About a brief encounter with Roger Ebert

Sad to hear of the passing of Roger Ebert. I hadn't read much by him in the past few years (no particular reason - my online reading in general has thinned out), but his reviews were staples in my early years of net-surfing, circa 1998-2000 (when the Chicago Sun-Times site was one of the first pages I opened each time I got online) and I particularly enjoyed his Great Films essays. In a somewhat surreal turn of events, I found myself in correspondence with him around six years ago, after he mailed to say he liked something I had written in Business Standard. This begat a comical email exchange because, although his ID and the tone of his mail seemed authentic, my blog had been plagued by some inventive troll activity around the time, and this seemed a little too good to be true. So I sent "Ebert" a very cautious, split-personality response expressing my happiness if the mail really was from him, but also being careful not to get too fulsome, and repeatedly using the phrase "assuming this really IS you". Then he would reply trying to convince me. He used faux-philosophical lines like "How can I prove I'm me?" He even sent across two photos from the 1999 Calcutta Film Festival, which I knew he had attended; the subject line of his mail was "Would an imposter have this?"

Even then I continued to be a little wary (the photos did seem to be insider views of the fest, but he wasn't in either of them). The pleasing clincher came a few weeks later when I was browsing through an entry on his blog and saw his response to this comment. (Yes, I'm showing off. Deal with it.)

At which point I mailed him back, apologising for my earlier reserve and saying the fanboyish things I had held back from saying earlier. He replied, sounding amused and relieved (and possibly also wondering if I was missing a few bulbs in the old chandelier). After that, however, we were only sporadically in touch - this was also around the time that his health problems were escalating.

As a very small tribute, here is a link to an Ebert piece that I often returned to in the old days, his review of Bunuel's The Exterminating Angel. No idea why this review in particular struck such a chord (partly perhaps because I had just seen the film and was trying to collect my own thoughts about it), but the quality and the passion of the writing left a big impression on me during a difficult, depressing period when I was wondering if it was possible to pursue a career writing about the things I was interested in. (Or if I even knew what I was interested in.) On some level, this and dozens of other Ebert pieces helped me decide, though back then it was beyond imagining that I would one day get an email from the man himself, saying "We are similar in having strong interests in both film and literature."

P.S. I first came across Ebert's writings on my Cinemania 95 CD-ROM in the pre-Internet days (that was also where I discovered this fascinating new concept of the hyperlink). Hard to believe it's been nearly 20 years.