When Roger Ebert appears on Oprah tomorrow (Tuesday) he’ll be using software to find the voice he lost to cancer. Ebert tells the tale on his blog:
One day I was moseying around the Web and found the name of a company in Edinburgh named CereProc. They claimed they could build voices for specific customers. They had demos of the voices of George W. Bush and Arnold Schwarzenegger. … I had an idea. Before I lost my voice due to cancer-related surgery, I’d recorded commentary tracks for some movies on DVD: “Citizen Kane,” “Casablanca,” “Floating Weeds,” “Dark City” and, ah, “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.” These tracks had been recorded separately from the movies, so they could be edited to fit scenes. They might be “pure” audio. …
CereProc didn’t need to hear me speaking a specific word in order for my “voice” to say it. They needed lots of words to determine the general idea of how I might say a word. They transcribed and programmed and tweaked and fiddled, and early this February, sent me the files for a beta version of my voice. I played it for Chaz, and she said, yes, she could tell it was me. For one thing it knew exactly how I said “I.”This was the voice I used in predicting the Oscar winners when Chaz and I taped a segment Friday of “The Oprah Winfrey Show.” When it was just me talking with Oprah, I used [a new Mac voice named] Alex. That show will air on Tuesday, so you can hear for yourself. Yes, “Roger Jr.” needs to be smoother in tone and steadier in pacing, but the little rascal is good.
Ebert’s been in the news a lot since a long (7,000 words) and fascinating profile by Chris Jones appeared in Esquire last month:
He is a wonderful writer, and today he is producing the best work of his life. In 1975 he became the first film critic to win the Pulitzer prize, but his TV fame saw most of his fans, at least those outside Chicago, forget that he was a writer if they ever did know. (His Pulitzer still hangs in a frame in his book-lined office down the hall, behind a glass door that has THE EBERT COMPANY, LTD.: FINE FILM CRITICISM SINCE 1967 written on it in gold leaf.) Even for Ebert, a prolific author — he wrote long features on Paul Newman, Groucho Marx, and Hugh Hefner’s daughter, among others, for this magazine in the late 1960s and early ’70s and published dozens of books in addition to his reviews for the Sun-Times — the written word was eclipsed by the spoken word. He spent an entire day each week arguing with Gene Siskel and then Richard Roeper, and he became a regular on talk shows, and he shouted to crowds from red carpets. He lived his life through microphones.
But now everything he says must be written, either first on his laptop and funneled through speakers or, as he usually prefers, on some kind of paper. His new life is lived through Times New Roman and chicken scratch. So many words, so much writing — it’s like a kind of explosion is taking place on the second floor of his brownstone. It’s not the food or the drink he worries about anymore — I went thru a period when I obsessed about root beer + Steak + Shake malts, he writes on a blue Post-it note — but how many more words he can get out in the time he has left. In this living room, lined with thousands more books, words are the single most valuable thing in the world. They are gold bricks. Here idle chatter doesn’t exist; that would be like lighting cigars with hundred-dollar bills. Here there are only sentences and paragraphs divided by section breaks. Every word has meaning.
Even the simplest expressions take on higher power here. Now his thumbs have become more than a trademark; they’re an essential means for Ebert to communicate. He falls into a coughing fit, but he gives his thumbs-up, meaning he’s okay.
Jones talks about profiling Ebert here, “The story really struck a chord, and it’s all because of Roger…I’m sure some group would have shown up outside my home with pitchforks if I had wronged Roger Ebert.”
And Ebert responds to the piece here, “I got a jolt from the full-page photograph of my jaw drooping. Not a lovely sight… in a moment I thought, well, what the hell… That’s how I look, after all.”
Romenesko points to another Ebert response:
Will Leitch… heard from Roger Ebert almost immediately after “I Am Sick Of Roger Ebert’s Fat F—ing Face” was posted on Romenesko many years ago. “I am certain you will grow to regret writing it someday,” the critic told the young writer. “I did feel shitty, instantly, and have ever since,” says Leitch. || “All is forgiven,” tweets Ebert.
TV Squad notes that Oprah and Ebert have a long history together. And that the two went out on a couple of dates in the 1980s, where Ebert gave Oprah the idea to syndicate her talk show. The show is bound to be a good one.