The Big Picture - 1. “I Must Destroy Him” | Gene and Roger

Episode Date: July 20, 2021

Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert were the most famous and powerful film critics of their time—and their shows were smash hits that changed an entire industry. Over the next eight episodes, host Brian Raftery will talk to Siskel and Ebert’s families, friends, coworkers, and peers to explore the duo's lasting impact—on movie criticism, on the media landscape, and on how we talk to one another. Host: Brian Raftery Producers: Amanda Dobbins, Sean Fennessey, Isaac Lee, Noah Malale, Bobby Wagner Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I want to play you a clip from one of my all-time favorite movie fights. It took place a few decades ago, so the audio is a little rough. But I'll give you an idea of why, for nearly 25 years, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert were the most popular film critics in the country. Now this may surprise you, but I really like Rocky IV a lot. That does surprise me. Well, then I'm going to be amazed at you. Let me explain why. I knew what'm going to be amazed at you. Let me explain why.

I knew what was going to happen in this picture. I mean, everyone knows what's going to happen in this picture, yet I got caught up in both of its fights. In case you don't remember, Rocky IV is the one where America beats Russia and wins the Cold War forever. Also, Pauly gets a robot. Anyway, the guy

getting so caught up in Rocky IV, that's Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune. He's tall and thin with this famously hard-to-miss forehead. And he's wearing what Gene pretty much always wore on TV, a sensible sweater and an unbreakable smirk. I want more, because he can make another great villain. I want Rocky V. I don't want Rocky V. Please don't give me Rocky V. I thought you'd rather have Halloween V. I wouldn't rather have Halloween V, and I don't want to talk about the 13th V. What I'm amazed about is that you wanted Rocky IV.

This movie is the bottom of the barrel. And the guy begging Rocky to retire? That's Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times. He's shorter and rounder than his partner, something that was pointed out quite a bit in the 80s. But he and Gene really were a striking duo, two guys who seemed like complete opposites. For this Rocky IV debate,

Roger's also wearing a tasteful sweater, a sweater vest, actually. And even though he's got these really thick glasses, you can see him shoot Gene a look of disbelief. Or maybe it's disgust. You haven't told me anything. This movie is absolutely formula. It is predictable.

It is uninspired. And it is not exciting. And even the fight at the end, which usually works for him, he didn't work this time. Roger, you like some of the others in the series, too. They went at it this way for decades. Every week, Gene and Roger sat in an empty theater, showed a few clips from the latest releases, and talked.

That's it. No big star interviews, no goofy trailer reactions, just two smart middle-aged writers from Chicago debating whatever movies they'd seen. This was a very unusual formula for a hit show, especially in the 80s when primetime was full of dopey sitcoms and glitzy soaps. But millions of viewers tuned in to watch Siskel Niebert. I was one of them. Every Sunday, I'd rush home to catch The Bald Guy and The Big Guy. To be honest, sometimes I watched just so I could get a look at R-rated movies.

My parents didn't want me to see Robocop, but Gene and Roger weren't my parents. They could show the craziest scene from that movie at 11 o'clock in the morning. Mostly though, I watched Gene and Roger to learn about film. They talked about cinematography, and the pleasure of a good performance, about old movies and why they're so important to understanding new movies. And they did so in a way that didn't make you feel intimidated or uneducated about film. Instead, Gene and Roger brought the movie conversation

out of the theater lobby and into your home and invited you to listen along. At the end of each episode of Siskel and Ebert, Gene and Roger would deliver their verdicts on the week's big movies. Thumbs up or thumbs down? If that sounds quaint now, remember that back then there was no internet. No tomato meter. So Siskel and Ebert's votes had power.

If they gave a film their trademark two thumbs up, whether it was My Dinner with Andre or Anaconda, moviegoers would take it seriously. And if they went thumbs down? Woof. Burt Reynolds, who starred in several poorly reviewed movies, called Gene and Roger the bruise brothers. Eddie Murphy once noted that a two thumbs down verdict could kill a film. You could gripe about Siskel and Ebert's decisions, and they made some truly strange calls over the years, like when they both gave Reservoir Dogs a thumbs down. Yet even if you disagree with them about a movie, you always wanted to know why they voted the way they did.

