Column: The Tribune's film critic Michael Phillips says so long for now

Chicago Tribune

2 days ago

Well. Goodbye for now.
The Tribune has eliminated the position of film critic, as part of a newsroom reorganization. This leaves me with two options: stick around for reassignment or take a buyout. I'm voting buyout. I'm opting in for opting out.
After six newspapers in Minneapolis; Dallas; San Diego; St. Paul, Minneapolis; Los Angeles and Chicago, and 41 fulltime years in this beautiful, vanishing subset of journalism, it feels right. Forty-one years, plus six years of freelancing my way through college. Call it 47. Forty-seven years of writing, editing, gobbling research like the grad student I never was; 47 years of making my peace at the keyboard (or waging another micro-war against cliches) when faced with one more deadline. Nearly a half-century of putting work ahead of everything else, too often at everything else's expense.
So now, for me, it's time for the shock of the new. The new to be named later.
Through fat and lean and thick and thin and, to quote Mel Brooks, through thin, the Tribune has been good to me. They took a chance on me back in 2002 and I'm grateful. The place has brought me so much to love in this city. Plus the paper underwrote 10 trips to the Cannes Film Festival, with my name on the festival badge, once upon a time.
I arrived from the Los Angeles Times as the Tribune's new theater critic. This was the result of a lengthy interview process for the finalists for the post vacated by the irreplaceable Richard Christiansen. Bizarrely, all the other finalists turned the job down, with regrets. Perhaps none of us could get our heads around the workload established so selflessly by Christiansen, and in my case I wanted enough life in my life to be there for my son, then one year old.
And then Tribune editors did something sort of amazing. They agreed to fill the theater critic position with two, not one: me and Chris Jones, the latter now the paper's editorial page editor as well as Tribune and New York Daily News theater critic. In an overwhelmingly white male newsroom, there we were, two more white males.
I think about that a lot.
There's an Arthur Miller quote that gets a lot of reuse here at the Tribune. It's etched into a wall inside our former tower's lobby: 'A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.' Right now, any newspaper with an interest in staying urgent and relevant and alert is getting an earful of a fractious nation. Making sense of these nerve-wracking times, and everything filmmakers, artists, writers, creators create out of the din, amounts to more than a routine profession. Or a bottom line.
I got paid for my first opinion at 17, which was ridiculous but educational. At my college paper, the Minnesota Daily, I knew I wasn't writing like myself yet. I wrote about movies, plays, performers and artists like a combination of critics I admired. Young actors often do the same; they learn by doing, and by borrowing, and in time by letting the false front fall away.
Every text, email, letter and phone call the Tribune readers have sent my way, be it out of agreement, frustration or just plain kindness — nothing I ever wrote meant as much as what you sent, and I mean it.
The good fortune so many of us fell into back then, editing or generating arts coverage, is a dream now, a dream of a less precarious era of journalism. My first fulltime job was arts editor of the Twin Cities weekly City Pages. What was I doing? I didn't know what I was doing. I just did as much of everything as I could see and hear and watch. In the Twin Cities in the '80s, you could catch Ella Fitzgerald one night and The Replacements the next. You could marvel at some of the riskiest, most experimental regional theater in American history, right there on stage at the Guthrie Theater, under the artistic directorship of Liviu Ciulei and Garland Wright.
You could have your atoms rearranged by Abel Gance's silent epic 'Napoleon' at the Walker Art Center. All in the name of work, and learning, and joy.
My Tribune gigs — four years on theater, 20 on movies — were the best, toughest, most rewarding years of my professional life. Getting to know Roger and Chaz Ebert led to me filling in for Roger, when he took ill, and then co-hosting 'At the Movies' opposite Richard Roeper and then A.O. Scott. (The white man parade never really ended.)
I met Robert Osborne of Turner Classic Movies when he came to town with Jane Powell for a screening of 'Seven Brides for Seven Brothers,' and then a while later, there I was, somehow, introducing a hundred or so films on TCM. I used to say it as a joke, though now it's truer than I realized: TCM may be the one entity in American culture holding this damn country together.
From here, I'll continue to show up on the long-running 'Filmspotting' podcast, broadcast on WBEZ-FM, whenever the hosts Adam Kempenaar and Josh Larsen see fit. Over on Classical WFMT, I'll continue my weekly segments for the film music program 'Soundtrack,' which I adore. Next month I plan to begin my 11th year as advisor and mentor of the University of Illinois College of Media Roger Ebert Fellowship, which is the grad school I never knew but now I know. It has the added benefit of keeping Roger's spirit in my heart and in my work as an editor and a colleague.
If my luck holds out, the unknown unknowns ahead include new colleagues I value as much as I do my fellow Tribune screens chronicler Nina Metz and my editor Doug George. They care, and they're pros, at a time when devaluing expertise is national political policy.
It is of course bittersweet, at least for me, to see the two remaining Chicago daily newspaper film critic positions go away like . Yet Chicago's film exhibition, curation, production and non-daily coverage, of every sort, remains a beacon for much of the rest of the country. And more importantly, for Chicago.
So. Goodbye for now, as the Sondheim song from the film 'Reds' put it. Thank you for reading. Keep seeking out the critical voices that make your own perceptions a little sharper, your interest in something you've seen — and something you may see tomorrow night — a little keener. For now, I'll enjoy this peculiar new feeling, captured best by another song lyric, this one from Irving Berlin's 'No Strings':