Shut Out, but Not Up
“When a few more journalists were let in, Ebert yelled again to the front: ‘Who are those people? Why are they getting in?’
It wasn’t much of a shot, based on the evidence in Knelman’s own story. Without a hint of belligerence, McCarthy simply observed that Toronto had been a “can’t-miss stop” for American critics, but many were thinking twice because “they have been finding it difficult to do their jobs.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
More than halfway through his article, Knelman got around to some serious reporting. It wasn’t helpful to the picture he’d been painting of petulant Yankees. It seemed that several other critics had also been kept out of the screening, that the festival office had agreed with the protesting critics that there was a problem, and that the festival was already taking steps to fix it.
“I’ve been amused that writers for two Toronto papers were shocked! shocked! that a journalist would be aggressive in pursuit of a story,” Ebert began. “Because I complained about not being admitted to a screening of Far From Heaven, I read about my ‘shocking outburst’ and my ‘hissy fit.’
“His embarrassing arrogance got the best of me,” Hays admitted. “I cringed at his star fit.” He said Ebert’s “disdain for the fest and the locals becomes clear in his response, in which he suggests we simple-minded Canuck journalists ‘miss the point.’…According to him, Roger ‘Scoop’ Ebert used his wicked investigative journalistic skills to see the movie and land some sort of ‘exclusive.’ Another way of looking at it is that hardworking staff at this highly efficient event lined up another screening”–which, Hays announced, he as well as Ebert attended.
As usual, the Canadians involved in this troubling chapter in the two nations’ long relationship made much more of it than the Americans did. Ebert did write something for the Sun-Times, but it was a piece that focused on the festival’s seating problems and mentioned the name-calling only in passing. And by the time he was done, the festival had announced such aggressive steps to correct the problem that he decided his article had lost its reason for being. So he spiked it.
