American Film Critic Roger Ebret’s Career Path Study

American film criticism is facing transformation from the printplatforms (newspapers, magazines, scholarly journals) to the internetplatform, which heavily shrinks the position of film criticism. Newspaperand magazines, where traditional film critics were employed, started to cutthe film pages and adopt the uniform articles by famous film critics. Inrecent years, more than30film critics has been fired or retired early.However, Roger Ebert, the First American Film Critic, has achievedgreat performance no matter in prints, television or internet in his45yearsas a film critic. He not only makes full use of technology with filmcriticism, but sticks to the core values like enlightenment and seriousnessas a film critic. The paper aims to find why Roger is so successful in hiscareer.This paper first depicts the new trends in the Chinese film criticismstudies, like international comparative study, film critic individual studyand internet film criticism study to clarify the importance of the study onRoger Ebert. Then, it analyzes the historical source of American filmcriticism, from the start of news critics at early20th century, to the goldenage in1960s~1970s, later comes the television and internet film criticism,which provides a grand view of the film industry and historicalbackground. Then, the paper describes the achievements of Roger Ebert inthe fields of prints, television, internet and other aspects. We conclude that the factors driven Roger’s success are as below: system and environmentalsupport from the American film criticism; perfect balance between eliteand mass; deep thinking about the characteristics of media and audiences;Roger’s brand marketing strategies; the intrinsic love and support for films.Last but not the least, the paper put forward some prospects for futurestudy on the American and China film criticism.