Roger Ebert survived Bad Boys II. Now, for a more serious challenge...
The nation's leading movie reviewer, dispensing thumbs-up, thumbs-down takes to the TV nation since 1975, will undergo radiation treatment for a cancerous mass on his salivary gland later this month, the Chicago Sun-Times reported Wednesday.
In a message to friends, quoted in the Sun-Times, his longtime newspaper home, Ebert, 61, described his condition as non-life-threatening, noting he's had the tumor "in one form or another for 16 years."
"The [radiation] treatments are a followup to earlier surgery, and I look forward to a complete recovery," the critic wrote.
Ebert underwent surgery on the salivary-gland tumor in February. It marked the second time in a year he'd gone under the knife. In February 2002, the movie maven disclosed he had a malignant tumor on his thyroid gland. Ebert said that problem "has been completely vanquished."
According to the paper, Ebert, late of the syndicated series Ebert & Roeper, does not expect the eight-week course of radiation, delivered in 20-minute doses, five days a week, to curtail his work obligations.
"I will...continue to see movies, write reviews and do the Ebert & Roeper television show," Ebert wrote. He will, however, skip the Telluride Film Festival, held at the end of this month, and shorten his stay at the Toronto International Film Festival in September.
Production on the latest season of Ebert & Roeper was said to have wrapped this week. Ebert, who filed a three-star review of Freaky Friday for Wednesday's Sun-Times editions, is next bound for a vacation in France with his wife and grandchildren. He'll begin radiation once he returns from the trip.
Ebert, formerly a rotund reviewer, has lost 45 pounds since the start of the year, the Sun-Times said. But the weight loss is related to the veggie-and-fruit-packed Pritikin diet and exercise, not his current medical condition, it noted.
"I can account for every pound I've lost," Ebert wrote. "Salivary tumors are not connected to weight loss."
The tumor also is not directly responsible for the droopiness evident on the left side of Ebert's face in recent months. That, the paper said, is a temporary side effect associated with his most recent surgery.
Ebert has sat across the aisle from fellow Sun-Times columnist Richard Roeper since 2000. Previously, he achieved first-class pop-culture status with Gene Siskel, a rival reviewer for the Chicago Tribune.
Ebert and Siskel, or Siskel and Ebert, as they were known, launched a movie-review show on Chicago's PBS station in 1975. For the next 24 years, they made the reviewing of movies as entertaining as the movies themselves.
Siskel died in 1999 at age 53, several months after undergoing surgery for a "growth" on his brain.
Last month, Eliot Wald, the man credited with conceiving the Siskel-and-Ebert concept, died of liver cancer. He was 57.
News of Ebert's need for radiation treatment comes two months after indie-star Vincent Gallo placed "a curse" on the critic's prostate in response to a blunt assessment of the filmmaker's Cannes entry, The Brown Bunny.
"The worst film in the history of the festival," Ebert told a TV crew, upon exiting the screening. Ebert was quick to point out that even though he had not seen every film in the history of the festival, "I feel my judgment will stand."
While Ebert was not alone in blistering Bunny, Gallo singled him out for scorn. He told the New York Observer he had, with the help of underground filmmaker Kenneth Anger, cursed Ebert's prostate.
"[My] film is archival," Gallo said in the Observer. "The minute I finish the print of the film, it will never go away, and Roger Ebert will be dead of prostate cancer--if my curse works--within 16 months, and my film will live far past the biopsies that are removed from his anus."
In the New York Post, Gallo went on to call Ebert a "fat pig" and noted he'd also put a hex on the critic's colon.
Ebert later assured readers his colon was fine. "I had a colonoscopy once, and they let me watch it on TV," Ebert wrote in the Sun-Times. "It was more entertaining than The Brown Bunny."
An attempt to reach Gallo for comment Wednesday morning was not successful.