Why Roger Ebert should’ve been a guest caller on Frasier

 

• He was so famous as a film critic. He also knew quite a lot of stuff as a historian!
• He could still talk at the time when Frasier originally aired. In further detail, Frasier ended on May 13, 2004 and he lost his voice on July 1, 2006.
• While he and Gene Siskel would normally refuse to guest star in movies or TV shows except for talk shows as they felt it’d undermine their responsibility to the public, they voiced themselves on the TV show The Critic which they couldn’t resist on while Ebert himself guest starred on Early Edition, both of which occurred during Frasier’s original run. He was also a guest star multiple times on Sesame Street where his movie television programs were spoofed. He was even involved with several talk shows, TV specials, and documentaries, among other stuff. Likewise, Gene Siskel guest starred as himself on The Larry Sanders Show, the day before Frasier premiered.
• He and Gene Siskel helped popularize nationally televised film reviewing where they verbally sparred and traded humorous barbs while discussing movies. While doing so, they created and trademarked the phrase “two thumbs up” which was used when both give the same film a positive review which can be seen on certain home video cases and boxes.
• He had many funny moments.
• For movies he really disliked such as North, Caligula, Little Indian, Big City, The Good Son, or Frozen Assets, he did an excellent job explaining why they sucked to the point they’re really famous and fun to read.
• His most famous scathing review would have to be the 1994 film North where he said “I hated this movie! Hated, hated, hated, hated, hated, hated this movie! Hated every simpering stupid vacant audience-insulting moment of it! Hated the sensibility that thought anyone would like it! Hated the implied insult to the audience by its belief that anyone would be entertained by it!”.
• He wrote a lot of movie reviews and journal essays throughout his life.
• He created a “Great Movies” list and a “Most Hated Movies” list.
• He won a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, the first film critic to do so.
• He created a top ten movies list every full year when he was a film critic.
• He often included personal anecdotes in his reviews when he considered them relevant. He occasionally wrote reviews in the forms of stories, poems, songs, scripts, open letters, or imagined conversations along with creative and bizarre, but apt metaphors.
• He wrote many essays and articles exploring in depth the field of film criticism.
• When he appeared on The Howard Shore Show, he was frequently challenged to defend his ratings where he stood by his opinions with one notable exception when he gave the second Godfather film a three star rating but a three and a half star rating to the third installment.
• Sometimes, he went back and revised his opinions on certain movies.
• He was often critical of the MPAA’s film rating system. An example was when he advocated replacing the NC-17 rating with individual ratings for pornographic and non-pornographic adult movies.
• He was an advocate for a variety of things while even being opposed to other things.
• He was a supporter of the Democratic Party. For example, during a 1996 panel at the University of Colorado's Conference on World Affairs, he coined the Boulder Pledge, by which he vowed never to purchase anything offered through the result of an unsolicited email message, or to forward chain emails or mass emails to others.
• Ebert was critical of intelligent design. He felt that those who believe in either creationism or New Age beliefs such as crystal healing or astrology aren’t qualified to be President of the United States.
• He wrote a lot of literature such as movie yearbooks, Behind the Phantom Mask, Questions for the Movie Answer Man, A Kiss is Still a Kiss, The Perfect London Walk (with Daniel Curley) which was about London as it was his favorite foreign city, Two Weeks in Midday Sun: A Cannes Notebook, and The Future of The Movies.
• He had a little movie glossary which was a list of movie clichés.
• He was extremely active in the public where he did many other things besides reviewing movies.
• He commented on films using his Catholic upbringing as a point of reference. Additionally, he was critical of films he believed were grossly ignorant of or insulting to Catholicism.
• He occasionally accused some films of having an unwholesome political agenda (eg. he asserted that the film Dirty Harry had a fascist moral position).
• He tended to lament that cinemas outside major cities are "booked by computer from Hollywood with no regard for local tastes", making high-quality independent and foreign movies virtually unavailable to most American moviegoers.
• When he wrote movie reviews, he did so with a huge knowledge of film and film history which helped many movies find their audiences.
