The one and only actor Roger Ebert wanted to play him in a biopic: “If you ever do a movie”
On paper, a biopic about someone who reviewed movies for a living doesn’t sound like the most dramatic, dynamic, or exciting thing in the world, even if Roger Ebert did lead a more interesting life than many of his peers and counterparts.
Quentin Tarantino would be the first to tell you that the life and times of a critic may not make for essential cinema, since he scrapped his planned tenth feature, which was literally called The Movie Critic, in favour of going back to square one and delaying his impending retirement for even longer.
Ebert spent almost 50 years casting his eyes over wave after wave of new releases, becoming the defining critic of his time, and possibly the most famous of them all. However, away from his day job, you could make the argument that there was enough meat on the narrative bones of his life to sustain a picture.
He worked with sexploitation maestro Russ Meyer, co-writing Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, which included an interesting escapade with the Sex Pistols, he became the first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize in 1975, changed the landscape of how the general public absorbed opinions on the latest releases alongside cohort Gene Siskel on TV, struggled with alcoholism in the 1970s, and battled cancer in his later years.
One of those events was supposed to make it to the screen, with Michael Winterbottom signing on to helm Russ & Roger in 2015, which was set to star Josh Gad as Ebert and Will Ferrell as Meyer, with the story focusing on the hedonistic, often debauched, and, ultimately legendary antics both on set and off that turned Beyond the Valley of the Dolls into an era-defining cult classic.
It was quietly cancelled and never heard from again, though, but with Ebert having passed away in April 2013, there’s no way of knowing whether or not he would have approved of or endorsed Gad’s casting. However, his widow, Chaz Hammel-Smith, did reveal his preferred candidate. Sadly, that was also tinged with tragedy.
Almost ten months to the day that Ebert passed away from cancer, Philip Seymour Hoffman was found dead from acute mixed drug intoxication. A generational talent and one of the greatest actors in modern cinema, it was a devastating blow to the acting community and the industry at large, with the former’s widow commenting on the latter’s death at a 2014 screening of the documentary Life Itself.
“Yesterday was hard, when I heard about Philip Seymour Hoffman’s death,” Hammel-Smith admitted. “Roger would say, ‘He is one of the best, most versatile actors ever’. And he was also a brilliant man, you know, human being, just very smart. And so, Roger always said, ‘If you ever do a movie, where you need someone to play me, I want Philip Seymour Hoffman.'”
It wouldn’t be a stretch to imagine the late, great Hoffman as Ebert in a biopic, but for obvious reasons, it wasn’t to be. Someone will almost surely turn the critic’s life story into a movie eventually, but they won’t have the benefit of a hand-picked lead chosen by the man himself.
