The Big Picture - 5. Attack of the Clones | Gene and Roger

Episode Date: August 10, 2021

As Gene and Roger jumped from one program to another, they left behind shows that were desperate to replicate the duo’s groundbreaking success. These reiterations, along with other imitations of the format, paved the way for a television market saturated with Siskel and Ebert wannabes. But what they all failed to realize was that what made Gene and Roger special was Gene and Roger themselves. Host: Brian Raftery Producers: Amanda Dobbins, Sean Fennessey, Isaac Lee, Noah Malale, Bobby Wagner Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert first teamed up in the 70s, no one had seen, or heard, anything quite like them before. The idea of movie critics going head-to-head every week was so new, so unusual, that it required the creation of a whole new format, one that soon began to spread across TV. No comic timing in this picture. It drags. It just lays there. It's just not funny. You know, you look at this movie and you can see how much smoother it is than his earlier ones, how much a better director he's become. Yes, he really is a much better director. And how much more clear he is in his aims. He's not just doing stand-up comedy.

And plus it's too long and it's gross and it has lots and lots of foul language. But... What do you mean to say but? There you go. But... Okay. I couldn't help myself. You gotta laugh at these guys.

Throughout the 80s, the small screen would become full of movie critics trying to imitate Gene and Roger's style and replicate their success. We are knee-deep in critics, complained one newspaper writer in 1986. And, according to some, it was Gene and Roger's fault. For The Ringer, I'm Brian Raftree, and this is Gene and Roger. As we've learned by now, whenever Gene and Roger became frustrated with their job or their bosses, they'd simply take their business elsewhere. In 1982, after growing unhappy with PBS,

the company that had launched their TV careers, Gene and Roger signed a syndication deal with Tribune Entertainment. A few years later, they fled Tribune and landed million-dollar contracts with Walt Disney's television division to start a new show, which would eventually be titled Siskel and Ebert. Every time Siskel and Ebert quit their gigs,

they left behind a pair of empty chairs, chairs their ex-bosses were eager to fill. would eventually be titled Siskel and Ebert. Every time Siskel and Ebert quit their gigs, they left behind a pair of empty chairs, chairs their ex-bosses were eager to fill. After all, Siskel and Ebert had not only demonstrated how a movie review show could work, they'd also proved it could be lucrative. So in 1982, not long after Siskel and Ebert announced they were leaving the original Sneak Previews, its producers began hunting for their replacements.

The show was so popular that nearly 300 critics applied for the job. Supposedly, even Pauline Kael looked into joining. After a few seasons, producers settled on film critics Michael Medved and Jeffrey Lyons. Their setup was nearly identical to Gene and Roger's. Two people sitting in a theater, showing footage from the latest releases, and arguing whether the movie deserved a yes or no. But the new sneak previews was kinda like the new Coke. As satisfying as it might be in quick bursts, something about the formula just fell... off. Medved and Lyons didn't have the long-running relationship Gene and Roger had, which made it hard for them to have an easy rapport. Without that history, Medved and

Lyons were just two guys talking about movies on TV. And they did it in a way that was much more scripted and much less loose than Gene and Roger did it. Sheen's growing disenchantment with the war and the senseless brutality he sees on both sides is a powerful dramatization of that divisive era. Platoon is a nightmare, but one of the most haunting films of the year. Jeffrey, I agree with you. This was a sensational film, and I was frankly surprised at how much I liked it. Medved and Lyons would stick with sneak previews for nearly a decade. Now, this gets a little confusing, but during that time,

the other show Gene and Roger had left behind in the 80s, At the Movies, was also relaunched with new hosts, Rex Reed and Bill Harris. Once again, the format was the same as Gene and Rogers. The fake movie theater setting, the movie clips, the back and forth bickering. Here are Reed and Harris discussing Full Metal Jacket, but also, of course,

Platoon. Hey, it was the 80s. I liked that first half of the movie much better. I thought it was much more powerful. When it went to war, I thought it looked more like a movie. I prefer Platoon in that instance. Well Platoon to me really was a movie and the thing that was wrong with it was that I predicted everything that would happen in it. It just seemed so obvious.

