At the Movies

I've heard about the Tallgrass Film Festival, but I've never been.

Wednesday night was the start of the festival, and a friend invited me to see the opening movie at The Orpheum in Wichita.

First, what a cool theater.

Second: I can't even describe how amazing the movie is.

It was a documentary about Robert Ebert, half of the Siskel and Ebert duo. I knew of them, and I remember when both of them died, but I had no idea of the history they had.

Roger Ebert worked for the Chicago Sun-Times. Gene Siskel worked for the Chicago Tribune. Both were enemies at first and refused to work with each other.

Over time, something about the two of them clicked. They bickered and cussed at each other in-between takes, but cared deeply for each other. Ebert said of Siskel: "He's an asshole, but he's my asshole."

Ha, ha.

The filmmaker followed Ebert throughout his hospitalizations, and was in the middle of emailing him questions for the film when he died.

Why did someone follow a gravely sick man around with a camera, you ask? Siskel died in 1999 of brain cancer at age 53. Aside from a few family members, no one knew he was sick. Ebert didn't even know, and the film said he was really upset about that.

After Siskel died, Ebert told his wife that if he ever had to go through a health battle, he wanted the world to know about it. He didn't want his problems to be kept a secret.

I cried about 57 times throughout the movie.

Of course I knew they worked for newspapers. I didn't know how long they worked for newspapers, that Ebert was the editor of his college newspaper, and that they both went through newspaper buy-outs and watched the staffs shrink.

(I know a little bit about those topics, too.)

They worried about job security. They both knew they couldn't be profitable on their own. They were always going to need each other to be successful.

In his last years when he could no longer talk, drink or eat, Ebert started a blog. He said something along the lines to the filmmaker: "Some people choose to write a blog. I have to write a blog."

His last blog entry was the day before he died.

I can't believe how powerful the film was. It expressed perfectly how much love they both had for movies and for the written word.

I wish I could have written down all of the wonderful quotes I heard in the movie, but it's not exactly polite to whip your phone out in a dark theater and start typing away.

It was amazing.

I remembered when Ebert could no longer talk or eat, but I couldn't remember why. During the entire film, I kept trying to remember what happened to him. I don't know of a polite way to say this, but I couldn't remember why half of his face was basically missing.

In the film he said that his face was "the new reality."

It took the entire film to get to that part. A large part of his jaw was removed because of cancer. In the movie, he communicated to the filmmaker through voice diction software on his computer.

Someone without half of his face seemed positive and optimistic most of the time.

Wow.

If this is any indication of how amazing the Tallgrass Film Festival is, I definitely need to start going from now on.

Newspapers are quickly dying off and journalists are burning out, trying to hold on to a sinking ship. It's nice to be reminded that it was once a great, admirable profession.

What Siskel and Ebert wrote changed people's lives.

And now I'm getting a little teary-eyed again.

I've interviewed people on their death bed before. (Perhaps that's a story for a blog post later.) I remember being asked by non-journalist friends why in the world journalists do that.

It's so invasive, people say. Why don't you just let people and families in pain have privacy and peace? Why not just leave them alone?

There are many answers to that, I think. The most important answer? Death is a part of life. It's not something that you can avoid, and, really, it's not something that people should pretend never happens.

Also, you don't talk to dying people and their families about death. You talk to them about their life.

Those stories should be told. They have to be told, in my opinion, because those are the most powerful words you'll ever read.