HOLLYWOOD Walk of Fame adds a star for Ebert

America's favorite film critic joins the stars he's praised and panned.
By DIXIE REID
SCRIPPS HOWARD
SAN FRANCISCO -- Roger Ebert stepped from the hotel elevator, his cheeks pink after a much-needed nap. There he was -- the jowl, the eyeglasses, the critical stare -- fresh from the Oscars.
"That's . . . that's," stammered a woman passing by. "Ebert," her companion whispered. "That's Roger Ebert."
Along with the Hollywood stars whose work he's scrutinized for 38 years, Ebert has become one of the most recognizable characters in show business.
He is, first and foremost, a journalist, the longtime film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times. His movie reviews are syndicated, appearing in 250 newspapers throughout the country. And he won the Pulitzer Prize for arts criticism in 1975.
But it is Ebert's television work, reviewing films first alongside the late Gene Siskel (using the thumbs-up-thumbs-down shorthand) and now with Richard Roeper, that made him a household face.
And this summer Ebert will join a host of entertainment legends with his own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
"I'm gonna be next to Tim Allen, in front of the El Capitan Theatre. Not too far from Harold Lloyd. Right down the street, I think, from Lassie," he says, settling into an afternoon cup of tea.
Ebert scouted his future star's spot on Hollywood Boulevard while in Los Angeles for the recent 77th Annual Academy Awards, a long weekend that had him conducting interviews from the red carpet and then backstage.
He stopped off in San Francisco a few days afterward, to talk about his latest book, "The Great Movies II" (Broadway Books, $29.95, 520 pages), the successor to his 2002 volume.
Ebert sees 500 movies annually and reviews about half of them. In the introduction to "Great Movies II," Ebert said he "could very easily bear the thought of not seeing many of them again, or even for the first time. What a pleasure it is to . . . look closely and with love at films that vindicate the art form."
Among his favorites are the silent films of Buster Keaton, whom Ebert calls "the greatest actor-director in the history of movies." And, if Ebert could plant his Hollywood star anywhere he pleased, it would be next to Keaton's.
A newspaper man
Ebert was born June 18, 1942, in Urbana, Ill. He grew up around newspapers. His father belonged to the electrical workers' union and followed politics closely, so his parents subscribed to the Chicago Daily News as well as two local newspapers.
The city editor at the News-Gazette in Champaign, the adjacent town, was the father of Ebert's best friend. One day he walked the boys through the plant, where they saw reporters and editors at work. Ebert knew that very day that he could become what he calls "a newspaper man." He wasted no time in getting started.
He was barely able to write, he says, when he began publishing the Washington Street News in his basement, delivering copies to a dozen neighborhood houses.
He worked on his grade-school newspaper, was the editor of his high-school paper and, by age 15, was earning 75 cents an hour covering high-school sports for the News-Gazette. During the summer, he'd write about county fairs and car crashes. And on many nights he could be found at a movie theater.
Ebert became the Chicago Sun-Times' movie critic in 1967. He is now, at age 62, a pop-culture icon, thanks to all the years he's appeared on television. He and Siskel debuted their small-screen partnership in 1978.
"He's the most famous of the hometown reviewers," adds David Van Leer, who teaches English and film studies at the University of California-Davis and writes books about pop culture in the movies. "He's frequently well-written, frequently zippy, but he's never made it into the stream where people who study films professionally want to read him."
Even so, Ebert is popular with mainstream moviegoers, says Sue Rousch, his editor at Universal Press Syndicate, which distributes his reviews to newspapers.
"He's the No. 1 most-recognized critic in the country now," she says. "Roger is the best."
Different days
Ebert's job takes him to the major film festivals -- Cannes, Toronto, Telluride and Sundance. And each April he hosts Ebertfest, also known as the Overlooked Film Festival, at the University of Illinois, his alma mater. He picks films he loves that haven't yet found an audience.
Ebert has written 15 books, mostly about the movies, and in the '70s composed three screenplays for director Russ Meyer, most notably "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" (1970).
Nowadays, an interview with a Hollywood director or actor is inevitably conducted in a hotel with a publicist hovering nearby. Things were different in the late 1960s, Ebert says.
"When I was younger, you would just go and spend a day with somebody, hang around with them. Robert Mitchum had dismissed his driver and had his buddy driving the car, and they were lost in Pennsylvania, trying to find a [movie] location. Mitchum was smoking pot the whole time, right in front of me. I alluded to it in the story. Mitchum was cool with that. One time I spent a whole day at Lee Marvin's house in Malibu, and he was getting drunk."
He remembers the night John Wayne was in Chicago and had a representative from the Warner Bros. studio invite the local film critics to his hotel room.
"The Duke wants you to come over," the publicist said. "He's in the presidential suite of the Conrad Hilton, and he wants to get drunk."
"So," says Ebert, "the four of us spent the evening with the Duke. It wasn't that he wanted us drunk, he just wanted some company."