I'd seen all of that in John Wayne movies. Look, replacing Gene and Roger would have been an impossible assignment for any critic. But on the new At the Movies, you never got the sense the hosts were having a conversation. Instead, it felt like they were jamming a bunch of talking points together. It didn't have the same casual, anything-can-happen feel as when Gene and Roger were in the balcony. And it didn't help that the new At The Movies hosts weren't allowed to use Siskel and Ebert's famous grading system. That's because Gene, who was always a few steps ahead when it came to business, had convinced Roger to have their two thumbs up verdict trademarked.

This was a savvy move. It allowed Siskel and Ebert to bring the phrase with them to Disney. Other critics might take their turns in Gene and Roger's old seats, but none would be able to copy their catchphrase or match their authority. That didn't stop lots of people from trying.

By the mid-80s, movie critics were popping up all over. On local newscasts, on showbiz news shows, even on kids' TV. Many of these reviewers would supply positive quotes, or blurbs, to movie studios, who'd use them in billboards and newspaper ads. If you go through old movie listings from the 80s, you'll find all sorts of ridiculous raves,

like, Red Heat is Red Hot, or, Some Kind of Wonderful is. To be clear, many of these on-screen critics were actual film critics, like writer and historian Leonard Maltin, who reviewed movies for Entertainment Tonight.

That show was full of 80s glitz and gossip, but Maltin managed to sneak in all sorts of film nerd knowledge. Here he is in 1985, repping for your favorite film repertory company. Thanks to a Los Angeles-based company called Criterion, King Kong of the 30s has found his way onto LaserDisc of the 80s. Malton had credibility, but some of the new on-air movie critics were total amateurs, which was supposedly part of their appeal. Gene and Roger were sophisticated critics who'd broken through by presenting themselves as relatable, semi-average Joe film lovers. So TV producers began hiring personalities who weren't actual critics, but who seemed

relatable. That explains, sort of, how Yogi Berra wound up reviewing films in a series of 80s beer commercials. I scored Moonstruck, a triple. Then there was Nickelodeon's Raid of K for Kids by Kids, which featured teens reviewing movies. I should probably point out that when I was 12, I was insanely jealous of the kids on this show. Partly because they got to watch movies for free and then talk about them on TV. But also because in one episode, they got to debate Siskel and Ebert.

Here they are reviewing Project X, not the party-hardy teen film from a few years back, but the 80s movie in which Matthew Broderick rescues a lab chimp. Wait, I fun it hard because you didn't have a good time at this? I said my review was, it was pretty close to. I actually enjoyed myself a little bit more than Gene did. This is not a great movie. I think we're all agreed that it's not a great movie. No, I disagree with you there.

But you know what it was? It was a sweet movie. This glut of sorta-kinda movie critics on TV was partly a result of Hollywood economics. By the 80s, studios were spending more of their time and money promoting their films on TV. Publicists were happy to supply footage from their latest blockbusters to any show that would take it, free of charge. Movie review shows were easy to make and impossible to avoid. And they had their own critics, many of whom took out their frustrations on Gene and Roger.

Throughout their career together, Gene and Roger had enjoyed a mostly cozy relationship with the press. They'd had some bad reviews, of course. One early Village Voice piece described them as looking like, quote, two eels fighting underwater. And the Chicago Reader had a column called Cisco Watch, in which they cataloged factual mistakes Gene made on air. For the most part, though, the coverage they received in their first few years together

had been positive. But the arrival of these Cisco-Lieber copycats inspired some critics and film scholars to re-evaluate Gene and Roger's work. In 1988, the LA Times published a lengthy essay describing their show as, quote, the MTV of film criticism. Back then, if you wanted to make something sound bad,

you compared it to MTV. Thanks to Gene and Roger, the piece argued, we were now stuck with a bunch of shallow, quickly digestible talking heads. Some of the attacks were more direct. Another LA Times article described Ebert's commentary as pedantic and Siskel's as superficial. Then, in 1989, came a lengthy Miami Herald piece on the state of film criticism,

written by the paper's critic, Bill Cosford. He described Siskel and Ebert as the best movie reviewers on TV. Then came a very big but. They are also the principal reason that people think movie critics are buffoons. They dress badly and allow themselves to be cast as celebrity goofballs. Their show has long since stopped being about what makes movies work and what makes them fail, in favor of being about their occasional choreographed disputes. The Herald article clearly pissed off Gene.

