The Big Picture - 2. “Is the Room Big Enough for Both These Guys?” | Gene and Roger

Episode Date: July 20, 2021

From the minute Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert hit the air, everyone wanted to know: Did these two guys actually hate each other? In this episode, we’ll learn more about how Gene and Roger came to be critics and rivals, and what made them the perfect foils for each other on TV. Host: Brian Raftery Producers: Amanda Dobbins, Sean Fennessey, Isaac Lee, Noah Malale, Bobby Wagner Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Within a few years of their television debut, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert would become the biggest film critics in the country. But when you watch their early appearances together, they're almost shocking. In the mid-70s, when they were first thrown together in front of the cameras, Gene and Roger were newspaper writers, not TV stars. They only had a few years of on-screen experience, and it showed. Especially when they talked about a movie like Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver. Robert De Niro creates a terrifying portrait of life

on the edge of madness. Even by the standards of the 70s, which was full of provocative films, Taxi Driver was a lot. The story of an angry loner who could pop off at any moment and who finally explodes in a burst of violence. But you wouldn't get a sense of that tension from Gene and Roger's conversation. The guy seemed so...polite.

But I hated the last third of the movie. The violence is so strong, I ended up looking away from the film in more ways than one. Not only didn't I see some of the bloodletting, I began not to see the sense of the picture either. Roger? Well Gene, that's where you and I disagree because it seems to me that what Scorsese is doing is looking not so much at the violence in the city as in the violence that's bottled up inside this person and it's the kind of violence that we've seen in America. Look, those are all good points, but Gene and Roger sound bored.

There's no energy to their argument, no suspense in how they'll respond to one another. Even the episode's most light-hearted segment feels forced. And sort of, you know, studied the way that they... Oh, Roger, I think there's a mongrel in the mezzanine. Either that, Gene, or it looks to me more like a bulldog in the balcony because it's time for the dog of the month this month. And my dog this month is the devil within her, a ripoff of the exorcist. That's how it all started out, with some dry banter and a dog of the month.

And without Siskel and Ebert's famous thumbs-up or thumbs-down reviews. Those early episodes weren't that easy for viewers to get through. And according to Roger Ebert, they weren't always fun to make either. Tapings went on for hours as Gene and Roger bickered off-screen, sometimes with the producers, sometimes with each other. They had no idea how to make a show like this work. Sometimes they wondered if they'd made a mistake in even trying. We hid behind clipboards. We were both very paranoid, I think.

I was afraid I would say something very stupid and Gene would say something like, that wasn't Fellini, that was Bergman, and I would leave in dismay. So how did two jittery men with clipboards become world-famous movie reviewers? For the Ringer Podcast Network, I'm Brian Raftery,

and this is Gene and Roger. Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert weren't the most naturally at-ease guys, at least not around each other. And neither wanted to share the spotlight. Here's producer Ray Solley, who worked with Siskel Niebert from the late 70s to the early 80s. The great thing was that they had big egos. The really tough thing was that they had big egos. When Ray first met Siskel Niebert, Gene was a film critic at the Chicago Tribune. Roger, meanwhile, was at the Chicago Sun-Times. They had their own careers without each other. They would watch a movie in the dark. They would then leave. They would go back to their little cubicle. They would sit at a typewriter and they would type out their thoughts. Now you put

them in a setting where there's another person there. Is the room big enough for both of these guys? If that all sounds a bit overdramatic, keep in mind, this was the 70s. Back then, daily newspapers had huge circulations. And a lot of the time, their writers became local celebrities. If you were a big film critic, you might find your name up in lights on a theater marquee

or on the side of a newspaper delivery truck. As critics, Siskel and Eber had power. And in Chicago, that made them more than local celebrities. It made them competitors. Before they went on TV together, the two men had barely spoken to each other, even when they were at the same screening. They lived in the same city, but operated in different worlds. Roger used to like to hang out in bars.

You know, Gene would like to hang out in fancy restaurants. This is Jim Murphy, who produced and directed Gene and Roger's show from the late 80s to the early 90s. Gene, very aggressive, very hard-charging, very competitive. I mean, he had to win. He had to win, he had to win, he had to win. He had to win. He had to win. Very smart, but not the same type of smart as Roger. Roger, very intellectual, extremely well read, loved to read, loved to write, soft person, but also very big ego. Great, great, great belief in his brain and his skills. And probably passive-aggressive because he couldn't be aggressive like Gene was.

