|
|
October 1, 2004
A message from the editor:
Welcome to RogerEbert.com, the online home of Roger Ebert, the best-known and most widely read film critic in the world. Roger has long been among the most web-savvy of movie critics, embracing the speed and accessibility of the technology as well as the web’s unprecedented ability to display and inter-relate large and complex databases of information in ways that are easily accessible to readers – or, to use the more active techie term, “users.” Roger takes his laptop with him everywhere he goes, from Telluride to Toronto, Kolkata to Karlovy Vary. He was the first person I ever knew who owned a digital camera, which he still uses as part of his uniquely personal coverage of various film festivals and events around the world.
|
biographies
Roger Ebert»Jim Emerson, Editor» |
Which brings us to where you are now: RogerEbert.com. Our goal for the initial phase of developing this site is to collect, assemble, and integrate virtually everything Ebert has written since he began working as the movie critic of the Chicago Sun-Times back in 1967 – the year of Arthur Penn’s revolutionary “Bonnie and Clyde,” John Boorman’s “Point Blank” and Howard Hawks’ “El Dorado,” and the arrival in America of Ingmar Bergman’s “Persona” and Luis Buñuel’s “Belle de Jour.”
RogerEbert.com encompasses not only Ebert’s insightful reviews – including Great Movie reviews spanning the history of movies from “Birth of a Nation” (1915) to “Fargo” (1996) – but personal interviews with some of the biggest names in movie history (Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, Woody Allen, Robert Mitchum, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton…) as well as some of the leading figures of today (Tom Hanks, Charlize Theron, Halle Berry, Spike Jonze, Steven Spielberg, Spike Lee); essays about topical and controversial movie subjects (including their treatment of sex, violence, politics, and religion); coverage of film festivals the world over, whether glitzy and famous or quirky and obscure; Movie Answer Man columns addressing questions submitted by readers; and clever, cliché-skewering entries from “Ebert’s Little Movie Glossary.”
The nuts and bolts of the site are, roughly, as follows:
- 5,500+ movie reviews
- 700+ essays, interviews, and film festival articles
- 2,300+ Answer Man questions and answers
- 600+ Ebert’s Little Movie Glossary entries
- 400+ Critical Debates (featuring a brief sampling of critical opinions from other reviewers)
We have pulled together all of this material (and are still finding and adding more) from numerous sources – including the Sun-Times electronic library, old newspaper clippings and microfiche files from the library, work Roger saved (or had transcribed) for personal reference on his own PowerBook, typesetting files from various books and collections of reviews and interviews, and reviews unearthed and transcribed for inclusion in Microsoft Cinemania in the mid-1990s. As you can imagine, trying to collate all these different formats from pre-computer 1967 to digital-conscious 2004 is a Herculean task, and we are aware that there are still plenty of rough edges to be smoothed out. So, if you find an error or inconsistency or database/software glitch (and you will), please feel free to call it to our attention by writing to me, Jim Emerson, editor of RogerEbert.com, at feedback@rogerebert.com.
In addition to locating and importing a wealth of words, the most challenging aspect of constructing the site has been to structure it so that the vast amount of inter-related information is made easily available to you – through an improved search engine, hot-linked names and titles in the text of reviews, and pulling together relevant links to related articles on nearly every page. So, for example, if you are looking up a review of a particular movie or an interview with a particular person, links to other articles pertaining to that movie or person will show up in the left column – whether it’s another review of the same film (perhaps a re-release or a “director’s cut,” or a Great Movies review), or an interview with the director or stars, or any Answer Man questions (listed by date) about the film or the filmmakers.
Although Roger is unquestionably one of the most prolific writers around, you may not be surprised to learn that he has not actually reviewed every motion picture released in America over the last 40 years. So, if you’re searching for one of your favorite movies and come up with no results, that simply means that Roger has not reviewed it. (Yet.) In the future we hope to add reviews by other excellent critics, thereby filling in some gaps while allowing one-click comparisons between their views and Ebert’s.
The site is new, and the work on it continues, but we hope you find this treasure-trove of observations and opinions as exciting and provocative as the movies themselves.
Jim Emerson
Editor, RogerEbert.com
