<\/p>\n
Well. Goodbye for now.<\/p>\n
The Tribune has eliminated the position of film critic, as part of a newsroom reorganization. This leaves me with two options: stick around for reassignment or take a buyout. I\u2019m voting buyout. I\u2019m opting in for opting out.<\/p>\n
After six newspapers in Minneapolis; Dallas; San Diego; St. Paul, Minneapolis; Los Angeles and Chicago, and 41 fulltime years in this beautiful, vanishing subset of journalism, it feels right. Forty-one years, plus six years of freelancing my way through college. Call it 47. Forty-seven years of writing, editing, gobbling research like the grad student I never was; 47 years of making my peace at the keyboard (or waging another micro-war against cliches) when faced with one more deadline. Nearly a half-century of putting work ahead of everything else, too often at everything else\u2019s expense.<\/p>\n
So now, for me, it\u2019s time for the shock of the new. The new to be named later.<\/p>\n
Through fat and lean and thick and thin and, to quote Mel Brooks, through thin, the Tribune has been good to me. They took a chance on me back in 2002 and I\u2019m grateful. The place has brought me so much to love in this city. Plus the paper underwrote 10 trips to the Cannes Film Festival, with my name on the festival badge, once upon a time.<\/p>\n
I arrived from the Los Angeles Times as the Tribune\u2019s new theater critic. This was the result of a lengthy interview process for the finalists for the post vacated by the irreplaceable Richard Christiansen<\/a>. Bizarrely, all the other finalists turned the job down, with regrets. Perhaps none of us could get our heads around the workload established so selflessly by Christiansen, and in my case I wanted enough life in my life to be there for my son, then one year old.<\/p>\n And then Tribune editors did something sort of amazing. They agreed to fill the theater critic position with two, not one: me and Chris Jones, the latter now the paper\u2019s editorial page editor as well as Tribune and New York Daily News theater critic. In an overwhelmingly white male newsroom, there we were, two more white males.<\/p>\n I think about that a lot.<\/p>\n There\u2019s an Arthur Miller quote that gets a lot of reuse here at the Tribune. It\u2019s etched into a wall<\/a> inside our former tower\u2019s lobby: \u201cA good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.\u201d Right now, any newspaper with an interest in staying urgent and relevant and alert is getting an earful of a fractious nation. Making sense of these nerve-wracking times, and everything filmmakers, artists, writers, creators create out of the din, amounts to more than a routine profession. Or a bottom line.<\/p>\n I got paid for my first opinion at 17, which was ridiculous but educational. At my college paper, the Minnesota Daily, I knew I wasn\u2019t writing like myself yet. I wrote about movies, plays, performers and artists like a combination of critics I admired. Young actors often do the same; they learn by doing, and by borrowing, and in time by letting the false front fall away.<\/p>\n Every text, email, letter and phone call the Tribune readers have sent my way, be it out of agreement, frustration or just plain kindness \u2014 nothing I ever wrote meant as much as what you sent, and I mean it.<\/p>\n The good fortune so many of us fell into back then, editing or generating arts coverage, is a dream now, a dream of a less precarious era of journalism. My first fulltime job was arts editor of the Twin Cities weekly City Pages. What was I doing? I didn\u2019t know what I was doing. I just did as much of everything as I could see and hear and watch. In the Twin Cities in the \u201980s, you could catch Ella Fitzgerald one night and The Replacements the next. You could marvel at some of the riskiest, most experimental regional theater in American history, right there on stage at the Guthrie Theater, under the artistic directorship of Liviu Ciulei and Garland Wright.<\/p>\n You could have your atoms rearranged by Abel Gance\u2019s silent epic \u201cNapoleon\u201d at the Walker Art Center. All in the name of work, and learning, and joy.<\/p>\n My Tribune gigs \u2014 four years on theater, 20 on movies \u2014 were the best, toughest, most rewarding years of my professional life. Getting to know Roger and Chaz Ebert led to me filling in for Roger, when he took ill, and then co-hosting \u201cAt the Movies\u201d opposite Richard Roeper<\/a> and then A.O. Scott.<\/a> (The white man parade never really ended.)<\/p>\n I met Robert Osborne of Turner Classic Movies when he came to town with Jane Powell for a screening of \u201cSeven Brides for Seven Brothers,\u201d and then a while later, there I was, somehow, introducing a hundred or so films on TCM.<\/a> I used to say it as a joke, though now it\u2019s truer than I realized: TCM may be the one entity in American culture holding this damn country together.<\/p>\n From here, I\u2019ll continue to show up on the long-running \u201cFilmspotting\u201d podcast, broadcast on WBEZ-FM, whenever the hosts Adam Kempenaar and Josh Larsen see fit. Over on Classical WFMT, I\u2019ll continue my weekly segments for the film music program \u201cSoundtrack,\u201d which I adore. Next month I plan to begin my 11th year as advisor and mentor of the University of Illinois College of Media Roger Ebert Fellowship, which is the grad school I never knew but now I know. It has the added benefit of keeping Roger\u2019s spirit in my heart and in my work as an editor and a colleague.<\/p>\n If my luck holds out, the unknown unknowns ahead include new colleagues I value as much as I do my fellow Tribune screens chronicler Nina Metz and my editor Doug George. They care, and they\u2019re pros, at a time when devaluing expertise is national political policy.<\/p>\n It is of course bittersweet, at least for me, to see the two remaining Chicago daily newspaper film critic positions go away like that<\/em>. Yet Chicago\u2019s film exhibition, curation, production and non-daily coverage, of every sort, remains a beacon for much of the rest of the country. And more importantly, for Chicago.<\/p>\n