They're just different people. Gene Siskel was born in Chicago in 1946. Both of his parents died before he was 10 years old, so he was raised by an aunt and uncle as part of a large extended family. When the weekend rolled around, Siskel headed straight to his local movie theater. He'd sometimes see the same film for weeks or even months in a row. Decades later, he could still remember what those matinees meant to him as a kid. It was an eight-block walk from my house to the theater here,

and I felt like an adult for the first time. Picking the pictures I wanted to see, eating the candy I wanted to eat. The films that made the greatest impact on me, the early Disney pictures, films like Dumbo, with a great shot of Mrs. Jumbo being chained up. A baby elephant, separated from its mother. Sisko later enrolled at Yale University. That's where he studied philosophy. And it's also where he would sometimes dress up as

Batman and jump out of trees. It was the 60s. He and his friends would stay up late, discussing whatever film they'd just seen, trying to figure out what it all meant. Those conversations stuck with him. Years later, whenever he described writing about movies, he'd say it was like covering

the national dream beat. After graduating from college, Siskel spent some time in the Army Reserve before landing a job in the local news section of the Chicago Tribune. When the paper's film critic position opened up, he sent a memo to the editors, arguing why he should take it over. He didn't have a lot of film criticism experience, but he got the job. He was 23 years old. Gene was all about competition. Marlene Eagleton, Gene's wife of almost two decades.

Not because of the person he was competing against. It was because he was always competing against himself. I honestly think that is part of the draw to Michael Jordan, who he thought was the most competitive person on earth, that he had that mentality, that perseverance. And Gene just really respected that. He was fun competitive. That's TV journalist Dave Price, who worked with Gene in Chicago in the 90s.

I remember one time Gene walks over to my desk, and probably 60 feet away in the left-hand corner is another conference room where they're having a morning meeting. And he says, 10 bucks. You give me 10 bucks,

I'll give you a hundred if I lose. I'm gonna take this script that you're writing that's probably subpar. I'm gonna crumble it into a paper ball. I'm gonna throw it into the corner. I'm going to have it ricochet off that producer's head and into the garbage can. He takes my script, crumbles it.

And this is not an exaggeration. He flicks this thing across the newsroom, pegs this producer in the head. It ricochets off his temple and right into the garbage can. And he's like, never bet against me. Never bet against me. Gene's professional movie review career began in late 1969, not long after he joined the Tribune. Talk about timing.

The big studios were losing steam, and movie execs were desperate to connect with young audiences. Within a few years, Hollywood was taken over by a new generation of cocky upstarts who did whatever they wanted. Filmmakers like George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola, Melvin Van Peebles, Dennis Hopper. This year, the judges of the Cannes Film Festival presented the award Best Film by a New Director to Easy Rider. Paul Newman is Butch Cassidy. And the Sundance Kid is Robert Redford. MASH, a motion picture that raises

some important moral questions. And then it drops them. Starting in the late 60s, movies became more personal, more daring, more urgent than they'd felt for years. And Siskel was covering them for one of the biggest papers in the country. He wrote raves of future classics like The French Connection and Z. He interviewed Alfred Hitchcock over lunch

and spent a boozy lost weekend in Palm Springs with Cary Grant, an adventure that could probably be a podcast on its own. As a critic, Siskel made some calls that were unorthodox at the time and that now, decades later, honestly seem crazy. He described Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid as laughable, but not very memorable. And he thought Chinatown was tedious from beginning to just before the end. As he later explained, he didn't write his reviews wondering what other critics thought about the movie, or what they'd think about him.

Within the confines of our little world, our arcane profession, having the guts to say that something that has a good buzz on it isn't good, and that you didn't enjoy it, does take guts. Some people just enjoy being contrary, though. I'm not talking about being contrary. I'm talking about saying I didn't see it. I know what the prevailing wind is. I didn't see it. I didn't see it on the screen. I'mailing wind is. I didn't see it. I didn't see it on the screen. I'm not doing it to stand out. I'm doing it because that's what I honestly believe.

This was back in the pre-Internet era, when it was a lot easier to throw out unpopular opinions. There was no film Twitter hive mind to appease. No stans and fans clogging your mentions just because you gave a thumbs down to something they loved. Gene and Roger had the freedom, and you know, the hubris, to speak their minds. Even if they knew they'd be in the minority.

Gene didn't just approach movies this way. He approached his whole life this way. Gene wasn't simply a movie critic. Gene was a critic of everything. Gene was a critic of the lunch he ate,

of the way the cab driver maneuvered through city traffic, of the furniture that was in the office that he was working in. Gene had a built-in sense of what worked and what didn't, and he loved to make his case. Before becoming a film critic, he briefly considered going to law school. He would have made a great trial lawyer because of the way he analyzed things. And the way he would appeal to a jury is much like the way he appeals to a viewer. It's just on a very honest human level.