They could boil down big observations into just a few quick, cutting sentences. And while they got heated at times, they were never mean to each other. Most importantly, they were able to sound smart without ever coming off as show-offy. It was such a simple approach to movie reviewing, but when they first teamed up, no one else was doing it. They were the only game

in town, and this was sort of a new thing. This is Chaz Ebert, Roger's wife and business partner for more than two decades. Two Midwestern guys sitting in movie chairs reviewing the movies. People kind of went a little gaga over it. When Gene and Roger were both really high on a movie, it was so much fun to sit and talk about it with them because they're like two little boys going back and forth and then this and this. And wait a minute.

What about this part? You probably have a Siskel in your life or an Ebert. It's the one friend you can debate anything with and never have to worry about being impolite or incorrect. Mine's my buddy Ryan, whom I've been arguing with for, oh, 30 years now. Hey, Ryan. Gene and Roger simply had those same conversations on TV every week for decades. That banter would make Siskel and Ebert famous. And it would change the way people in media talk, or at least how they try to talk.

And not just about film, but about sports, politics, television, fashion, or even history. Some of your favorite talk shows and podcasts are indebted to Siskel and Ebert's style, including ESPN's long-running Part in the Interruption. Let's see him do it again. Do it again? Let's see him do it again. He's done it for 15 years.

Let's see him do it in Game 3 and Game 4. You said he was dead. PTI creator and producer Eric Reitholm grew up in Chicago and lived right around the corner from Roger Ebert. And watching his hometown heroes at work was an early lesson in what makes good TV.

What I found with Siskel and Ebert is you saw the best versions of themselves on television. You saw them come to life and you saw them as the human beings that you are. You didn't see them as analysis. You saw two people who could get under each other's skin, sometimes personally, but mostly about what it is

that they just watched, this thing that they have passion about. When the people on the screen are passionate about something, the audience tends to be passionate about the discussion. It's been more than two decades since Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert reviewed a movie together. I really miss them, and not just because they help me figure out what movies I should see. Mostly, I miss listening to them get lost in conversation. Gene Siskel died in 1999. Roger Ebert passed away in 2013. But in a weird way, Gene and Roger are just as influential now as they were in their heyday.

They taught an entire generation how to argue. And for better and worse, created the blueprint for modern media. Anytime you see two sports nerds going at it via a Zoom screen, or listen to a pair of movie podcasters bemoan the Oscar nominations, well, they're just doing Siskel and Ebert, whether they know it or not. So how did Gene and Roger

become TV superstars in the first place? And why do their opinions, and the way they share them, still hold so much sway years after they've been off the air? Over the next eight episodes, I'll talk to their friends, family members, and fans to find out how Siskel and Ebert became bigger than the big screen. For The Ringer, I'm Brian Raftery, and this is Gene and Roger. If you've only watched old Siskel and Ebert clips on YouTube,

it might be hard to comprehend just how popular they were, and for just how long. In the 80s and 90s, they appeared on magazine covers, primetime specials, and Saturday Night Live episodes. And they were on every talk show you can imagine. There have been many memorable duos in the history of cinema, but not as memorable as my next two guests. They are probably today's most influential film critics, and it's a real pleasure having them on the show this evening.

They have an incredible syndicated show at the movies. I always watch them. I think they're wonderful. Together they've added a new twist to film criticism, and the audiences seem to love it. Please welcome, it's fun to have these gentlemen with us, Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel. From their earliest years together, Gene and Roger were always Siskel and Ebert. It was hard for their fans to think of them as separate entities. I know at a trade show once that they were appearing at, you know, they had a booth.

