Roger Ebert - The Progressive Interview - Interview

Progressive, The, August, 2003 by Matthew Rothschild

Roger Ebert is running late. He's in Madison, Wisconsin, for the Wisconsin Film Festival, which is going on just days after the Academy Awards. Directors are buttonholing him, but he manages to break away, and when he arrives at The Progressive's office, he's contrite and cheerful.

I've wanted to interview Ebert for a while, since, unbeknownst to many of his fans, he has decidedly liberal politics. Ebert, a film critic and columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times, won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1975. For twenty-three years, he co-hosted Siskel & Ebert, which was nominated for six Emmy awards. His current show is Ebert & Roeper, which runs on more than 200 stations around the country.

In person, he doesn't come across as a celebrity but more as an opinionated journalist, a trade he's been plying for forty-six years. At age fifteen, he became a sportswriter for the Champaign-Urbana News-Gazette, and he was the editor of the Daily Illini at the University of Illinois. He joined the Sun-Times when he was twenty-four. He is the author of thirteen books, including Ebert's Little Movie Glossary, Roger Ebert's Book of Film, and I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie. His most recent is The Great Movies, which he dedicates to other film critics, including Pauline Kael, Stanley Kauffmann, and Andrew Sarris.

When we get down to the interview, I speak with Ebert about Michael Moore, our current political climate, Bush and religion, and progressive films he likes.

Afterwards, I walk him back to his car. The license plate reads "Movies."

Q: Tell me, what was your reaction to Michael Moore's acceptance speech at the Academy Awards?

Roger Ebert: I agree with what he said. I don't think Bush was legitimately elected President. But I was very offended as a reporter when Michael came directly back to the pressroom where I was, along with 300 or 400 other reporters and lectured us, "Now do your job. Don't report it was a divided house. Only five loud people were booing." I was just talking with Sean Welsh at the Wisconsin Film Festival, who directed Spellbound. He was one of the directors Michael had invited up on stage, and I asked him very carefully about that, and he said, "No, it sounded about 50-50."

Q: Why do you think there was such a divided house?

Ebert: The Academy is paranoid about its image. But I would propose to you that if Michael Moore had taken a deep breath, and looked straight at the audience, and said, "I am a nonfiction filmmaker during a fictitious Presidency," and stopped, I think he basically would have gotten a positive response to that. But his whole delivery was wrong. They were not ready to assimilate that much that quickly. You know, they didn't boo anyone else, and there were several other anti-war speeches that were applauded.

Q: But they were much less explicit.

Ebert: Yeah.

Q: I mean, when Moore said, "Shame on you," to Bush for the Iraq War, that's about as explicit as you can get.

Ebert: But by the time you got to that, the boos were already thirty seconds old.

Q: How do you think it played with the larger audience, the American public?

Ebert: I think it gave ammunition to Michael Moore's enemies. It played into their hands.

Q: We had a long discussion about this the day after at The Progressive. Some of us, like me, were just so delighted to hear someone get up and say out loud that we're defiant, we're not going to accept this man and this man's illegal war, that it gave us a real sense of positive energy.

Ebert: You know, they say be careful what you ask for because you're going to get it. On our Ebert & Roeper program, we have an annual show where we pick the winners--who ought to win the Oscars--and then at the end of that show there's a segment where Roeper and I say what we would most like to see. So I wound up and said, "I'd like to see Michael Moore get up there and let 'em have it with both barrels and really let loose and give them a real rabble-rousing speech." I asked, basically, for that to happen. And then, when it happened, I don't think Michael Moore really sold it to that audience. So I'm in favor of people getting up there and saying it, but at the same time there is a way to communicate effectively so as to help your cause, and I don't think Michael found that.

Q: What do you make of the criticism of Hollywood celebrities for speaking out against the war--the Sean Penns, the Susan Sarandons?

Ebert: It's just ignorant; it's just ignorant.

Q: Why do you say that?

Ebert: I begin to feel like I was in the last generation of Americans who took a civics class. I begin to feel like most Americans don't understand the First Amendment, don't understand the idea of freedom of speech, and don't understand that it's the responsibility of the citizen to speak out. If Hollywood stars speak out, so do all sorts of other people. Now Hollywood stars can get a better hearing. Oddly enough, the people who mostly seem to hear them are those on the right wing, so Fox News can put on its ticker tape in Times Square a vile attack on Michael Moore, and Susan Sarandon is a punchline. The right wants to shut other people up.