He would have been a great trial lawyer. Anyhow, he tried movies instead, you know, no pun intended. Right. I just got that. That was a very good pun. Thank you. When Gene evaluated a movie, he'd ask himself, is this really worth two hours of my life? And if his answer was no, he made sure his readers heard it loud and clear.

That's why in 1970, he gave zero stars to a risque new comedy. It was a kitschy, X-rated rock and roll fantasy titled Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. If you've been waiting for something new, waiting for a film to shake you into the freaked out, mind-blowing scene of right now, then come and see it, man, and find out why it's called Beyond the Valley of the Dolls from 20th Century Fox.

Siskel didn't want his audience to find out about Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. He called it a cesspool and despised the script so much, he didn't even mention the young screenwriter's name. Which is funny, because the movie was written by a guy Siskel was about to be spending a lot of time with, Roger Ebert. We'll be right back. Roger Ebert's writing career began when he was still a kid. He grew up in Urbana, Illinois, a small city outside Chicago, where Roger published a neighborhood newsletter, along with sci-fi stories. He later became editor of his grade school paper, his high school paper,

and his college newspaper at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He covered sports, politics, world affairs, all while still in his 20s. He came from a family where he was the only child, so he got to indulge his love of reading a lot. Chaz Ebert, Roger's wife of 21 years. His curiosity was indulged and encouraged by his parents. And also, I can just see him, you know, as I'm saying this, I can just see this little Roger sitting in the middle and all the adults are talking and Roger is being probably treated

as one of the adults in the conversation. So I think that it's a curiosity that was born of his intelligence and his love of people. Roger didn't have a TV until he was older, but he'd been immersed in film from an early age, as he later recalled in an 80s TV special. So while the other kids my age were growing up on television, I grew up at the movies.

It was very important for me, growing up in a small town in Illinois, to be able to go to the movies and see how people lived in other parts of the world. Ebert spent long weekends at his local theater, watching westerns, cartoons, Marx Brothers comedies, and newsreels. But when he got to college, he was exposed to movies that wound up having a deeper impact. Movies like Akira Kurosawa's drama, Akiru, about a dying man searching for meaning in his life. Or Francois Truffaut's coming-of-age story, The 400 Blows. Film was a way for Roger to understand the feelings and lives of others,

not just those on the screen, but also those sitting next to him in the theater. He judged movies, but not people. That's Kerry Rickey, a longtime film critic and a longtime friend of Roger. Roger cared what you thought about movies, and even if you had a different opinion from him, he wanted to hear why you loved it or not, because that gave him more wisdom. He liked hearing other points of view.

Maybe not on the show with Gene so much. In 1966, Roger got a feature writing gig at the Chicago Sun-Times Sunday Magazine He went on to review low-budget movies and visit the occasional film set Roger wasn't actually planning on covering movies full-time But when the paper's film critic retired, Roger was offered the job He was 24 years old Roger's new position gave him a lot of freedom He covered low-budget skin

flicks and the French New Wave movement. He once got stranded in a Pennsylvania snowstorm while writing about Robert Mitchum. And he attended the 1968 Los Angeles premiere of a movie that would stick with Roger the rest of his life. Stanley Kubrick's existential sci-fi adventure, 2001,

A Space Odyssey. And now, your journey is just beginning. At that first screening, the audience didn't know what to make of Kubrick's cryptic film. At one point, Roger spotted Hollywood legend Rock Hudson walking out of the theater, yelling, Will someone tell me what the hell this is about? Roger didn't have an answer. He didn't really understand 2001 either. But he was transfixed.

Movies had always been Roger's way of connecting with the rest of the world, but 2001 connected him with the rest of the universe. As a kid in the Midwest, he'd written his own outer space stories. Now he was watching a film that opened up the possibilities of what those far-off galaxies might really be like. At the movie's premiere, he felt chills run down his spine when he realized that HAL 9000, the movie's eerily human-like supercomputer, hailed from Roger's home state of Illinois. It must have felt as though 2001 were made just for him. Roger gave 2001 a four-star review in the Tribune.

Then he went back to see it again. And again. and again. I can remember hippies hanging around outside the theater to get in after the intermission, lay on the floor in front of the screen and look at this great sound and light trip. Wow, man. Refreshment sales were real big at intermission on that show. I remember sitting up all night too arguing about the mysteries of 2001, which I still think is one of the greatest movies ever made. When I asked Chaz about Roger's connection to the film and the mysteries it held for him,

she mentioned the movie's opening sequence. In case you haven't seen 2001 in a while, that moment ends with a prehistoric ape man throwing a bone into the air, where it's replaced by a spinning satellite, a shot that teleports the viewer across millions of years. Even as I'm describing it, and it wasn't even my favorite movie, but I've seen it so many times with Roger and that especially that scene is what really gets him because it pulls it all together.