Gene decided to walk around. That's Marlene Eagleton, who was married to Gene Siskel for nearly 20 years. The sales guy said, hey, if you walk around, you have to walk around together. Because alone, nobody knows you. But together, they will. Gene and Roger were easy to recognize. So was their format. Every episode would cover about five or six movies.

They'd sit in the show's fake movie theater set and present a few clips from each film. Then they'd jump into their debate. The producers called that back and forth the crosstalk. And it was what everyone at home waited for. The crosstalk might be contentious or giddy or both. But the conversations tended to be dramatic because Gene and Roger usually didn't know how the other critic felt about a movie,

even if they'd watched it together. They would immediately leave the screening afterwards, no chit-chat. This is producer Nancy De Los Santos. No, how are you doing or what are you planning on doing? They just would leave the theater and go off and do their own writing. From their fake theater balcony in Chicago, Gene and Roger were firsthand

witnesses to huge changes in Hollywood. They started reviewing movies at the peak of the 70s boom, became celebrities in the heyday of the 80s blockbuster, and spent their final years together chronicling the indie revolution of the 90s. And they covered every film they could, devoting just as much time to a little-known foreign language movie as they would to a Tom Cruise extravaganza. Watching those Siskel and Ebert segments now

is like watching a quarter century of film history broken down into five-minute clips. For example, if you weren't alive in 1990, it might be hard to appreciate the impact Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas had when it was released. But Gene and Roger's reaction to the film captures just how exciting and seismic the movie felt at the time. You can sense how it affected them, not just as movie critics, but as movie lovers. They sound almost dazed. And it's a fascinating movie. It's a great American film. Okay, I've seen it twice. I'm going

back lots more times. And what I'll go back for is small things, editing scenes, the way he jumps in on dialogue, the way there's that whole sequence about when the Ray Liotta character gets into drugs and it's shot in a whole different fashion because he's high on drugs. And Scorsese, the artist, wants to show us that. It's very special filmmaking. And you could also mention the scene when somebody doesn't realize he's about

to get killed and then he realizes it. And that moment of realization is like a hammer blow from the screen. Those old clips are also reminders that the movies we see

as classics today weren't uniformly beloved at the time. No film ever really achieves critical consensus. There are always dissenting voices. And a lot of the time, those voices belong to Gene or Roger. They didn't care what other reviewers thought, and they didn't care if their opinions on a film were unpopular. Here's Roger taking down Die Hard. And with a movie like this, once you start picking out the loopholes, and there are a lot of them,

it doesn't matter how good the stunts or the special effects are, or even how good Bruce Willis is. You just can't stay interested. I did stay interested. For balance, here's Gene voting thumbs down on Silence of the Lambs. It worked for me. It worked. Well, then you're easy, because for me, I thought, oh, come on. A guy who's truly frightening doesn't need a you know, a huge organ playing in the background. I didn't buy it at all.

This is the movies. It was moments like this where I'd be sitting in front of the TV saying, oh, come on. Sometimes I couldn't believe what Gene and Roger were saying. But even when I disagreed with their opinions, I'd keep coming back week after week. It was almost like watching the news. If you wanted to know what films were out there and what people were

saying about them, you had to watch Siskel and Ebert. And they made it seem as though the only thing more exciting than going to the movies was talking about them.

We'll be right back. Gene and Roger's TV fame didn't come easily, and there were other movie critics who paved the way for their success. In the 50s, it wasn't unusual to see writers like Bosley Crowther or Rex Reed talk about film on a panel show. Years later, movie critic Pauline Kael would prove to be one of the few movie writers as sharp and unpredictable on the TV screen as she was on the page. And in the early 70s, a frizzy-haired, mega-mustache critic

named Gene Shalit joined the Today Show, quickly becoming known for his tightly scripted puns and one-liners. Sad to say, Stanley Kubrick is responsible for the dulling of The Shining. As the decade went on, local newscasts and big cities began hiring their own movie critics. And if you were a young movie buff in the

70s, like filmmaker Quentin Tarantino, you made sure to tune in. It wasn't what we would consider real analysis. They were almost more like consumer advocates. Okay, talk to Billy Budd and he's going to let you know whether you should waste your money

on that new Conan the Barbarian movie, and that'll be coming up at 6. You might know the name of the newspaper critic. You might know Canby's name, and you might know for your local newspaper. But you definitely knew the name of the guy on the local newscast. It was becoming clear that TV was the perfect medium for talking about movies. That's why in 1976, a producer and documentarian named Thea Flome was called into a meeting at WTTW, a respected PBS affiliate in Chicago.

