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Gene Shalit, a movie critic and arts reporter for the Today show over four decades who was known for his puffy hair, oversized handlebar mustache and affection for groan-inducing puns, has died. He was 100.
Shalit’s family announced the death Friday to NBC News, saying in a statement that he “passed away peacefully today after 100 years of an amazing life”.
Shalit joined Today as a contributor in 1970 and became arts editor in 1973, later settling in for his segment, Critic’s Corner. When he left the show in 2010, he was one of the last high-profile film critics on a major network.
“What resonated above his unusual appearance was his incredible wit, his remarkable intelligence. But he didn’t pound you over the head with it. He amused you. He enlightened and amused whatever subject he was on,” Guy Ludwig, Shalit’s producer for more than 20 years, wrote in an essay.
It was no coincidence that Chicago critics Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel’s local “thumbs-up, thumbs-down” movie-review program, Sneak Previews, went national on PBS in the late 1970s and that Today show’s ABC rival, Good Morning America, hired Joel Siegel to be its movie critic in 1981.
“Shalit was instrumental in changing the balance of critical power in America. When he began his ‘Today’ tenure, newspapers and magazines were the primary sources for movie reviews. That’s where cinematic opinion was sparked and shaped,” the Plain Dealer wrote in 2010, calling Shalit “Daniel Boone in a bow tie and Groucho glasses”.
Shalit started as an entertainment columnist for McCall’s magazine, eventually becoming senior film critic for Look magazine in 1968 and writing for Ladies’ Home Journal. His popularity in magazines led to an offer from NBC.
“No one at NBC had seen him. They’d only read his stuff. So he walked into this executive’s office and the executive took one look at him and said, ‘Mr Shalit, have you ever thought of radio?’” wrote Ludwig. “They didn’t know how the public would react to someone who looked so different from people who were typically on TV in 1967.”
On the air, Shalit was a middle-of-the-road critic. Of 1986’s classic Stand By Me, he said it was different from other movies about youth “because of instead of grossing you out, Stand by You is engrossing”.
“Many critics will give so much of the plot of a movie away that they destroy the movie for the viewer … I just don’t give away the story,” he told the Associated Press in 1993.
He liked Defiance starring Daniel Craig and Jude Law, calling it “a vivid dramatization of one of history’s titanic turning points”. But he called Brokeback Mountain “wildly overpraised, but not by me” and drew condemnation from Glaad for calling Jake Gyllenhaal’s character, Jack, a “sexual predator”. Shalit apologized.
He called Frozen “very cool.” He said the oddball title of The Men Who Stare at Goats was “heard to bleat,” and his review of The Lovely Bones read in part: “There’s no bones about it.”
He called a remake of King Kong” so “gargantuan that I must create new words to describe it: fabularious … a brilliantological humongousness of marvelosity”. His take on Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple: “It should be against the law not to see it.”
During his tenure, he traded quips with anchors ranging from Edwin Newman, Barbara Walters and Jane Pauley to Tom Brokaw, Bryant Gumbel, Katie Couric, Jane Pauley, Al Roker and Meredith Vieira.
Gumbel was not always a fan, once saying Shalit’s reviews “are often late and his interviews aren’t very good”. The critique came in what was supposed to be a confidential memo to Marty Ryan, the show’s executive producer at the time.
He was born in New York and grew up in Morristown, New Jersey, starting his grammar school’s first newspaper before writing a humor column for the newspaper while a student at Morristown high school. He graduated from the University of Illinois in 1949.
In 1987, he edited a book called Laughing Matters: a Celebration of American Humor, saying he wanted to introduce and reintroduce such old and new masters of American humor as Mark Twain, James Thurber and Russell Baker.
Shalit was regularly mocked on Saturday Night Live by cast member Horatio Sanz, who would appear on the Weekend Update desk dressed as Shalit and go on an extended, barely coherent rants that punned the title of every movie he reviewed. Shalit also made cameos on Sesame Street, Family Guy and Spongebob Squarepants.
He is survived by a daughter, Willa Shalit.
