Two unlikely titans of the film industry died in the last couple of days.
Last night, after hearing that Roger Ebert’s cancer was leading him to cut back on reviews, I read his upbeat, newsy blog post from April 2nd (just two days ago), in which he outlined his various plans for writing, for involving other writers and critics in his work, and even for launching new multimedia projects.
From Ebert’s final blog post, A Leave of Presence:
What in the world is a leave of presence? It means I am not going away. My intent is to continue to write selected reviews but to leave the rest to a talented team of writers handpicked and greatly admired by me. What’s more, I’ll be able at last to do what I’ve always fantasized about doing: reviewing only the movies I want to review.
At the same time, I am re-launching the new and improved Rogerebert.com and taking ownership of the site under a separate entity, Ebert Digital, run by me, my beloved wife, Chaz, and our brilliant friend, Josh Golden of Table XI. Stepping away from the day-to-day grind will enable me to continue as a film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, and roll out other projects under the Ebert brand in the coming year.
I have not yet seen any specific details about Ebert’s death today, but presumably his cancer was somehow connected — and he was presumably much more ill than he assumed just two days ago when he made that extraordinary post.
I spoke with Ebert very briefly back in 2004 on Broughton Street. While he was here to be honored by the Savannah Film Festival, he offered one of the most extraordinary programs ever in the history of the event: a shot-by-shot analysis of Citizen Kane for hundreds of movie buffs at Trustees Theater. Ebert was a passionate defender of film both as art and as entertainment — less prone to highbrow disdain than some of his contemporaries, Ebert always wrote reviews in ways that respected his readers.
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala died this week too.
I’m pretty sure she’s the only person to win both an Oscar (two, actually) and a Booker Prize, arguably the highest honor out there for writers in English.
From her obituary in The Guardian:
The writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, who has died aged 85, achieved her greatest fame late in life, and for work she had once dismissed as a hobby – listing “writing film scripts” as a recreation in Who’s Who. Her original screenplays and adaptations of literary classics for the film producer Ismail Merchant and the director James Ivory were met with box-office and critical success. The trio met in 1961, and almost immediately became collaborators, as well as close and lifelong friends.
Soon after Merchant and Ivory themselves met (in New York), Merchant proposed that they make a film of Jhabvala’s early novel The Householder (1960). The pair then went to Delhi and asked her to sell them the book and write a screenplay of it in eight days flat. Over the next five decades, she wrote 23 screenplays. The collaborations included adaptations of EM Forster’s A Room with a View (1985) and Howards End (1992), for both of which Jhabvala won Academy Awards; and Henry James’s The Bostonians (1984) and Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (1993). Jhabvala’s two Oscars put her in the incongruous company of Bette Davis and Elizabeth Taylor – journalists reported how odd the gilt statuettes looked in her plain New York flat.
I used Jhabvala’s Booker-winning novel Heat and Dust a couple of times in a sophomore level lit class at Armstrong. The theme of the course was “star-crossed lovers.” The eerie, distant story of the English colonial officer’s wife who leaves everything behind for a relationship with a wealthy Muslim prince proved difficult for many students to relate to, but I found the text’s mysteries endlessly absorbing.
Jhabvala’s remarkable list of screenplay credits also includes The City of Your Final Destination, which screened at the Savannah Film Festival just a few years ago, with director James Ivory his typically gracious self in appearances around town. That was the second time Ivory had appeared at the festival, thanks primarily to the fact that Gil Donaldson of Merchant Ivory Productions is a native Savannahian and serves on boards at SCAD.
Both Ebert and Jhabvala brought a lot of pleasure to the lives of moviegoers — and they challenged us too.