Evolution and just the idea of where we came from and where we're going all together. And I have to admit that even after Roger passed away, sometimes I would think about that. Because I would think, he always had an interest in things like this. And, you know, maybe he knew something. Maybe he knew something. Maybe it was something primal in his own psyche or in his own trace memory of our own evolution as humans. Gene also loved 2001. He once asked Stanley Kubrick if he could buy the giant monolith prop from the movie. But the film that became Gene's lifelong pursuit was a swaggering late

70s drama about a troubled teen who spends his night at a dreamlike Brooklyn club called The 2001 Odyssey. John Travolta is Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever. Catch it. Rated R. No one caught Saturday Night Fever quite like Gene. A few years after its release in 1977, he spent $2,000 to outbid Jane Fonda at a charity auction for Travolta's all-white disco suit. He saw it 17 times. We saw it on our honeymoon in Paris in French. Oh, wow. Yeah, welcome to marriage with Gene Fiskel.

If 2001 took Roger into an imaginary future, Sirenite Fever transported Gene to an imaginary past. People ask me to this day, why did I go so much about this picture? I get asked it all the time. This is Gene in 1983. He's talking about Sirenite Fever with the one person in the world who probably cared about the film as much as he did, John Travolta.

And I say it's the childhood that I never had, the adolescence that I never had. Well, me neither. Well, I would have loved to have had it. I would have loved to have been stud. I would have loved to have been king of the dance floor. I would have loved to have been king of the dance floor. I would love to have girls hanging all over me. But like most kids, you know, I was shy and scared. So this was acting out the adolescence that I would have liked to have. That's the appeal for me.

The films of the late 60s and 70s arrived during Gene and Roger's formative movie-going years. They were young men trying to figure out the world, and the movies of that era offered some clues. They were stories about love, sex, war, death, and everything in between. And their excitement over what they were seeing came across in their reviews. Roger even won a Pulitzer in 1975 for his writing. It made him the first film critic to ever win the award. And, as you can probably guess, it also made Gene pretty jealous. But as that painful Taxi Driver review proves, the thoughtful writing that had earned Gene and

Rogers so much attention didn't instantly translate to the small screen. It was going to take plenty of work to get Siskel and Ebert ready for prime time. And Thea Flom, the creator of Sneak Pre previews, knew it. Flom was brought in after the critics shot a disastrous pilot for Chicago station WTTW. She began by giving the show a brand new look. In the original pilot, Cisco and Ebert sat in stiff director's chairs. But Flom and her team built a new set,

made partly out of scrap from a rundown local theater. It gave the illusion that the critics were sitting in the balcony of a cozy-looking neighborhood cinema instead of a tiny set at WTTW. For years, people would come up to me and say, you know, I know the theater where you shoot that. I would just nod and smile.

After sprucing up the set, Floam got to work on the hosts. Gene felt that it was important for them to wear coats and ties so they would be taken seriously. I felt that that's the way nobody dresses going to the movies. So I said, no, you have to look like regular people. This is not a show, a PBS show about the cinema.

This is about people going to the movies. So you have to wear movie clothes. So they did. Those movie clothes? They'd eventually evolve into Siskel and Ebert's signature style. Sweaters, blazers, and the occasional sweater and a blazer. It wasn't exactly a casual look, but it reflected the vibe Siskel and Ebert were going for. Professional, but not pretentious. When people sit around and talk about movies or go to the movies, they don't sit

in director's chairs. That's producer Ray Solly again. They don't talk as if they're delivering a thesis for a PhD on cinema. They are relaxed and enjoying themselves as well as being in a communal moment watching a movie with a lot of other people. But getting Gene and Roger to relax and enjoy themselves would be Floam's biggest challenge. She had to teach them how to talk about movies in a way viewers could understand. That was especially hard for Roger, who had less TV experience than Gene. I would say to him, the trouble with you has always been the smartest kid in the class.

