified causes, most likely complications from a renewed bout with cancer. He was 70.

He titled his last blog post "A Leave of Presence." How fitting. Because Roger Ebert will remain very much with us. He lives on, in his writing, in his commentaries, in countless video clips, in the memories of his friends, fans and loved ones.

I am not going to do Mr. Ebert justice with this post. I lack the talent. But here's my best shot.

Roger Ebert was the first critic who made me THINK about films. I realized that, at their best, they were more than entertainment, more than a backdrop for a date night. Film is an art form. Roger was one of its poets. I paid attention to the technical aspects, to the mise-en-scene, to how a director worked his or her magic.

His commentary on the DVD releases of "Citizen Kane" is a thing of beauty. Like so many of us, he lost it at the movies, long before Pauline Kael coined the phrase. And he was more approachable than Kael, more talented, frankly, less in love with his own sense of self.

Ebert's frequent TV appearances with the late Gene Siskel on Letterman or Carson were hilarious.

Forget the famous "two thumbs up." Look deeper. He was the first film critic to receive the Pulitzer Prize.

And he exposed me to so much, not just to directors whose films I might have otherwise missed (Fellini, Bergman), but to literature, too. I was so inspired after one of his blog posts last year, I drove to McKay Used Books and bought several novels by Henry James. Another piece caused me to put "A Dance to the Music of Time" into my Amazon.com wishlist.

He could rip a flick to shreds and he could wax poetic about the superiority of film over digital projection and he could write better than anyone in his field. No, scratch that. He could write better than most scribes, period.

And he was an inspiration as a human being, too, bravely fighting a cruel disease. Cancer took his jaw and his voice. He kept working until it took his life. 

This weekend, I plan to watch "Citizen Kane," with Ebert's commentary, in tribute to an old friend I never met.

Godspeed, Roger Ebert. I hope you and Gene are somewhere together, laughing, talking, maybe watching a flick or two.

Your life and career rate two thumbs WAY up.

Henry James, John Boy Walton and a few other things on my mind...

I hadn't read Henry James since college.

But, I was so inspired by this blog post from film critic Roger Ebert, I picked up a couple of his books while at McKay's a couple of weeks ago. Last week, I downloaded "Daisy Miller" for free on my Kindle and read it in one sitting.

My friend and colleague Larry Van Guilder describes James quite well. "Writing has changed so much since he wrote that you have to change gears to read him."

The way his words flow and his picture-perfect character portraits are well worth the shift.

I like to watch "The Waltons" sometimes in the evenings. It helps me relax and satisfies my need for nostalgia. I have always identified with the lead character. Like John Boy, I yearn to write about the human condition and live in New York and linger awhile with the literati.

And sometimes, when life gets a little blue, I pull a volume off my shelf (or click on an eBook in this crazy, wonderful century), and spend some time with a genius like Henry James.

It's enough.

Anything but dated

Watching "Saturday Night Fever" all these years later, it's at first difficult to remember why I like this film.

It's terribly dated. Some of its themes and scenes could charitably be described as misogyny. Plot holes abound.

And yet --- for some of these same reasons, "Fever" is a triumph.

The film conjures a time and place, becomes ingrained in it, offers a stopped-time look at America, specifically Brooklyn, circa 1977. No movie save something like "American Graffiti" or "The Last Picture Show" does a better job at capturing, nay defining, an era.

John Travolta's Tony is a working-class stiff with big dreams. He wants more out of life than getting into trouble with his friends and living it up at the 2001 Odyssey disco on Saturday nights. The problem is he can't exactly figure out how.

And he suffers from the classic American male dilemma --- figuring out that women are more, much more, than sexual objects. It took me a whole lot of growing up and several later episodes of "M*A*S*H," awash in Alan Alda's feminist philosophy, to learn that lesson. Tony figures it out, sort of, through his friendship with Stephanie (Karen Lynn Gorney), the Brooklyn born woman who makes it to Manhattan.

What "Fever" does best, painfully so at times, is offer a bleak, honest realism to the venerable coming of age story. We may not like some of the film's gritty scenes, but I suspect they are as true to the period as anything put to celluloid.

Gorney is pretty but she isn't a Hollywood bombshell. And that's good. Tony, and we the audience, is taught to appreciate her for what she is, not for what she looks like.

And then there's that disco music. Love it, loathe it, it's catchy stuff. And it works well here as Travolta shows off the dance moves that made him a star. Hear "Night Fever" on the radio to this day, and suddenly you're strutting down the sidewalk with Tony as he makes his way to work.

The late film critic Gene Siskel loved this movie. His partner Roger Ebert once guessed Siskel saw it 17 times. He even bought Travolta's famous white suit at a charity auction.

Ebert guesses Siskel bonded with the film because it reflected who he was at that time in his life. And that's really what we want the arts to do to us, isn't it? How we react to it is all important; therein lies the rub.

Maybe it's not worth it to spend 20 minutes dissecting something like "Saturday Night Fever." Maybe it should be relegated to what it is -- a popular movie about Brooklyn teenagers enjoying the culture and music of the moment.

But, no. This film is more than that. Somewhere amid Tony's dreams of a better life lies a theme -- and a yearning desire -- that is anything but dated.