Roger Ebert: Remaking my Voice

April 22, 2011 by Gail
Filed under VidStyle

When film critic Roger Ebert lost his lower jaw to cancer, he lost the ability to eat and speak. But he did not lose his voice. In a moving talk, Ebert and his wife, Chaz, with friends Dean Ornish and John Hunter, come together to tell his remarkable story.

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ABOUT Roger Ebert

“By any measure, Roger Ebert is a legend. The first person to win a Pulitzer for film criticism, as film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, he may be best known for his decades-long reign as the co-host of Sneak Previews, a TV show with fellow Chicago critic Gene Siskel.

For 23 years and three title changes (finally settling on Siskel and Ebert and the Movies) the two critics offered smart, short-form film criticism that guided America’s movie going. After Gene Siskel died in 1999, Ebert kept on with critic Richard Roeper. (And he’s also the co-screenwriter of the Russ Meyer cult classic Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, a fact that has astounded more than a few young film students.)

In 2006, Roger began treatment for thyroid cancer. He told the story of his many surgeries and setbacks in an immensely-worth-reading Esquire story in 2010. Enduring procedure after procedure, he eventually lost the lower part of his jaw and with it his ability to eat and speak.

Turning to his blog and to Twitter, he found a new voice for his film work and his sparkling thoughts on just about everything. He’s tried his hand as an Amazon affiliate, he’s become a finalist in the New Yorker caption contest, and he’s started a controversy or two. He’s also developing a new computer-aided voice based on the tens of thousands of hours of captured audio from his TV work.”

The VIDEO