Roger Ebert was the original fanboy

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 16:50:00 +0000

It's no secret that Roger Ebert was a fan of movies. He loved movies passionately and sometimes despite themselves—like when he gave Speed 2: Cruise Control, a movie with a 2% tomato meter rating, a three star review because of its passionate commitment to "goofiness."

But what most people don't know is that he was also in fandom. Ebert began his career as a teenager in sci-fi fandom, writing passionate letters to fanzines and eventually writing for the fanzines himself.

But he didn't just write. In a missive for sci-fi magazine Asimov's, published in 2004, Ebert recalls how "Fandom was a secret society and I had admission to friends everywhere who spoke the same arcane language."

Geek love: How a fantasy hater fell in love with J.R.R. Tolkien

Sun, 04 Nov 2012 23:00:00 +0000

I’m not generally comfortable with the kind of grown man who embraces the word “geek” as a self-identifier because most of those who do so seem to be making an active attempt to forestall adulthood by barricading its way with sky-high piles of endlessly replicating, increasingly self-referential, post-juvenile pop-culture junk. But when the trailer for "The Hobbit" first appeared nearly a year before the film’s Dec. 14 release (which is just plain goofy — like marketing on geologic time), it prompted what one Facebook poster termed a collective online “nerdgasm” — and I wasn't immune. And so it must be said that those of us who do manage to move comfortably about in the larger world are evidence that a certain Y-chromosome tendency to gibbering fannishness does in fact exist, and many of us have points of contact with this phenomenon that we tend to coddle and then feel guilty about it later.

And some of us wonder why.

Salon.com > geeks

Roger Ebert was the original fanboy

Geek love: How a fantasy hater fell in love with J.R.R. Tolkien