The director who cursed Roger Ebert’s colon and hexed his prostate
Beginning his career as a film critic in the 1960s, Roger Ebert rose to become one of America’s leading movie journalists, honing an accessible style that abstained from pretension. Often comedic and brutally honest, Ebert’s articles occasionally landed him in hot water, but none more than his review of The Brown Bunny.
Directed by actor/musician/filmmaker Vincent Gallo, The Brown Bunny was highly controversial upon its release due to a scene in which Chloë Sevigny performs genuine oral sex on Gallo. The film is experimental, although it was criticised by many for simply being pretentious rather than innovative. Still, it wasn’t universally hated – many critics thought it was an understated masterpiece.
However, Ebert was one of the critics who detested it the most, watching it at its Cannes Film Festival debut. After Ebert shared his hostility towards the movie, Gallo, a notoriously unpleasant person, hit back at the critic. Ebert opened an article published in June 2003 with the words, “Vincent Gallo has put a curse on my colon and a hex on my prostate.”
He continued, “He called me a ‘fat pig’ in the New York Post and told the New York Observer I have ‘the physique of a slave trader’. He is angry at me because I said his The Brown Bunny was the worst movie in the history of the Cannes Film Festival.”
It is hard not to find something comical in Gallo’s deeply absurd choice of insults – after all, hitting back with comments about someone’s physical appearance is always a low blow. Ebert seemed to take the comments on the chin, writing, “I had a colonoscopy once, and they let me watch it on TV. It was more entertaining than The Brown Bunny.“
The critic ended his article by writing, “It is true that I am fat, but one day I will be thin, and he will still be the director of The Brown Bunny.” The feud between the two ended up drawing further attention to Gallo’s movie, and you can’t help but wonder if Gallo purposefully made such derisive comments in order to attract more people to see his film.
Regardless, this incident only further cemented Gallo’s reputation as one of the industry’s unkindest men – even if he did later suggest that the hex was a joke. The pair appeared to have made up a year later, with Ebert giving the edited version of The Brown Bunny a positive score.
However, unsurprisingly, Gallo hit out against the critic years later, despite the fact Ebert had since died from cancer. It seems that Gallo was never truly happy to hear such damning words about a movie he had predominantly made himself. His next film, 2010’s Promises Written in Water, was also received so negatively that he went as far as to make it unavailable for public viewing.
