It was around the time "The Blair Witch Pro­jec­t" was a thing so it must have been in 1999 or 2000, that when I was read­ing Roger Ebert's "Movie An­swer Man" colum­n, I thought, hey, I may have some­thing to say about this.

I emailed him about how the "found footage" genre was old, cit­ing 1980's Can­ni­bal Holo­caust, and even go­ing back to Edgar Al­lan Poe's "Arthur Gor­don Pym" which is (of course) a found man­u­script. We ex­changed a few email­s, he was al­ways thought­ful, po­lite, will­ing to have a nice con­ver­sa­tion. He even­tu­al­ly asked about what was the best pos­si­ble time to vis­it Buenos Aires, I said spring or fal­l, sug­gest­ed that he may be in­ter­est­ed in at­tend­ing BAFI­CI, and even­tu­al­ly it pe­tered out.

So, not much as anec­dotes go, but it made me re­al­ize I had been read­ing his re­views and ar­ti­cles (and lat­er his blog and his twit­ter feed) for over 15 years.

I re­mem­ber see­ing him do a cameo in a lame TV show (the one with the guy that has a mag­i­cal dog that brings him to­mor­row's news­pa­per or some­thing), and think­ing, hey, I know that guy, sort of.

Now that he's dead, it seems he was, for ev­ery­one, the same he was for me, gra­cious, friend­ly, in­ter­est­ing.

He was the kind of guy who wrote re­views for Deep Throat and co-au­thored a Russ Mey­er movie, and was al­ways ready to say that a movie was crap yet good crap be­cause there are de­grees of crap, and you have to take crap in its own terms.

I'll miss the guy.