Roger had to learn how to read the teleprompter. He also had to learn how to write for television, and he would bring his copy to my house on Sunday night, and we would sit around the dining room table. All my children ran around and edit his copy, and only once do I remember him saying to me something about, to the effect that he had a Pulitzer Prize. And there I was editing his copy, and I said, yes, Reg, but you still have to learn how to write for television. It took a while, but Roger caught on. Years later, he'd tell Kerry Rickey the first big lesson he learned

about talking on TV. He saw me on a TV show, and called me immediately and he said, darling, one piece of advice. All those cliches you cut out when you're writing in print, put them back on the radio or television because those are what people can hang on. They're not listening to your writing. They just want the idea. After Gene and Roger figured out how to talk to the audience, they had to learn to talk to each other. After all, when they'd shot their first pilot in 1975,

movie criticism on TV was still a new concept. Critics would appear on local news or national morning shows, but they'd often be limited to just a few minutes, and they were usually alone. Siskel and Ebert, however, had to keep the audience's attention for an entire half hour. 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 would say, and I would say over and over again

at the beginning, there are three things viewers want to know. What's this movie about? Who's in it? Should I go and see it? That's it. There were other hiccups. This was a new kind of show,

so the tapings could drag on for hours. For two guys who were not only highly ambitious, but who also had a lot of deadlines to beat, it could be a frustrating experience. Sometimes, Gene and Roger would simply burn out. Other times, they got overheated. This is Roger in 2005, remembering how the show began. And finally, there was a big fight one day

because we finally got a discussion tape that we liked, and the producer told us that he couldn't use it because the light had reflected against Gene's wristwatch. And Gene said to this person, I just want to tell you that if we have to do this again, I'm going to get up out of this chair and I'm going to walk out of the studio and out of the station and never come back. For years, Gene and Roger had barely acknowledged each other's existence. Now they were being forced to spend hours cooped up together in a studio. And if Siskel and Abel were having a bad time on set, it was best to stay out of their way.

In many ways, Gene was television's first Simon Cowell. He would call it as he sees it. He wouldn't care what he said to anybody. Roger always wanted to put you at ease, but you knew that there were certain things that were hot buttons. As Marlene remembers, the bad vibes from those tapings would sometimes linger, even after they'd wrapped up for the night. In the early years, it was really ugly.

Like, he would come home, and he would just be in a really foul mood. And it would be partly because of Roger, but partly because of the show. When opening soon at a theater near you, officially premiered in 1976, it aired just once a month on PBS stations scattered around the country. You couldn't even watch the show in Los Angeles.

It was like Siskel and Ebert were getting their own out-of-town tryouts. And they used that time to get their act together. Before the taping of each week's show, we would all sit together and watch a tape of the previous week's show, where we would note the things that really worked and the things that really didn't. And that's the best way to get better. That's so funny. I just imagine Siskel and Ebert watching Siskel and Ebert and both of them making comments about how they each did in the previous week. Yeah, it sounds like it would be fun. It was really dead serious. I can remember walking out there and saying, do you know how many millions of American man hours you have just wasted with that conversation?

One early viewer of the show was Chaz Ebert. When I used to watch them on television, I thought, and I'm on record of saying this, so I'm not telling tales of myself out of school, I preferred Gene first on TV as a TV personality. I thought that Roger came across a little whiny at first. As strange as it might sound, the more relaxed Gene and Roger became

around each other, the edgier they got on screen. They hadn't worked out all their differences, but they had figured out how to use them to their advantage. When our show began to catch on it was because we started to argue and disagree and our personalities were in evidence and our personality conflicts were there and we had chemistry because whatever we felt for each other was real. If it looked like we were mad at each other, it was because we were mad at each other.

In October 1978, Gene and Roger got their biggest on-screen makeover yet. Their show's clunky title was dropped in favor of something much more memorable, sneak previews. They even got this zippy new theme song. That tune would soon be playing on TV stations around the country. Gene and Roger were about to become superstars,

whether they were ready for it or not. Next time on Gene and Roger. The thing about being in the Midwest is that you could be an intellectual, but you didn't want it. They had this very refined palette, but they talked about the things they loved, like Joe Sixpack. Watching the show was one of my few ways into the world of thinking about film differently, to think about it in a critical sense. They actually had the same warrior agent representing them to make sure that they got the same deal, so that one didn't get more than the other. They said, let's do this because if we keep it so that we both live or die

by the deals that we make, we're more likely to be more invested. They both walked into the unknown phenomenon of celebrity together. So they were, you know, frightened sometimes. You know, there were a bunch of firsts. They were live on SNL. They were scared out of their minds. They were on the Johnny Carson show. They both froze.

Gene and Roger is written and reported by me, Brian Raftery, with story editing by Amanda Dobbins. The show was executive produced by Raftery, 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. Our art director is David Shoemaker.

Illustration by Eddie Feig. Thank you for listening.