While attending Ebertfest, I had the opportunity to stay at Roger Ebert’s boyhood home. Located at the corner of Maple and Washington Streets in Urbana, Illinois, the two-bedroom house is an Airbnb rental. It’s easy to image a young Roger stomping around this one-story house with wood floors, a small fireplace and cozy bedrooms. I slept in the room with two twin beds because it seemed most like a child’s room. It also had a card catalog, Illinois banners and a photo of Ebert with his Gene Siskel, the film critic from the Chicago Tribune. Ebert wrote for the rival Chicago Sun-Times, a tabloid newspaper.
While Ebert is best known for his film criticism, he’s also remembered his screenwriting work on Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. There’s a framed newspaper ad about the fireplace bragging about the movie grossing $577,192 in its first five days in New York, $330,996 in its first two weeks in Los Angeles, and $69,095 in its first week at the Roosevelt Theatre in Chicago. I also liked the framed essay Ebert wrote about the Art, a single-screen cinema in Champaign, Illinois, where he saw La Dolce Vita, Woman in the Dunes and L’Avventura.
Wrote Ebert, “I remember those movies at the Art so vividly. The poster is outside, with a stark surrealistic images and bizarre typography. The earnest Bohemians in the lobby, sipping their coffee and talking like the captions on New Yorker cartoons. The notion that in a movie you would never heard of you could discover truth you would never dreamed.”
