// This is a machine generated transcript. Please report any transcription errors to will-help@illinois.edu.

[00:00:00]
Speaker 0: From Illinois Soul, this is Dialogue. I'm Reginald Hardwick, news and public affairs director at Illinois Public Media. Dialogue is an exchange about culture straight from the soul. 

In 1999, Roger Ebert was already an immensely successful film critic. He had been writing for the Chicago Sun-Times for more than three decades. On TV he'd been hosting a review show for almost a quarter century, spending most of that time with Chicago Tribune movie critic Gene Siskel as his co-host. But on the cusp of the 21st century, Roger added another feather to his cap, founder and host of a film festival in his hometown, Champaign-Urbana. Ebertfest, as it eventually came to be named, has continued for more than 25 years in Champaign, even after the death of its namesake critic in 2013. Chaz Ebert has had a front row seat to all of it. She and Roger were married for 20 years, and she co-founded the film festival as well as RogerEbert.com. Days before this last Ebertfest, she spoke with Brian Mackey of the 21st show.

[00:01:25]
Brian Mackey: [talking before about how this was the overlooked film festival. Eventually that comes out of the title.] How has programming the festival evolved over time?

[00:01:33]
Chaz Ebert: We did hear from some other filmmakers who said, we don't like the idea of thinking that our films are going to be overlooked or were overlooked. And at the time, we were not showing only movies that were overlooked. There could be something that had been a blockbuster that we were showing and we said that, OK, let's take the overlooked out of the name. And some people thought that the overlooked referred back more to The Shining, the Overlook [Motel], and there is actually another film festival that I think has Overlooked in its name and I think that's in St. Louis. So, but Overlooked did not serve us anymore and just eventually we just started calling the film festival Ebertfest and that name stuck.

[00:02:24]
Brian Mackey: Absolutely. Yeah, I guess it's hard to argue that Lawrence of Arabia in 2001 were overlooked. All right, let me share, we asked members of our texting group about their memories of Ebertfest and the man himself. You can join that, by the way, by sending the word talk to 217-803-0730. Karen in Champaign says, I have a cookbook that Roger Ebert wrote, The Pot and How to Use It. I love this book, even in my 60s. She goes on to say the films that I have seen at the Ebertfests of the past stick with me for decades. He had excellent taste and was an excellent curator. The talkback is one of the best aspects of any film festival. The talkback brings a higher level to sharing a film together. She says Roger Ebert valued the nurturing of empathy in human beings. He believed that the hearing of our own stories and other people's stories through films creates a better sense of community. There is no better legacy that a human can leave than stirring the pot so that empathy bubbles up.

[00:03:25]
Chaz Ebert: He was so proud of that cookbook. That was one of the things, I mean, even with his movie career and everything else that he had done, his cookbook was one of the things he was most proud of because it became a bestseller. First of all, in Hawaii, and then I think it was translated into Japanese or and maybe even Chinese, and so he was really proud of The Pot and How to Use It and we used to actually take a crock pot or something to the film festival and cook some of the recipes when we could in between going to the movies down in Champaign, so.

[00:04:09]
Brian Mackey: What a great story. And he did love that it was a rice cooker if I'm remembering correctly.

[00:04:15]
Chaz Ebert: It was a rice cooker. That's right, yeah, yeah, amazing.

[00:04:16]
Brian Mackey: We have Susan calling from Elgin on line one. Susan, thanks for calling in.

[00:04:23]
Susan: Hey there, um, I just wanted to make the comment that, um, I've been a film fan my whole life. I mean since I was very, very little and I knew old Hollywood and all the old movies, um, but watching, um, Roger's reviews on television and reading them in our newspaper, um, boy, they gave me a completely different take on how to think about film and it opened up a lot of films for me that I wouldn't have otherwise known about because I lived in Des Moines, Iowa, so we're talking 1970s, but anything from Amarcord to Fitzcarraldo to, you know, just My Dinner with Andre. All those films were films that I might not have otherwise discovered if it hadn't been for Roger.

[00:05:10]
Brian Mackey: 100%. Susan, thanks so much for sharing that memory. I appreciate it. Chaz, I imagine that's something you hear a lot from people about their introduction to film through his writing.

[00:05:21]
Chaz Ebert: Yes, I do. I hear that a lot and one of the things that if you notice in the last few years, there's been a little more of a retro look at films and so some films from the past have come back into theaters, which makes people go to the website to look for Roger's review of it.

[00:05:43]
Brian Mackey: I wanna ask about some of your, both of you, about some of your favorite memories from Ebertfest. There's one particular moment I'm gonna start with. We're gonna set this up the way you set it up at the 2013 festival with Tilda Swinton walking out on stage along with Chaz.

