The Profile: Roger Ebert

THIS, of course, is not quite about L.A. but it is about the "factory" that makes its home here: Hollywood and movies. Last week, we talked a bit about the arc of the profile and I shared some samples of stories with the class. Below, you'll see another link as well -- "ways in" to a story, but I wanted to post Chris Jones' Esquire profile about film critic Roger Ebert's battle with cancer here and, today, Ebert's own response in the Chicago Sun-Times, his hometown paper. Below, a sample that speaks to what we discussed about observation and a writer's choices (note the comment about the "commissioned portrait"):

It was also well written, I thought. "When I turned to it in the magazine, I got a jolt from the full-page photograph of my jaw drooping. Not a lovely sight. But then I am not a lovely sight, and in a moment I thought, well, what the hell. It's just as well it's out there. That's how I look, after all. . . . . My theory was that if Chris had an article to write it was not my place to write it for him as a favorable press release about myself. Let him write what he observed. Oliver Cromwell is said to have commissioned an official painting of himself, "warts and all." He apparently never said any such thing, was misquoted a century after his death, and his official portrait showed no warts, but never mind: He should have said it."

-- L.G.
photo caption: Film crtic, Roger Ebert
photo credit: Esquire magazine