I was new on the staff, and the head of production said to me, do you like movies? And I said, I love movies. The WTTW brass had an idea for a new series. Take two film critics, arm them with footage from the latest movies, and get out of their way. At the time, TV was full of talking heads going head-to-head. In the 60s, the snarky Gore Vidal

and William F. Buckley had become known for their small-screen quarrels. And one of 60 Minutes' most popular segments was a two-person debate called Point-Counterpoint. Every week, the show's tens of millions of viewers tuned in to watch experts argue about... well, the same shit we're arguing about now. Jack, I spent the holidays

flying back and forth across this country, and I'm worried. The place seems all out of focus, sea to shining sea. Everybody's mad as hell, but they're not sure what at. The cities are rotting, farmlands are idle.

This rant goes on for a minute and a half and features a gazillion complaints. At one point, she's literally complaining about how bad 70s food tastes. We've both flown many times, Shana, coast to coast, but we see a different land below. Point Counterpoint was basically what would happen if Debbie Downer and Sam the Eagle had their own debate show. But it focused on current events. No one had produced a successful debate show about movies. And after hearing the pitch, Floam was intrigued. I said, well, that sounds great.

What could be more perfect for television than talking about the movies and showing clips from the movies, right? It's kind of an obvious idea when you think about it. In fact, it was so obvious, the station had already given it a go. But the results had been pretty disastrous. He said, well, we did a pilot of it, and it was really not good, and I just promised me you won't look at it. So that original pilot, the two on-camera hosts had been Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel. Though few people ever saw it, Gene and Roger's first TV pilot, which was taped in the fall of 1975, was notable for several reasons, most of them not good. One was its clunky title, Opening Soon...at a Theater Near You.

Then there was the jaunty theme song. Plus, you had Gene's swinging 70s style, which included a bushy mustache and a butterfly collar wide enough to trap actual butterflies. But what really stands out about the pilot is how little charisma Gene and Roger had together. At the time, they were both relative newcomers to TV. Gene had recently started reviewing movies for a local Chicago station. He'd later host an Emmy-winning avant-garde live monthly call-in show called Nightwatch, where he'd screen underground videos.

The show was so ahead of its time, Gene had to convince his viewers it was actually airing live. You can call me right after you see viewers it was actually airing live. You can call me right after you see a film. This show is live. If it were not live, if it were on tape, you couldn't call me. And I want you to call me, otherwise I'm going to be sitting in this Channel 11 studio talking to myself. Roger's TV experience included a few on-air news pieces, as well as some intros for a film series focusing on director Igmar Bergman. And if you want to see Roger not really comfortable in front of a camera, you should look at those introductions.

Poor guy. And in this movie, his name was Spiegel, which is Swedish for mirror. Still, even though Siskel and Ebert weren't polished TV pros, Flohm was a fan of both critics and thought it was worth bringing them back for another try. The 70s was turning out

to be a great era for film. Among the movies Siskel and Ebert covered in the pilot were One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Dog Day Afternoon. At the time, film, not television, was leading the cultural conversation. And a regular TV show about movies had a potentially huge audience.

So, I called them and invited them both to lunch and told them the idea that we would work out a good way to do a TV show where we would talk about the movies. And they were both really pissed at the station because they did that pilot thing and nobody ever called them afterward. The critics were also suspicious of working with each other. For years, Siskel and Ebert had been locked in passive-aggressive combat. They were the film critics at two of the best-known newspapers not only in the city, but in the country.

