Siskel and Ebert Forever

Matt Singer, the Editor-in-chief of ScreenCrush.com, has written a delightfully readable chronicle about film critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert in Opposable Thumbs: How Siskel & Ebert Changed Movies Forever. Singer explains that what made their enormous success so unlikely was the contentiousness between them that never really seemed to subside.  Siskel and Ebert disagreed about everything; whose name came first on their television show, who sat closer to Letterman or Carson when they made guest appearances, whose film criticism was better, as well as who was the more admired. Siskel admits he never really got over Roger Ebert winning a Pulitzer Prize in Criticism for his film reviews in the Chicago Sun-Times. Viewers of their beloved television program picked up the tensions that ran between them and instead of alienating them, they became more interested. Eventually, Siskel and Ebert recognized they were a powerhouse team together and were grateful for the fame and wealth it brought them. For a long time, they were the most influential film critics in the country.

Before television, Roger Ebert was the film critic at the Chicago Sun-Times and Gene Siskel was the film critic at the Chicago Tribune. When they bumped into each other at parties, their loathing was palpable: “the kind that causes glycerin to explode when it mixes with nitric and sulfuric acid. When they were placed in close proximity, something could erupt at any moment. It often did.”  But several savvy television producers saw something in their exchanges that if packaged properly, could be television dynamite.  Singer shares with us several stories of how they came to work together explaining how many of the stories contradicted the remembrances of others he interviewed. What is clear is that the early shows were bumpy and almost threatened to end the entire enterprise. Both men were non-telegenic and needed coaching to become more camera-ready.

The early reception to their television show on Chicago’s public radio station was mixed. Some film critics lambasted them for being too heavy-handed and ignoring the more sophisticated subtleties of film criticism. Richard Corliss, the former film critic for Time magazine, felt they didn’t delve deeply enough into areas worthy of discussion.  The Los Angeles Times’ former film critic, Patrick Goldstein thought their reviews nothing more than free advertising. But A.O. Scott, film critic for the New York Times until very recently, thought the free exchange between the two critics, offered up after they each gave their initial responses, were riveting in a way that often trumped what a single movie critic could produce alone. A.O. Scott believed Siskel and Ebert demonstrated how “All art is subjective, and in injecting criticism with a heaping dose of lively debate, they created a show that was itself a persuasive argument in favor of the subjective experience of cinema.”

Singer believed each of them were often eloquent, even poetic. Singer cites Ebert’s commentary on Pulp Fiction, where he describes the movie as having “the exhilaration of pure filmmaking, with colorful characters and screwy dialogue and unbelievable situations and violence and comedy all trying to shoulder each other off the screen.”  Singer is impressed by Siskel’s snarky response to the 1992 comedy, Frozen Assets.  The movie is about a manager of a sperm bank.  An exasperated Siskel claimed “I don’t think I can adequately describe to you how unpleasant the remaining ninety-five minutes were or will be for you…”

Siskel believed movies were about more than the story told to you. He felt that when you disagreed with someone about a movie, you are disagreeing about who you each are, and in essence criticizing one another. We can feel this when we watch the two men spar about the movies. For example, when they reviewed 1987’s Made in Heaven, they instantly began to bicker with more than their usual ferocity. The movie is about a man who dies and meets his soul mate in Heaven, and then is thrust back to Earth to find her where she has been reincarnated into another body.  Siskel told Ebert “I believe that if you think of someone, whether it be here or in someplace else, that they come alive. I think the film had a religious content to it.  So I found the film beautiful.”  Ebert replied testily “whether or not you believe in this doesn’t have anything to do with whether the film is good or not.” Ebert replied, “For me, it does.”

If Singer falls short, it is in providing us with enough information about each man’s biography. We learn bits and pieces, but he doesn’t pull it together in a cohesive fashion that would allow us to see how their life experiences, particularly their traumas, interacted with their emotional responses to the movies they reviewed. We learn Ebert never went to film school; he was a Ph.D. candidate in English which he never completed, after taking on the job as film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times.  Ebert described his early life as a lonely one.  He attended Catholic school which he didn’t like and became a fervent non-believer.  His father was an electrician, and his mother was a bookkeeper. He didn’t marry until he was fifty, and never had children. His wife, Chaz Ebert, claims she met Roger at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, although Ebert told a different story saying they met at a restaurant by chance.  Singer drops these bombshells and drifts away from them, leaving the reader hanging.

Gene Siskel grew up a smart Jewish boy who recalls his infatuation with Saturday Night Fever as one of his most intense movie experiences because it “portrayed a wild adolescence I hadn’t experienced but that I could enjoy vicariously on film.”  Siskel lost both his parents to illnesses while still a small child. His uncle and aunt raised him. He never spoke about his past and was wary with others; unlike Ebert whose newspaper colleagues remember as jovial and bawdy, and a non-stop talker. Siskel married Marlene Iglitzen and raised two daughters. He was compulsively late, and a gambler.  He looked to the movies for spiritual solace trying to understand “why life contained so much pain and suffering.”  He graduated from Yale University and drifted by chance into journalism. Unlike Ebert, he was less interested in what other people thought of him.

Singer tries to speculate about the electricity present when Siskel and Ebert were together onscreen. One wonders whom each of them represented to each other subconsciously.It was obvious to viewers they could push each other’s buttons in a way that was highly uncomfortable for them both. Singer observes that even their approach to criticism was different. Ebert fancied himself a teacher who wanted to explain to viewers what they might have missed or misunderstood. He believed his primary function was to react spontaneously to the film before him by writing down immediately his reaction and then furbishing his initial response.

It seems Singer has trouble figuring them out at times. Singer is clearly an ardent fan of both men and smitten by the art of film criticism, which he sees as transcendent. But he doesn’t always connect the dots. He reveals to us snippets of their backgrounds, and somehow drops the ball, when what we most want to see is Singer integrate his biographical findings with their reactions to the films they review. It seems this sort of probing would have allowed Singer to offer us a more fully-fleshed-out picture of them both, and perhaps even reveal to us his own biases. I know this is a big ask, but it seems within his domain as a fine film critic himself. Ultimately, movies reveal to us things we don’t know about ourselves or confirm feelings we knew we have but couldn’t put words to. They allow us to see our sensitivities, our self-consciousness, even our longings, fantasies, and fears. Singer relinquishes this area of exploration and clings to more sturdy ground.