Tonight there will be a memorial tribute at the Chicago Theater for Roger Ebert. Over at Chicagoist, photographer Art Shay has a lovely gallery and essay about his friendship with Ebert over the years. I’m still finding it hard to cope with the fact that he’s gone. In many ways it reminds me of how I felt when Robert Altman died. Another great man; however irrationally, it just seemed like he’d always be around. I’ve already posted the email he sent me, but now I’d like to re-post something I wrote for Chicagoist:

I certainly would not have even dreamed of writing about movies, let alone writing a whole book about movies, if I hadn’t grown up reading Leonard Maltin’s movie guides and watching Siskel & Ebert on TV. When I agreed with Ebert, which was fairly often, I would get all excited just sitting there watching the show, wishing I could join in that conversation on the balcony. Of course I felt the same way when he would pan a movie I really liked–I wanted to jump right in and tell him how wrong he was. His dismissal of David Lynch always irritated me. In fact I was so full of myself when I was 21 that I actually emailed him, chewing him out for dumping on Lost Highway … Many years later I posted an anecdote about Gene Siskel that Barry Gifford related to me and it was a genuine thrill to see Ebert retweet it. The city of Chicago has lost a great champion with his passing. The fact that he stayed in Chicago all these years, rejecting the siren songs of NYC and LA when it would have been so easy to move on, proves his loyalty to this cockeyed caravan of a city.

Lastly: FUCK YOU Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for not giving Ebert the Oscar he so richly deserved.