Real shock, fear rivals anything on reel

by Roger Ebert

I walked into a movie at 8:30 a.m. Tuesday, and walked out two hours later into a different world.

The movie was a comedy about a wedding in India. Small human stories, little joys and heartbreaks, some music. It made me happy. I left the screening and was stopped by a woman who works with the festival; I've never learned her name, but we smile at each other every year."Something very bad has happened," she said.

She told me what it was. I walked over to the coffee counter in the theater lobby. A crowd was watching the TV. You saw what I saw. We were all watching TV. My wife and stepdaughter were in New York City. They had attended the Michael Jackson concert the night before. My heart began to pound. I walked as fast as I could back to the hotel.I tried to call New York, but the lines were jammed. Also the lines to Chicago.

I saw the phone light blinking. There was a message from my wife, Chaz, saying she and Sonia were safe. Thank God she got through. On the way to LaGuardia, they had seen the World Trade Center burning. At the airport, they ran into a woman Chaz knew, who had a car there, and who offered them a ride to her Long Island home.

The airport was being evacuated, and the routes to Manhattan were closed. This woman saved them from standing on the street.My story is like so many stories. Thousands of innocent victims are dead, but we think first about those we love.

What is new and frightening is that on Tuesday when the tragedy happened, we were all forced to think in these personal terms. The war was here.This day was going to come sooner or later. In recent years, the United States has fought push-button wars thousands of miles from home. Today the war is no longer far away.

The continental United States, which was not invaded during any of the wars of the 20th century, has been stained by the blood of countless victims. We are weeping. The 21st century began today.

I sit in this Toronto hotel room, filled with sadness. It may be I know people who were helpless passengers when those planes went down. The tragedy of the collapsing World Trade towers is too sorrowful to contemplate.

One of my editors calls. Can I write something about the reaction in Toronto? Yes, I can. The reaction here is the same as everywhere. We are stunned, we are in grief, and in the dark places of our hearts, we fear a time of anarchy and violence--an apocalypse on Earth--unless men learn to live together on a planet that has grown too small.

The phone rings. It is my wife. She and her daughter are safe in a hotel on Long Island. I advise them to rent a car right now, fill it with gas and wait until tomorrow to see what develops. They may have to drive back to Chicago. Who knows when the skies will be safe? I hear myself talking, and I feel like a character in one of those dumb end-of-the-world movies.I hang up and watch the president on television. He is speaking on a pre-recorded tape, and there is something wrong with the tape. Fox News keeps stopping it, backing it up, starting it again. He backs away from the podium, approaches it, backs away again. I have seen so many movies I wonder if he is there at all.

A few minutes later, of course they are interviewing Tom Clancy: He wrote the book.I call the film festival office. All screenings and other events have been canceled for today; they are trying to decide about the rest of the festival. They tell me they are working with local hotels to find places for stranded guests, since the airports are shut down, and the border has been closed.The border between the United States and Canada has been closed. That takes a moment to sink in.

How will I get home? Should I rent a car, too? Thank God I have friends here. Me, me, me--and thousands dead. But that is what happened today. Now it is about us, and not just about them.

*Roger Ebert has been the Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times since 1967. Syndicated in more than 305 papers in the U.S., Canada, England, Japan and Greece. Author of 15 books, including the annual editions of "Roger Ebert's Movie Yearbook," "I Hated, Hated, HATED this Movie," the Norton anthology "Roger Ebert's Book of Film," the best-selling "Ebert's Bigger Little Movie Glossary" and "Questions for the Movie Answer Man." Roger is also the Co-host of "Ebert & Roeper and the Movies." The show appears on more than 200 stations and continues to rank as the top-rated weekly syndicated half-hour on television. For the previous 23 years, he co-hosted "Siskel & Ebert" with the late Gene Siskel. He lives with his wife, trial attorney Chaz Hammelsmith Ebert, in Chicago.