Roger Ebert Gives Thumbs Down to Variety

Variety has fired Todd McCarthy, its lead critic, citing economic reasons. In response, Roger Ebert has written this piece praising McCarthy's critical work and slamming the magazine.

An excerpt:

Variety used to cover everything. I remember a magical night in Rome in 1967, when I sat late at night on the Via Veneto and gawked at the last remnants of la dole vita. A held a copy of Weekly Variety, all black and white on newsprint and easily more that 100 pages thick. I became fascinated by the back pages, the items two paragraphs long about cabaret performers in Boston, dancers in Miami, magicians in Philadelphia, lounge acts in Las Vegas, jazz clubs in London. Variety got its name from variety artists, and for decades they lived off a favorable notice in its pages. The paper then truly was "the showbiz Bible."

Well, those days over with. The glory days of the famous Variety critics are finished. I knew one of them, Gene Moskowitz, who signed his reviews Mosk., and was the Paris bureau chief who directed coverage at Cannes. In the 1970s, dying of cancer, he came to what he knew was his last Cannes, bringing along his wife and the young son he was so proud of. Under an umbrella on the beach, he looked toward the old Palais and said, "I saw a lot of good movies there." Another man of the cinema, another lover of T shirts.

About Todd McCarthy I am not very worried. He's one of a kind. I can think of no better candidate as the director of a major film festival. Or as a professor, or of course as a film critic. What I lament is the carelessness with which his 31 years of dedication were discarded. Oh, the paper cites its reasons. "It's economic reality," Variety President Neil Stiles said of the move. Some "downsizing" is necessary cost-cutting. Some symbolizes the abandonment of a mission. If Variety no longer requires its chief film critic, it no longer requires me as a reader.

This is part of a larger trend in periodical publications, which have been slashing film critics from their pay roles. But it is one thing when a small town newspaper, or even a national newspaper, decides to let some of its art and entertainment staff go, and quite another when the American film industry's lead trade publication axes its film reviews. The long term result of dismissing film critics may very well change the function of the magazine . . . or doom it.