Gene at the Chicago Tribune and Roger at the Chicago Sun-Times, where he'd recently won a Pulitzer Prize, a first for a film critic. You have to remember, this was when newspapers had massive circulations and long-running rivalries. And Gene and Roger worked just a few blocks from one another. As they recalled years later, they had no choice but to see each other as enemies. It's been my mission since I was 23 years old to beat him.

That's 18 years ago. He is the one person in Chicago that I must destroy in print. We didn't speak to each other at all the first nine years that we knew each other before we started doing the show. And then they asked us if we would like to do this show with each other, and my original response was no. What do I have to do a show with Gene Siskel for? I can do a show all by myself. According to Gene's wife, Marlene,

the feeling was mutual. They had some initial hostility, perhaps. I don't know about hostility, if that's the right word. But, you know, they were competing. I mean, they just really liked to one-up each other, which was great and was healthy.

But I think in the beginning, listen, they were newspaper people. What do they know about television? It's not something you walk into. It was up to Thea Flom to convince the critics they were better off teaming up. Gene said, all right, so tell me why I should do this. And I said to him, full of my young arrogance, because I can teach you how to be better on television. And if we do this right, I promise you that I think this will be the most popular half-hour television series on PBS before we're through. Many decades later, Floam and Roger Ebert would recall that fateful lunch. On Lincoln Avenue, you said, what are you boys fighting?

This show is going to be a hit. It's going to be on nationally, not locally. You're still going to be doing it in 20 years. Someday you're going to be producing it yourselves. Don't fight it. You saw that, and we didn't see it. We didn't believe it. I think at, and we didn't see it, we didn't believe it. I think at first we saw the show as a battlefield.

Floem's instincts were correct. The show was bound to be a hit. But for Siskel and Ebert, the fights were only beginning. And you were really ace arch competitors. Absolutely. I mean, this was not huggy, huggy, oh, hi, how are you? No, not at all. No, no. I was friendly with the other two film critics in town but Gene and I were kind of,

we would be on the elevator together alone looking at the numbers changing over the door. For Gene and Roger, becoming Siskel and Ebert would be a battle at times, both on screen and off. But in the years to come, the two men would form a remarkable partnership, one that would make them as recognizable as the actors and directors they covered. In some ways, the story of Gene and Roger plays like a film itself, a buddy comedy full of big twists and brutal one-liners. It starts out fast and ends too soon.

And no one who watched it would ever look at movies in quite the same way again. This season on Gene and Roger. The great thing was that they had big egos. The really tough thing was that they had big egos. The really tough thing was that they had big egos. And that was the challenge. Is the room big enough for both of these guys? I would see some of the knockdown, drag out fights they had when they were filming. And I could see that Jane knew how to push Roger's buttons.

It took a while for them to get the hang of it. Sometimes it would be unpleasant and I would walk out there into the studio and say, that's not going to fly. It's just too unpleasant. Nobody wants to be sitting at home and seeing that. Let's do it again. I think those experiences together

becoming celebrities was a bond. It's at the Cannes Film Festival. He sees Pulp Fiction there and I come, Hey, so, Roger, what do you think? He goes, it's either one of the best movies I've ever seen or it's one of the worst. And I need to see it again before I decide. Chaz is clutching one of Roger's hands, and I just clutched the other one, and I said, I know.

This is what I know. I think something must be wrong with Gene. I don't know about it. He was professional, and he held it together, but I could tell. He was kind of like this teddy bear with all the stuffing pulled out. Without Gene, was there a show? Gene and Roger is written and reported by me, Brian Rachtery,

with story editing by Amanda Dobbins. The show was executive produced by Sean Fennessy. Our producers are Amanda Dobbins, Noah Malalay, Bobby Wagner, and Isaac Lee. Music and sound design by Isaac Lee. Copy editing was done by Craig Gaines and fact-checking by Kellen B. Coates. Thank you for listening.