He wrote an angry letter to the editors. The first thing he pointed out was that he was not a bad dresser. Then he defended his show and accused the writer of being jealous of Rogers Pulitzer, while admitting he was jealous of it too. But the biggest sign of frustration among Siskel and Ebert's peers came in early 1990. That's when Time magazine critic Richard Corliss published an infamous essay and film comment about the state of movie criticism. It was a preemptive eulogy for the sort of work Corliss and his peers had studied and practiced for decades, movie writing that was informed, insightful, and passionate.

That kind of writing, Corliss worried, was under threat, thanks in part to TV reviewers who had come to rely on quick yes or no verdicts, without adding any analysis. Though Corliss's piece mostly focused on Gene and Roger's competitors, he did take a few swipes at their show, describing it as a sitcom starring two guys who live in a movie theater and argue all the time. It's every kind of TV and no kind of film criticism. It was an argument Gene and Roger had been hearing for years, that their on-screen reviews just weren't deep enough. Roger didn't agree, but he didn't totally disagree either.

Here he is addressing the criticism of his own criticism in a 1989 appearance with Bob Costas. First of all, what we are doing is not high-level film criticism. We are doing a different kind of criticism on television, but what we are not doing is simply talking about what we like and what we don't like. If you really look at our show and look at some of the other shows that deal with the same material, you're finding, I think, that we're much more substantial in that we're dealing with the issues and dealing with things like visual style and with subject matter and with different kinds of subject matter much more

articulately than anybody else on television. The problem, in a sense, is the nature of the medium. When you have a minute and 45 seconds, how much are you going to be able to say? I mean, did you ever think of it as reductive, that sort of binary yes or no? In your mind, as a critic now, as you got older and started thinking about it more how did you feel about that yeah as a critic now i hate giving grades i hate giving scores and it does kind of suck that we're now all stuck in the binary thanks to rotten tomatoes this is film critic alonzo duralde whom we met in episode three he was a long time viewer of cisco niebert i guess they were ahead of their time because, you know, we are now all trapped in the one and zero, you know, mode of film criticism thanks to RT. But I would

hope that people would watch the entire episode of the show and not just fast forward to the end where they give their, you know, up-down vote in the same way that I would hope that people don't just look at a Rotten Tomatoes score, but actually go read reviews of critics whose opinion means something to them and get a fuller sense of what people think about this movie and why. We'll be right back. If Gene and Roger were frustrated by the number of would-be Siskel and Ebert's, they mostly kept quiet about it. Mostly.

The closest they came to dissing the competition was during a 1986 appearance with David Letterman. Then we spent the next four years with a syndicated show called At the Movies. Okay, now that's no longer the show. That's gone. Well, that show is not exactly gone, but it will be. Gene and Roger could afford to joke. They knew neither At the Movies nor Sneak Previews would be as popular as when they were hosting.

That's because the shows were missing one thing. Well, two things. Siskel and Ebert themselves. Here's Sneak Previews creator Thea Flome, who left the show not long after Gene and Roger did. From time to time, there were, you know, studios that would reach out to me and ask me to come in and work my magic as though there was such a thing on whoever their

pairing was. I never did it. People didn't understand that what made Gene and Roger work was not the format. It was Gene and Roger. Without Gene and Roger, it just didn't quite work so well. It wasn't just Gene and Roger's chemistry, their ability to make every conversation feel spontaneous and combustible, that allowed them to remain the most popular critics on TV. It was the fact that after a decade together, they'd become a trusted brand. In 1986, the same year Gene made that crack on Letterman, Siskel and Ebert's syndicated Disney series debuted in nearly 90% of the country's TV markets, an impressive number for a new show.

