Roger Ebert Walking Out of the Theater Started an Infamous Feud

May 2003, the Cannes Film Festival. Depending on who you ask, The Brown Bunny was either jeered or achieved a 10-minute standing ovation. It certainly made an impact; whether that was because of the blatant egocentricity of its director/writer/star, the overwhelming lack of any real narrative, or the surprise unsimulated sex scene at the end, we may never know. But this movie by an arrogant director who managed to show his own porn at Cannes had people talking, and one of the many was Roger Ebert. He walked out of the movie and declared to awaiting cameras that it was “the worst movie in the history of Cannes”. As a famously silver-tongued critic, such declarations were not uncommon from Ebert, and it wasn’t very often that they merited a response from anybody. But what Ebert didn’t know as he wandered out of the screening and made this condemnation of The Brown Bunny was that he had invoked the fury of a filmmaker for whom tact and professional dignity were not exactly a virtue.