Read Chris Jones’ Esquire profile on Roger Ebert
Feb 20, 2010 in Media
I’ve liked many of Chris Jones’ features in Esquire but his profile on Roger Ebert in this month’s Esquire is one of the best profiles I’ve read in a long time.
Here’s the start of the piece:
For the 281st time in the last ten months Roger Ebert is sitting down to watch a movie in the Lake Street Screening Room, on the sixteenth floor of what used to pass for a skyscraper in the Loop. Ebert’s been coming to it for nearly thirty years, along with the rest of Chicago’s increasingly venerable collection of movie critics. More than a dozen of them are here this afternoon, sitting together in the dark. Some of them look as though they plan on camping out, with their coats, blankets, lunches, and laptops spread out on the seats around them.
The critics might watch three or four movies in a single day, and they have rules and rituals along with their lunches to make it through. The small, fabric-walled room has forty-nine purple seats in it; Ebert always occupies the aisle seat in the last row, closest to the door. His wife, Chaz, in her capacity as vice-president of the Ebert Company, sits two seats over, closer to the middle, next to a little table. She’s sitting there now, drinking from a tall paper cup. Michael Phillips, Ebert’s bearded, bespectacled replacement on At the Movies, is on the other side of the room, one row down. The guy who used to write under the name Capone for Ain’t It Cool News leans against the far wall. Jonathan Rosenbaum and Peter Sobczynski, dressed in black, are down front.
“Too close for me,” Ebert writes in his small spiral notebook.
Read the rest on Esquire’s website
What follows is a revealing, emotional and powerful account of a great critic and journalist battling with his body. Ebert is courageous and strong and an example of living with cancer and Jones is a great writer for getting this across.
Ebert responds to Jones on his blog.
It was an inexplicable instinct that led me to agree when Chris Jones contacted me requesting an interview. The idea of Esquire appealed to me. I did a bunch of interviews for them in the 1970s, when it was the crucible of the New Journalism.
What goes around, comes around. I’d read some of Chris’s stuff. He’s good. You sense the person there. He’s not holding his subjects at arm’s length. I knew I’d have to play fair. I’ve done interviews for years. This was no time to get sensitive and ask for photo approval, or an advance look at the piece. I’d been the goose, and now it was my turn to be the gander. I’ve never known what that means, geese-wise.
Jones talks about the writing of the piece for About.com
“You’re writing about a great writer, and I was terribly self-conscious about that,” Jones says in a phone interview. And then the Canadian comes up with the analogy he’s looking for: “The idea of him reading my stuff - it’s like having Wayne Gretzky watch you skate.”