And in the years ahead, none of the replacement critics could ever match Siskel and Ebert's ratings. Their millions of viewers simply followed Gene and Roger wherever they went. Most of those viewers were tuning in to see what Siskel and Ebert thought of the latest movies. But by the late 80s, Gene and Roger's on-air battles had become more than just a feature of the show. They'd become one of its biggest selling points. Even though Siskel and Ebert often agreed more than they disagreed,

the mere possibility of a squabble is what drew fans like Ramin Barani, the writer-director we met in episode two. You liked the debates, and you were hoping they would get into an argument. That was the best part when you were younger. You were just like, I hope they fight today. I mean, you didn't want them to agree too much. Nowadays, famous people can fight with one another as much as they want, as publicly as possible. But in the 80s, things were much more smoothed over, especially on TV.

You didn't see the kind of real-life conflict that Gene and Roger kept up for years and years. And it gave them a competitive advantage over all the would-be Siskel and Eberts. None had the kind of soap opera-ish relationship that Gene and Roger had. That underlying tension that gave all their arguments an extra spark. It wasn't just longtime viewers who got caught up in Gene and Roger's drama. Even their co-workers found themselves pulled into it at times. Jim Murphy, a producer and director on the show, remembers a special episode of Siskel and Ebert that went through 19 rounds of editing.

And even then, Gene and Roger were still arguing about the results. Every screener they saw, either Gene got too much of this, Roger got too much of that, Roger got too much of that. I thought we should have used this part. I thought we should have used that part. You know, it's hard to get through that when you have two very strong people saying like, you know, I'm not accepting it unless it has this or I'm not accepting it unless you take that out. So I do remember those being immensely frustrating at times, but they always got done in the end. Were there sort of Gene factions and Roger factions among the staff, or was it all

kind of unified? At times, people would agree with one or the other more. To each other, we would grouse about either gentleman's personality peculiarities because they were very different and they each had their own pet peeves and annoying habits and things like that. But as a team, we sort of all backed them both. Viewers, though, tend to decide with one critic over the other. There were Gene fans and Roger fans, and even today, you see people on Twitter taking sides.

But in order for the show to succeed, it needed both critics and all the animosity that came with them. Disney even played it up when promoting the show. One commercial consisted of the two critics sitting in a theater and complaining about one another. He occasionally tells me what I think, and he is only occasionally right.

He persists in thinking that he's a better film critic than I am. Drives me crazy. For The Critical Difference, it's Siskel and Ebert and the movies. Gene and Roger were so comfortable being public enemies that some people assumed it was all an act. In 1987, the critics appeared on the cover of Chicago Magazine next to a headline that read, Is the feud a fraud?

It's a question some of their friends and co-workers still get asked today. Was all that fighting just for show? The answer? No. Definitely no. Gene and Roger's relationship was tricky. A mix of resentment and affection that, even decades later, is hard to sort out without having them here to explain it to us. One thing's clear, though. The friction between Gene and Roger was genuine.

They'd started out as crosstown rivals and become national rivals. And they were very different men, in terms of interest and attitude. When you put two people with a combative history and conflicting personalities in front of TV cameras and keep them there for nearly 25 years, their frustrations are going to come to the surface. When Chaz Ebert began dating Roger in 1989, she'd sometimes visit the set when the critics were taping an episode. I would see some of the knock-down, drag-out fights they had when they were filming, and I could see that Jane knew how to push Roger's buttons and get him to respond

angrily about something because, you know, sometimes Roger felt that Gene wasn't pulling his weight or sometimes Roger thought that Gene thought that Roger was being too bossy or too exacting about something. But they still, even then, they got along. When they were not at the studio, when they were just sitting around as friends, they were acting, you know, they acted like brothers to me. That's how many of Gene and Roger's family members and co-workers saw them, as spiritual siblings who fought the way brothers do. In the mid-80s, they sat down with talk show host Gary Collins, who brought in a clinical psychologist to try to get at the bottom of their rivalry.

