Opposable Thumbs
Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert became America’s most influential film critics at a time when critics wielded far greater power and influence than today. Siskel and Ebert were thrust into that position by television, climbing from Chicago PBS to national syndication. Through their show, millions of viewers who seldom if ever read Pauline Kael or Rex Reed found themselves absorbed in the great cultural conversation surrounding cinema in the ‘70s and ‘80s.
As Matt Singer reminds us in his account of Siskel and Ebert, Opposable Thumbs, those televised conversations could be acrimonious. Aside from genuine differences of opinion, the two men disliked each other for reasons that look petty from the distance of today. They wrote for rival papers, Ebert at the Chicago Sun-Times and Siskel at the Chicago Tribune, both were young when they began to cover the cinema beat in the late ‘60s and sometimes behaved like bucks locking horns over turf. Singer quotes Siskel’s Yale roommate who called him “the most competitive person I’ve ever come across.”
The author grew up watching “Siskel & Ebert”—and he wasn’t the only person drawn to writing and thinking about film by the dueling Chicago critics. They were not the first TV movie reviewer-celebrities—Singer reminds readers of the brutally honest Judith Crist and the jocular Gene Shalit. More than their predecessors, Siskel and Ebert were academically credentialed yet eager to talk in plain speech about the complexities of plotting, acting and camera angles. However, their pilot episode (Nov. 26, 1975, on Chicago’s WTTW) was unpromising. “Ebert mumbles. Siskel rambles,” Singer writes, “they might as well have been taking muscle relaxers; their on-screen presence is downright somnambulant.”
The concept that became “Sneak Preview,” “At the Movies” and finally “Siskel & Ebert” evolved through many hands into a show about “the magic of differing viewpoints” as much as movies. By the time they went national, the two critics and their producers figured out “how to turn their furious rivalry into an unbreakable alliance,” enacted in a studio setting cunningly made to look like an old movie theater. Most viewers thought Siskel and Ebert were really talking with each other inside a cinema during off hours. Ebert sat on cushions so as not to appear shorter than his rival.
Their stars rose during a time when film was important, the center of cultural conversation (and not just on occasion). “We’ve always wanted viewers to feel as if they were just eavesdropping on a couple of guys who loved movies and were having a spontaneous conversation,” Siskel said. And by 1978, when viewers beyond Chicago began eavesdropping, Siskel and Ebert had perfected the formula, complete with clips from specific scenes in the films they discussed (hard work in the pre-digital age of 35mm).
That “Siskel & Ebert” trademark, the opposable thumbs—up or down—came a few years into the series. Decades after their deaths, they remain the world’s most recognized film critics, testimony not only to the power of television but their insights into cinema.
Opposable Thumbs: How Siskel & Ebert Changed Movies Forever is published by Putnam.
