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Slumdog Millionaire seems to be gaining the all-important buzz at the Toronto Film Festival, but the film wasn’t the most interesting thing to happen at Saturday’s screening. According to the Daily News:

Soon after the lights went down, a source tells us, “a man in the audience started yelling, ‘Don’t touch me!’ People looked around and shrugged. Ten minutes later, the voice yells again, ‘I said don’t touch me!’”

Again, people shrugged off the disturbance. But a few minutes later, says our source, “the guy stands up in the darkness and thwacks the guy behind him with a big festival binder. He hit him so hard everybody could hear it. Everyone freaked out and turned around.”

The thwacker? New York Post film critic Lou Lumenick.

The thwackee? Esteemed Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert.

After battling thyroid and salivary gland cancer for years, Ebert, 66, can no longer speak.
“Apparently, Roger was just trying to tap Lumenick on the shoulder to signal him that he couldn’t see the movie,” surmises our source. “He was trying to ask him to move over a bit.”

We’ve only gotten to talk to Ebert twice before he lost the ability to do so, and we always found him quite enjoyable, and not very pokey.
Ebert has responded to the incident in the Chicago Tribute, claiming that the incident “has been blown out of proportion [and] is of little interest.”