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Gene Siskel: A Man of Influence

By Mark Caro
Tribune Movie Writer
February 22, 1999

Gene Siskel became famous on television, but as a point of pride, he consistently identified himself first as a print journalist.

"Gene always used to say the news director on a TV station would look around and take the person with the longest hair and say, 'You're the movie critic,' " Roger Ebert, his longtime television foil, recalled Sunday. "Gene and I were actually print journalists who were covering a beat, and we were hired to go on television and talk about our jobs."

Siskel was the Tribune's movie critic, and Ebert was his fierce Chicago Sun-Times rival when the two were paired in the fall of 1975 to discuss and debate new movies on a start-up public television show called "Opening Soon. . .at a Theater Near You." They argued passionately about their jobs on this and three increasingly popular incarnations of the show.

By the time the 53-year-old Siskel passed away Saturday morning, nine months after surgery to remove a growth from his brain, he and Ebert had sparked a mini-revolution of how film is viewed and discussed in popular culture.

"I think that we tend to dismiss criticism done on television because of the time constraints, because they just don't have enough time," said New York Daily News film critic Jack Mathews. "That is absolutely true in the vast majority of cases. What Gene and Roger have done is show that serious criticism can be done in that short format."

Siskel and Ebert weren't the first well-known movie critics, just the most famous and, in many ways, the most powerful. Although early critics such as James Agee and Andrew Sarris had tremendous influence in publications catering to film aficionados, newspapers didn't take the art form so seriously, often giving reviewers cutesy pseudonyms. For instance, the Tribune's film critic from 1915 to 1966 was "Mae Tinee," the pen name for an assortment of reviewers adopting a chatty persona.

"The high profile of film critics actually can be traced by to Judith Crist at the New York Herald Tribune in the early '60s," Ebert said. "Crist attacked 'Cleopatra' and was banned by Fox from their screenings, and that got an avalanche of national publicity, which led to every paper in the country saying, 'Hey, we ought to get a real movie critic. When I got my job in '67, that was still part of the fallout from Crist."

Mae Tinee, meanwhile, finally gave way in 1966 to Clifford Terry, who left for a year-long Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University in 1969 and was replaced by 23-year-old Siskel. The two young critics immediately became intense competitors as they tried to out-scoop or just out-think one another.

So it's no wonder they were reluctant when a WTTW-Ch. 11 producer proposed they team up for "Opening Soon." Although the image of the two of them dissecting a movie and declaring "Two Thumbs Up" has become iconic, the format went against the grain for other reasons.

Film reviews came to you as distant pronouncements printed in respectable black and white in 1975. You rarely heard the voice behind the voice.

Television also wasn't a film-friendly medium back then. You had little opportunity to see film clips on television, as entertainment-related TV shows were years away. The studios only began buying TV movie ads around the time they were giving blockbusters such as "Jaws" (1975) and "Star Wars" (1977) wider releases.

Meanwhile, Siskel and Ebert weren't anyone's idea of telegenic. Siskel, who began reviewing movies for WBBM-Ch. 2 in 1974, had a bushy mustache and was about a head taller than Ebert, who looked like a frumpy professor.

Years later they would champion an unlikely film about two guys conversing over a meal, "My Dinner with Andre" (1981). In 1975, the idea of watching two guys analyzing films on television seemed equally esoteric.

"I'm sure this show was seen as arcane and high brow," said "love jones" director Theodore Witcher, 29, who grew up in the Chicago area and recalls watching them "religiously" from a young age. "Here were two guys arguing about movies and arguing points that perhaps the larger audience wasn't even interested in. I think over the years people have become more used to critical discourse or critical dialogue."

"Opening Soon" was short-lived. It disappeared briefly for fine-tuning, and, in 1976, re-emerged as "Sneak Previews," also on WTTW.

As on the first show, Siskel and Ebert showed clips, interacted and trotted out Spot the Wonder Dog to highlight the "dog of the week." They also voted "yes" or "no" on each movie. Those famous thumbs weren't introduced until 1986, when the show moved from Tribune Entertainment to Buena Vista Television. "Sneak Previews" caught on, going national on PBS stations in 1978.

"So much of television is polished, refined, laugh-tracked, done so cleanly that it's incredibly boring," Siskel told the Tribune in 1985. "Sports and news are popular because they're live. We want the same feeling, that viewers are eavesdropping on us as we talk."