[00:05:58]
Speaker 4: This is a woman of her word. Tilda promised you that we're gonna do something that they do at her film festival and film events in Scotland. We're going to have an audience dance along. She's serious, she is coming down into the aisles to get you to dance with her.

[00:06:17]
Tilda Swinton: We're not dancing up here, we're coming down to dance with you 'cause if we dance up here you're just gonna sit and watch us and laugh, OK, so no, no observers allowed, participants only.

[00:06:52]
Brian Mackey: All right, Barry White, "You're the First, the Last, My Everything." So, obviously as a radio show, Chaz, we're missing a visual element here. Can you describe for me the scene as you experienced it, as you remember it?

[00:07:06]
Chaz Ebert: Yes, Tilda Swinton was going to go on stage, but we had recently had loss in our family. Me with Roger and Tilda's mother had passed recently, and we were both actually backstage crying. And we said we can't go on stage crying, we have to do something to bring forth joy. And Tilda said, I know we have a dance-a-thon at my film festival in Scotland. Why don't we do that? And I thought that's great, you know, and so that's how that came about and the audience loved it. It's still one of the things that people talk about the most, aside from the movies, dancing all around the Virginia Theater with Tilda Swinton. We kept going back and forth about whether we could show a movie that Roger had written called Beyond the Valley of the Dolls that was directed by Russ Meyer. And we finally said yes, why not? It turned out to be a hit with the audience. But the thing that we never thought that we could do, we were able to get the band the Strawberry Alarm Clock to come play on stage. They had disbanded and they came back and reformed the group just to perform at Ebertfest, and I think they continued to tour after that. So that was a joyous time, having the Strawberry Alarm Clock [show with] Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.

[00:08:45]
Brian Mackey: That among Ebert fans, that movie is sort of, I don't know if I don't want to use the word notorious, but right, it certainly occupies some mind share. Yeah, and he did not go on to write many other movies in life. So how did he come to think of that?

[00:09:01]
Chaz Ebert: Roger actually did write more movies, some that, uh, that maybe a couple that may become Broadway plays. So he didn't produce them as movies, but he did write other movies.

[00:09:16]
Brian Mackey: OK. Did he change his, the way he thought about that film and that experience over time?

[00:09:21]
Chaz Ebert: He became very proud of it. I think at first he was, you know, people used to call Russ Meyer a soft porn master. But Roger said that when you analyzed Russ Meyer's films and later a woman's group said that his films, the women were all take charge and they were in a way a feminist film because the women were in charge and the women called the shots and they actually had a, they actually started having film festivals where they were showing Russ Meyer films and women were talking about them. So, yeah, Roger became, you know, he became just proud of the work that he did. 

I was gonna say another one of my favorite moments is when the director Charles Lane brought his film Sidewalk Stories to us and in it, he was sort of becoming the character of like the little tramp, it was an homage to Charlie Chaplin finding a baby and what to do with someone who was, uh, you know, a homeless man on the street, but he found the baby and he had to take care of it. That was really a very poignant movie and the audience loved it and we loved having Charles Lane at Ebertfest with Sidewalk Stories.

[00:10:47]
Brian Mackey: Let me ask you about Champaign-Urbana. What does it mean to host the festival there at the Virginia Theater and not someplace like Chicago?

[00:10:55]
Chaz Ebert: Well, I like to quote Roger, how he started the book, he said, of being born there. I was born in the center of the universe and I've had good fortune for all my days. I just love that. I love his writing so much. And he could romanticize almost any situation, but he talked about his childhood and how fortunate he was to be born there and that as he grew older to have a resource like the University of Illinois in his town. At one time he thought that he would go to Harvard and his parents said, boy, we don't have that kind of money for you to go to Harvard. It's a good thing you were born here in Urbana-Champaign because you have the University of Illinois and it's just as good as Harvard, so.

[00:11:45]
Brian Mackey: Beautiful, beautiful. All right. Let me remind listeners, this is the 21st show. We're talking about Ebertfest, co-founded by my guest today, Chaz Ebert, along with her late husband, Roger Ebert back in 1999. This is the last year for Ebertfest in Champaign-Urbana this weekend, April 17th and 18th. We'll have details on that on our website. I want to share a message from a listener, Lloyd in Danville sent us a text message. He says Ebert's legacy will be the fact that whether or not a particular movie got good or bad reviews, if Ebert reviewed it, that meant it got reviewed by the most important critic of all times. Chaz has done a remarkable job at continuing his legacy. She deserves a tremendous amount of credit for that. My experience with movies today are by streaming. That's unfortunate because of the missed opportunity for socialization of people meeting at theaters. [He, Ebert, was a great man with a clear vision.] Chaz, last fall, the university and the Ebertfest team announced there would be no further events, at least not in Champaign-Urbana. We can get into what happened since that announcement, but why is it time to wind down? Why is it time for Ebertfest to come to an end?

