Because what the world needed now was dramaz, sweet Twittah dramaz, right?
SIGH.
So! After reports of Ryan Dunn’s death yesterday turned toward examination of the Jackass star’s mini drinking binge in the hours before he got behind the wheel (at minimum 3 shots and 3 beers in four hours, gaaaaaah), film critic Roger Ebert decided it was appropriate to post the following on Twitter:
Which…okay. I get it. And of course we all agree – friends don’t let friends (jackass or otherwise) drive drunk. Granted.
But DUDE. The guy had been dead HOURS. Not exactly, well, tasteful.
Then Bam Margera got wind of Ebert’s jab, and things went all to hell:
GAH.
Of course then Perez Hilton, Attention Whore, had to get in on the clusterfuck, putting up a post - ”Roger Ebert Responds Insensitively To Ryan Dunn’s Death” – calling Ebert out.
Ebert read the post, and AGAIN took to Twitter:
Which was interpreted by many as Ebert refusing to apologize, and, well, kind of being a jerk.
I know. This is just getting unnecessarily complicated now, right? Celebrities, how many times have we told you to THINK BEFORE YOU TWEET, HMM? WHY DO YOU NOT LISTEN?
ANYWAY, rightly sensing that shit had gotten more than a little out of control when his Facebook page was taken down last night after being flagged as “hateful” – presumably by Jackass fans – Ebert moved to post a full rebuttal/explanation just a few hours ago. Not on Twitter, oh noooo – he went straight to the Chicago Sun Times, motherfuckers! Ebert is GANGSTA.
In part, he wrote:
To begin with, I offer my sympathy to Ryan Dunn’s family and friends, and to those of Zachary Hartwell, who also died in the crash. I mean that sincerely. It is tragic to lose a loved one. I also regret that my tweet about the event was considered cruel. It was not intended as cruel. It was intended as true.
…In a touching interview with the NBC station, Bam Margera’s mother, April, said Dunn was a fast driver and that she told him to slow down “every day” following a bad accident he was involved in more than a decade ago. “He drove too fast and I yelled at him all the time about that,” she said. In another story, it was indicated that DUI was involved in the earlier crash.
I don’t know what happened in this case, and I was probably too quick to tweet. That was unseemly. I do know that nobody has any business driving on a public highway at 110 mph, as some estimated — or fast enough, anyway, to leave a highway and fly through 40 yards of trees before crashing. That is especially true if the driver has had three shots and three beers. Two people were killed. What if the car had crashed into another car?
Which was maybe kinda an apology but also maybe kinda a justification. So, umm, draw?
And that’s where things stand now, in the land of Twitter dramaz. And it’s all kind of… stupid.
I wasn’t a fan of Dunn’s in particular, though I enjoyed the Jackass TV show and films as they were meant to be enjoyed – with cringing and laughter and shock and awe at those boys and their antics. And it goes without saying that I have a ton of respect for Ebert and his tremendous body of work. But the bottomline is, a man is dead. A 34 year old man, a young man, gone before his time. And whether he died because of his own stupid mistake or not, he deserves a little respect. Because just like you and me and Roger Ebert, he had friends and family, and he was loved, and is now mourned. Let’s take a moment and remember his humanity, before we take to a public forum and shame him – or anyone else for that matter. Cool?
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