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Life Itself (2014) is a beautiful, comprehensive documentary about the life of Roger Ebert. A great deal of time is spent inspecting the man’s personal life and relationships, notably those with longtime television partner Gene Siskel, and with his wife, Chaz Ebert.

But those familiar with the full body of Ebert’s fame will realize the documentary’s distinct lack of one longtime collaborator and friend of Ebert: Richard Roeper. After Gene Siskel’s untimely death from brain cancer in 1999, he and Ebert’s hit show At The Movies (1986-1999) underwent some changes. A bevy of critics filled in for Siskel during the show’s 1999-2000 run, when the program was re-titled Roger Ebert & the Movies. These included everyone from Todd McCarthy to Elvis Mitchell, Tom Shales, and of course, Chicago Sun-Times’ own Richard Roeper. Eventually offered the gig as a permanent co-host, Roeper hosted the show with Ebert, re-titled Ebert & Roeper and the Movies from 2000-2002, then again re-titled to Ebert & Roeper from 2002-2007. But despite sharing the spotlight with Ebert for all those years, there’s no mention of Roeper in the doc.

Life Itself director Steve James has spoken to this point, saying the decision was merely the product of Ebert dying during the film’s production, and the way that changed the cadence and direction of the film. As James explained in an interview with Eric Kohn at Indiewire:

I had every intention of at least documenting in some way the show with Roeper, because Roger did the show with Roeper for like seven or eight years…I planned to interview Richard, but what happened was that after Roger died, I started to really try and work with the interviews that I already had done, which ended up being about two-thirds of the interviews that were eventually in the movie. I started to piece together a structure for the movie. When I got to that part of the film where Gene dies, and the decision that Gene and his wife made about how they were going to be very private about the illness, and the impact that decision had on Roger—how it hurt him to be excluded from knowing that diagnosis and how it fueled his own decision to not deal with anything that might befall him in a similar way going forward—I just felt like I had to go from that to delving deeply into what befell Roger. I just felt that was such a strong narrative line of greater importance to spend some time with the show in the aftermath of Gene.

To that end, the narrative about Ebert’s television show effectively stops with Siskel. Roeper isn’t identified in the film, but neither are mentions of any of the other guest hosts or iterations of the program that came post-Siskel. As James further explains in his Indiewire interview:

I’m known for making long films. If I’d made a three-hour film, I could have put all that in, but I really felt like it was important to make some hard decisions about this because there were so many aspects to Roger’s life. The memoirs are 460-odd pages, and it didn’t even dig deeply into the show the way the film does. So there was so much to choose from and I just felt that you have to make hard choices to tell a narrative story,” James continued. “I know Richard really wanted to be a part of the film and I even sent a note to him explaining why I made the decisions I made and he was very classy about it. But I ended up decided that that was more important to telling the story and that the show with Gene was the significance of Roger’s television film criticism. Everything that followed afterwards really was less important—but I wanted to have a montage with all these imitators. I had a whole montage planned of all the imitators of the show, but I even ended up cutting that. It was quite entertaining to watch.

Even if you may disagree with the outcome, James’ reasons make sense - filmmakers often have to sacrifice things they want to include, because they know most people aren’t going to sit through hours and hours of film. It can be an arduous process deciding what material stays and what material goes, and it tends to be dictated by the message and purpose the film is trying to convey. In the case of Roger Ebert and Life Itself, Roger Ebert’s death overshadowed all that followed it, and as James opined, rendered many details insignificant.