[00:13:36]
Chaz Ebert: Oh, I, um, I don't know. It's time because the university said it was time and everything has a season. We just wanted to have a chance to do a proper farewell to all of the Ebertfest, we call them family, who've been coming over the years. There are so many people who have actually attended since the very first Ebertfest. This year, it's going to be a little different. We're gonna show some newer movies, one that was shot in the Champaign-Urbana area and the environs around it. And for that movie, the auditorium, the Virginia Theater is going to be filled. We've sold so many tickets for that. Individual tickets as well as passes that it's gonna be great to be seeing the movie and that's [Chili Finger], uh, starring John Goodman and Judy Greer will be there with us.

[00:14:40]
Brian Mackey: I think we can get another caller in here who wants to talk about another memory of Roger and one of the films he championed. Doug is calling from Naperville. Doug, thanks for calling in.

[00:14:52]
Doug: Thank you, Brian, and I wanted to Chaz and to thank [and lift up] Roger's in the early 1990s for Hoop Dreams, the documentary of the two young men, Arthur and William, in Chicago from seventh and eighth grade through high school is a great contribution Roger made to us and [we just briefly add that] you know Roger would say that the mark of a great film is when you care about his characters and in the documentary you really care about these two young men deeply. And be grateful also Chaz if you could please share thoughts on Roger's relationship with Gene Siskel. Thank you.

[00:15:39]
Brian Mackey: Thanks, Doug.

[00:15:40]
Chaz Ebert: Well, thank you, Doug. You know, I have to tell you. Almost every Friday, you know, at RogerEbert.com, we release our list, our movie reviews every Friday, as do many other outlets. There's probably not a Friday that goes by that there's not some movie that I think, oh, what would Roger say about this one? And some movie that I think I sure wish I could see Roger and Gene Siskel debate it back and forth. The thing that I miss, their enthusiasm because Roger, they were so, they so sincerely believed in what they were saying about the movies and they were passionate about it. They didn't think that movies, yeah, they could be an entertainment. Movies were a part of life. Movies, their talking about it was so visceral that it brought you into the conversation about movies, about life, about different lifestyles, about, you know, different ethnicities, just cultural things. I missed the passion that they brought to film criticism.

[00:16:51]
Brian Mackey: Roger means so much to so many people as a public figure, as a writer. I mean, my own moviegoing was influenced by him. I was also influenced by him as a young newspaperman. I still remember, you know, some of the non-movie things he wrote about over time, you know, the way Macy's destroyed the Marshall Field's legacy in Chicago is one that stands out to me. Can you talk about those, sharing, I mean, this is a man, this was your life partner, your business partner, about sharing him with so many other people. Is there a bittersweetness to that to you? How do you feel about that?

[00:17:22]
Chaz Ebert: He was very prolific and he loved, he could sit and write and somebody said that he thought at the speed of writing that his thoughts, his fingers could barely move to keep up with his thoughts but he loved so many things, you know, writing about movies. He liked writing about theater. What I would like to do is collect a selection of his non-movie writings, just like when he was just incensed that Macy's was not going to use the Marshall Field's name and he thought that that was gonna take away something from the culture of downtown State Street. And there are so many other things that he wrote about that I would like to collect some of his non-movie writings and just publish them in a book. He was passionate about so many things, um, and because he sincerely cared. I think part of that is because he was an only child. And he said that he was surrounded by older people in his family. He had some cousins that he would see maybe not as often as he wanted to, the younger cousins. So he was surrounded by older people and I think that the way he thought and the way that he wanted to be connected with people, part of that stemmed from being an only child. And so when he married into my family, my large family, I mean he was the center of, you know, he loved being the center of attention and being surrounded by a lot of people and you can see that in his writing, in his appearances, um, a lot of things like that.

[00:19:10]
Speaker 0: That was an abbreviated interview with Chaz Ebert, co-founder of Ebertfest, being held at the Virginia Theater in Champaign for one last time, April 17th and 18th. You can hear the entire interview at twentyfirstshow.org. And that's all for this week's dialogue. Kennedy Vinson and Ariel Robiny produced the segment on autism. Christine Hatfield produced the segment on Ebertfest. Dialogue and Illinois Soul are part of Illinois Public Media, a service of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. I'm Reginald Hardwick. Thank you for listening. We'll dialogue with you again next week.