Gene Shalit, a movie critic and arts reporter for the Today show over four decades who was known for his puffy hair, oversize handlebar mustache, and affection for groan-inducing puns, has died. He was 100, per the AP. Shalit's family announced the death on 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 a segment known as "Critic's Corner." When he left the show in 2010, he was one of the last high-profile film critics on a major network.
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 the 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," the Plain Dealer wrote in 2010, calling Shalit "Daniel Boone in a bow tie and Groucho glasses." "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."
Shalit started as an entertainment columnist for McCall's magazine, eventually becoming senior film critic for Look magazine in 1968 and a writer 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 Guy Ludwig, Shalit's producer for more than 20 years, in an essay at the time of Shalit's retirement. "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. "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 AP in 1993. What he was known for were his puns: He called Frozen "very cool," for example, and said that the title of The Men Who Stare at Goats was "hard to bleat." "What resonated above his unusual appearance was his incredible wit, his remarkable intelligence," Ludwig wrote in his essay. "But he didn't pound you over the head with it. He amused you. He enlightened ... whatever subject he was on." Shalit was predeceased in 1978 by his wife, Nancy Lewis, and had six children. More here on his life.
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