• He was an admirer of director Werner Herzog who he supported through many years when Herzog’s popularity had declined.
• He leveled charges against films such as The Night Porter. This is because he was wary of films passed as art but which he saw as lurid and sensational.
• He continued writing for the Chicago Sun-Times even when he used TV and the internet later on to share his movie reviews.
• His voice was really distinctive thus making it super easy for anyone to recognize especially if they had seen something that featured his voice such as The Critic, a documentary, an interview with him or Siskel & Ebert.
• He always worked with well-known sexploitation director Russ Meyer during his short stint as a screenwriter in Hollywood such as when he co-wrote Beyond the Valley of the Dolls which he enjoyed writing.
• His wife Chaz was a trial attorney.
• He founded his own annual film festival called Ebertfest to show old and new films he wanted people to see.
• He championed up-and-coming directors even early in their careers when they directed popular movies. It made him influential enough to where Martin Scorsese admitted to feeling encouraged by Ebert due to his hard, but ultimately loving attitude toward the medium of film though he might’ve been biased towards certain directors and he and Gene Siskel were jerks to each other.
• He always aspired to be as honest about his opinions and experiences as possible because he inspired others to analyze what they’re viewing which had a positive effect on many filmmakers that encouraged them to improve their craft.
• From the 1980s through the 2000s he found the interests in film criticism to be very much a credit to himself.
• In movies he gave a positive review to, he explained really creatively as to why it was a good or a great movie.
• Sometimes in his movie reviews, he’d take note of things that are worthwhile holding out hope for better things to come later on.
• He passionately championed the filmmakers he loved where he wanted to see movies towards audiences as someone who saw hundreds of them a year which he found special in particular.
• He sophisticated insights into art and cinema thanks to his distinctively witty writing style which was the way he served as a meditator both on a livery level, and in his personal interactions between everyday Americans and the Hollywood film staff.
• He invented a steering wheel arcade game where you drive an imaginary car down a race track.
• His right thumb was trademarked where he gave a thumbs up.
• He was the Hollywood Radio and Television Society's Co-Man of the Year 1993 along with Gene Siskel.
• He was a film lecturer at the University of Chicago Fine Arts Program.
• He attended college at the University of Illinois, where he won the National College Award for his campus newspaper columns.
• Before becoming a film critic, he was a sportswriter.
• He had an extensive collection of cartoon character toys, dolls and action figures.
• His home had a mini-movie theater and a glass enclosed workout room, plus he had a life-sized statue of Oliver Hardy.
• He credited Mad's movie satires as one of his earliest inspirations for becoming a film critic where he even wrote an introduction for the book Mad at the Movies.
• He was a brother in the Phi Delta Theta Fraternity.
• The stars of Cheers, Wings and Frasier did a lot of movies he gave a positive review to during the time when they were airing or beforehand or afterwards like Pixar movies, Anatasia, Irreconcilable Differences, The Mask, A Small Circle of Friends, Saving Private Ryan, Dr. T & The Women, Pretty Woman, Guilty by Suspicion, Deconstructing Harry, Look Who’s Talking, Shoot to Kill, Made in America, Three Men and a Baby, Cousins, 15 Minutes, The American President, Raging Bull, Fat City, Big Night, The Empire Strikes Back, Sleepless in Seattle, Doc Hollywood, White Men Can’t Jump, Indecent Proposal, Natural Born Killers, Kingpin, The People vs. Larry Flynt, Wag the Dog, Matilda, James and the Giant Peach, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, Green Card, Summer of Sam, Liberty Heights, Getting to Know You, Say Anything… and Antz.
• At the time, he was trying to achieve one of his life-long goals which was winning one of the weekly cartoon-caption contests in The New Yorker.
• His writing can be described as discursive, alluring, deeply personal, occasionally incisive, frequently obtuse, eloquent and moral, populist yet eclectic when reaching for comparisons and somewhat conservative regarding sex. He also had a no-nonsense style of writing.
• He had biting, razor sharp sarcasm.