Posted by chicagomedia.org on September 11, 2008 at 19:03:59:
Ebert confirms fellow critic hit him at Toronto Film Festival
Though Pulitzer Prize-winning Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert no longer spars over movies with fellow critics on TV, it turns out the 66-year-old reviewer whose speaking voice has been lost to the effects of cancer treatment still has to defend himself from other reviewers -- physically, if not verbally.
By e-mail Thursday, Ebert corroborated a New York Daily News report that New York Post film reviewer Lou Lumenick whacked the venerated Chicago critic with a binder during a screening last week at the Toronto Film Festival.
Lumenick reportedly was annoyed by being tapped on the shoulder by whomever was sitting behind him, so he got up, turned around and took a swing. Only afterward did Lumenick apparently realize he had hit Ebert, who had simply been trying to silently request Lumenick shift in his seat so as to not to block his view.
"[Lumenick] hit him so hard everybody could hear it," a source told the Daily News. "Everyone freaked out and turned around."
Lumenick did not respond to an e-mailed Tribune request for additional details.
Ebert wrote in a story posted to suntimes.com that the incident "has been blown out of proportion [and] is of little interest." But he also noted his wife, Chaz, who did not witness what happened, was taken aback when she learned of it.
"Her reaction when she heard: 'I'll get a no-neck guy from the West Side to break his knees,'" he recalled. "Just rhetorical, I trust."
(ROSENTHAL/trib)