Roger Ebert (1943-2013)
has escaped into the future, into that dimension we have yet to see.
No matter what, fans
of the Cinema of Weirdness have to love Roger Ebert because he wrote Russ
Meyer’s 1970 magnum opus Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, one of the greatest movies ever
made.
That’s Roger and Russ
above—and if you don’t know which is which, what
are you doing here?
Ebert went on to
script two more flicks for Meyer: Up!
(1976) and my fave, the beyond-whacky Beneath
the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens (1979).
As a teen, after only
having the opinions of NYC-centric-intelligentsia critics like Vincent Canby,
Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris to turn to (I won’t bother to comment on the nabobs
and halfwits pretending to be critics on New York’s TV stations—even as a kid,
I knew they were wastes of skin), discovering Roger Ebert via PBS’ Sneak Previews (I can still whistle its
theme!) was a godsend: Ebert was a populist, but he was smart—and, as far
as I could tell, he wasn’t a snob.
