A. O. Scott of The New York Times pays tribute to Roger Ebert, who recently announced that he won't be returning to TV--persistent illness having robbed him of the ability to speak since 2006--but that he will be returning to his regular written column. (Ebert's farewell to Richard Widmark and Charlton Heston appeared on his website last week.) Of course, Ebert had made his mark as a film writer (and as the screenwriter of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls) long before he first teamed up with fellow Chicago reviewer Gene Siskel on Sneak Previews, the local public television show that made the two of them the most recognizable film critics in the country when it went national in 1978. That show made Ebert a TV star (and, in the process, probably did more to persuade publishers to bring out collections of his reviews than his Pulitzer ever did), as well as inspiring a wave of copycat shows and dueling on-camera critics, including such lesser tackheads as Michael Medved.
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