They agreed there was something brotherly about their dynamic. After all, Ebert was the only child in his family, and Siskel the youngest in his, and by many years. Maybe that explained their mutual need for attention, the need to always be right. Other than that mini-breakthrough, they didn't make a whole lot of progress. One of the things we disagreed about in talking about this was which one of us was the older brother. The other one is the younger brother. Well, I'm four years older than James. Three

and a half. He's not competitive at all, is he? There it is. Look at that. He wouldn't even stand for a half a year. Oh, I feel so sorry for you. Toward the end of the segment, Gene points out that if anyone were to ever get to the bottom of his relationship with Roger, the show would be doomed. They knew their little blow-ups gave their TV appearances a tension their competitors could never duplicate.

Those other critics didn't have Gene and Roger's years' worth of built-up frustrations. And they didn't have the same brutal sense of humor. Here's Marlene Inglison, Gene's wife. I know they like matching wits. I mean, Gene and Roger were like Oscar Wilde and Dorothy Parker in the same room together. Which one was which? You know, I think they traded from time to time, to be fair. Just like they flipped a quarter to see who sat next to the host of the talk show. What some viewers saw as harsh words between Gene and Roger was often just the way they talked. There's a semi-famous blooper reel of them from 1987 that reveals how closely their senses of humor lined up.

They were filming promos for that week's show, and Gene had been garbling his lines. You know that for Gene, speech is a second language? Roger's first language is, yes, I'll have apple pie with my order. He asked the McDonald's girls if he can have apple pie with their order before they asked him. And you know what Gene says when he goes into McDonald's girls if he can have apple pie with their order before they ask him.

And you know what Gene says when he goes into McDonald's? Can I have apple with their order? Their razzing goes on for almost 10 minutes. If this video had leaked back in the 80s, it might have settled the friend or foe question forever. It doesn't capture Gene and Roger acting like bitter enemies lashing out at one another or as best buds putting on an act. They just seem like themselves, friendly foes. Here's how Chaz Ebert summarizes Gene and Roger's relationship more than 30 years after

first meeting them. This is what I saw. I saw civilized men who really respected each other's opinions and who knew that they both thought they were like the smartest guys in the room and so they wanted to impress each other. Still, that respect wasn't obvious to many of the show's fans.

Like Howard Stern, who pressed them on their relationship on his radio show in the late 80s. I don't think you really like each other. Well, you know, the fact is that if we hadn't been doing this television show, we probably wouldn't have had three conversations in the last 13 years. But for the half hour Gene and Roger were on the air together every week, they seemed destined to be together.

Whether they wanted to or not. And their combative energy would prove impossible for others to recreate. By 1990, the replacement version of At the Movies had been canceled. And many of the other Cisco Libre clones were gone, too. That year, Gene and Roger appeared on the cover of Spy, a magazine that, before the internet, harnessed 90% of the media world's collective sarcasm. They appeared as part of a feature story that semi-scientifically ranked the most influential critics in the country. Roger came in first, until Gene started calling the writer of the article,

arguing that he actually deserved the top spot. Gene won, but only by a small margin. The point was, even with all their competitors, there was no single critic as powerful as Siskel and Ebert together. And in the 90s, that power would be felt across the industry. It would be Gene and Roger. They had to sit through a lot of movies. And, you know, when these jewels started appearing,

they were just so delighted to spend two hours sitting there watching something that was, you know, worth watching and worth thinking about. They felt that if it was something that they sincerely believed about a movie, it was okay to advocate for it. And I'm gonna use the word advocate or to talk about it or write about it. And she, in between, you know, readings,

came down and banged on the door and said, "'We have lines down the block in New York. It was a trip. When Roger and Gene began the crusade for the movie, suddenly it became like a cause. Gene and Roger is written and reported by me, Brian Rachtree, 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. Thank you for listening.