Offered bigger paychecks and wider distribution, Siskel and Ebert took their act to Tribune Entertainment in 1982; it nationally syndicated a new version called "At the Movies," which aired locally on WGN-Ch. 9. Spot was replaced by a skunk to identify the stinkers.

In 1986, the duo accepted an even more lucrative offer from another national syndicator, Buena Vista Television, to launch "Siskel & Ebert & the Movies," later known simply as "Siskel & Ebert." No animals appeared on this version, carried locally by WBBM-Ch. 2.

The discarded shows continued with new hosts, Jeffrey Lyons and Neal Gabler (replaced by Michael Medved) on "Sneak Previews," Rex Reed and Bill Harris (replaced by Dixie Whatley) on "At the Movies." But neither program could re-create the Chicago critics' liveliness, smarts or popularity, and both eventually wound up on the scrap heap.

As the show's popularity increased, so did the duo's influence. Spy magazine declared them to be the country's most influential film critics, with Siskel being given a slight edge over Ebert (Ebert griped that Siskel had badgered the Spy folks into submission), and the two made Entertainment Weekly's most-powerful-people-in-Hollywood lists.

One way the pair flexed their muscles was to draw attention to issues that stirred their passions. Their campaign for a non-X adult movie rating in part sparked the creation of the NC-17 rating. Other themed shows condemned colorization and pushed for full-screen letterbox images on video releases and more usage of black-and-white film.

They also championed independent and foreign-language films and documentaries otherwise doomed to fall through the cracks. By shining a spotlight on such underdogs as "My Dinner with Andre," "Hoop Dreams" and "One False Move," they gave these films theatrical life.

Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr. said Sunday that Siskel's most powerful legacy will be his vigorous support of worthy causes.

"He was blessed with tremendous analytical skills, but he had a great sense of social conscience and social justice, and in his own way he dealt with those in Hollywood who had been locked out and denied equal opportunity," Jackson said. "For example, he almost single-handledly promoted 'Hoop Dreams' out of the minor leagues into the major leagues, because he knew that much talent was locked out by the conventional route."

Although the duo remained respected in an industry known for backbiting, the show was not without its critics. Some complained that the rise of quick-hit TV reviews came at the expense of more thoughtful print analysis.

Washington Post television critic Tom Shales once derisively referred to the Chicago critics as "Jolly Roger and Tweedle Gene, the Film Flam Men." (Although, when Siskel went on leave earlier this month, Shales became his first fill-in on the show.)

"There's a tremendous amount of envy of them because of their success," Mathews said. "That envy has bred a lot of disdain. There are a lot of people who diminish what they've done, thinking they're showmen, not critics. I tell those people I don't think they're paying attention. If you checked off what's being said about these movies by them and the ground they're covering, that's simply not true."

Chicago-based director John McNaughton, whose 1996 film "Normal Life" received theatrical distribution thanks in part to Siskel and Ebert's public support, said he thinks the duo's Chicago basis played a key role in their appeal. "These guys came out of the Midwest and they were for regular Americans, not people who were necessarily cineastes or cinephiles."

Throughout their careers, Siskel and Ebert maintained their grounding in the print world. Meanwhile, their impact is inescapable throughout TV and other electronic media. Even "The McLaughlin Group" and other arguing-pundit shows -- as well as "The Sportswriters on TV" -- followed Siskel and Ebert's lead in televising print journalists discussing their fields.

Ebert noted that televised movie criticism has come full circle since he and Siskel began their show. At first, local stations reacted by hiring their own film critics. Now most of those stations have exchanged their critics for fluffy entertainment reporters who offer celebrity sound bites.

"Once again there's very little serious movie criticism on television," Ebert said, adding he thinks the show's impact has been mostly on the grass-roots level.

"I've received hundreds of e-mails from people who say something like, 'I started watching your show in my small town in the south or in the Midwest when I was a kid or when I was a teenager, and I never heard anybody talk about the movies that way, and I realized that they were worthy of serious discussions, and it was OK to have opinions about them and to defend those opinions."

Yet as much as the show has influenced the cultural landscape, it had as great an effect on its principles.

"I'll never have another forum like our show in my life," Siskel told Northwestern University students in 1991. "It's fabulous."

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