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I'm Stephen Metcalfe, and this is the Slate Culture Gab Fest Meet the Crotchman edition.

This is also the daily podcast from slate.com for Wednesday, February 24th, 2010.

On today's program, we're going to talk about the film critic Roger Ebert, Ricky Jervase, and his new HBO show, and something called Chat Roulette.

Joining me today are Julia Turner, Slate's deputy editor. Hello, Julia. Hi, Steve. And of course, Dana, Steven, Slate's film critic. Hey, Dana. Great to see you both. Dana, let's start with Roger Ebert, and therefore let's start with you. We should say the occasion for our segment on Roger Ebert is a new and very compelling profile in Esquire magazine about Roger Ebert.

The occasion for that profile in some respects is the fact that Roger Ebert four years ago

underwent jaw surgery to treat cancer has had his jaw removed and essentially is going

around unable to eat, drink, or speak, or make almost any facial expression other than I was delighted

to discover a smile. But before we get there, let's talk a little bit about Ebert, your

relationship to him and his legacy is a film critic. All right. Well, I'll tell my Ebert story

to start, but I'd much rather talk about his legacy. You guys both know my Ebert's story. But maybe the listeners don't know it. So I'll tell. I don't think I know it. And I didn't get a chance to tell Ebert himself the story until this year when he just did the slate movie club with us, which was great. But when I was 11 years old, I wrote Roger Ebert a fan letter because I wanted to become a movie critic when I grew up. And I used to watch him on this show sneak previews that he did with Gene Ciskel on PBS before at the movies even got syndicated and got big. And always loved both of them, but always especially loved Roger Evert because he had this great, even at the time, I think even as a kid, I sort of sensed that he had this great trashy sensibility. you know, he wrote beyond the Valley of the Dolls, the Russ Meyer film. Incredible factoid about Roger Ebert, right?

And one of the great, I mean, maybe the camp classic, right? Which has always been such a huge part of his sensibility. And then I was reading some stuff about his background for this segment and realizing that he got his very beginning start as a teenager, writing fan letters to science fiction magazines, that he was a big sci-fi head and would write these, I guess, impressive letters that somehow got him a job as a, I believe a sports writer was maybe his first journalism job. And, you know, he's worked in various beats and journalism throughout his career. But that is all still so present in his writing. And I think when we get to talking about his current web presence and his incredible Twitter feed, which everyone should follow if you're on Twitter, and his online journal and all the stuff he's writing right now that has nothing to do with movies, I think you kind of see the threat of that all the way through his career, the part of him that was interested in kind of paraculture, you know, the culture that sort of feeds on the margin in the fringe. But you never, but your letter. The story. Oh, I'm sorry. So I wrote in this letter. I was 11 years old. I guess I just sent it to the Chicago Sun-Times. I don't remember how I addressed it or anything. And he answered very promptly with a typewritten letter that I still have somewhere and encouraged me to be a movie critic and took it very seriously. And I still remember had this line where he said, see all the movies you can, good and bad, which is great advice. And now that I sort of, again, see what he's become in his late career. It makes complete sense that he wrote me back. I bet he's written dozens, if not hundreds of children letters who write him something similar.

And he has this sort of graphomaniacal side, right?

He kind of can't stop writing.

That's sort of what his whole new online persona is about.

And so that, in a way, makes me love the letter even more, that it was just part of this huge generosity that's been his whole career.

And let's talk about what Ebert means to other film critics, What kind of a figure he cuts in the world of film criticism? He's a giant in some respects. Yeah, I mean, maybe you guys can speak to that just as well as I can, because I feel like he's one of the few film critics who's really a household name, even if you don't read his criticism, even though he hasn't had that TV presence now for five years or so since he lost his voice. I mean, to me, he seems somewhat in the tradition, at least philosophically in the tradition of Pauline Kale, who's always, obviously, is sort of considered a higher brow critic than him in a way because she wrote for the New Yorker, etc. But who I think brought her body into film criticism in a way that's similar to what Roger Ebert does.

You know, she's always sort of cited as that, right, the moment that film criticism took off and started to do something different and to acknowledge the presence of the body and the desires and the history of the person sitting in the theater.

And I feel like Ebert, especially in his online journal writing, is really all about that.

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