The Big Picture - 6. “The Human Condition” | Gene and Roger

Episode Date: August 17, 2021

For Siskel and Ebert, the '90s were a revolutionary era—both for the movies and for their careers. A new generation of filmmakers was taking over Hollywood, and Gene and Roger became cheerleaders for the bold next wave of writers and directors. But the industry was also plagued by problems and controversies, many of which Siskel and Ebert faced head on. By the time the '90s ended, Gene and Roger would become more than just the country's best-known film critics. They'd also become advocates. Host: Brian Raftery Producers: Amanda Dobbins, Sean Fennessey, Isaac Lee, Noah Malale, Bobby Wagner Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit Superstore.ca to get started. For Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, the 90s arrived a few months ahead of schedule, thanks to a movie that began heating up theaters in the summer of 1989. To Do the Right Thing was not a parable or a pep talk, but an attempt to show how little feelings can grow up into big ones

and how a race riot can seemingly come out of nowhere. It was a strong, courageous film, one of the few American films in recent years that uncompromisingly tried to say something serious about race relations in our country. The filmmaking is so much fun that people who didn't go to this picture because they thought it might be too painful for them to watch or some kind of preachy lecture, boy, did they miss an entertaining motion picture. The 1990s are going to be better because this guy's making films.

Gene's prediction turned out to be spot on. The 80s had begun with Raging Bull and ended with a lot of big-budget bullshit. But as that decade wound down, Lee and a new wave of filmmakers, all of them stubborn, smart, and independent, would rise up. Their movies energized audiences and critics, especially Siskel and Ebert. Here's Marlene Igleson, Jean's wife. They had us 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. Gene and Roger weren't the only ones to champion Do the Right Thing. And it's not like the movie needed their help. But they were the only film critics who could share their enthusiasm to an audience of millions. By the time the 90s began, Gene and Roger had been reviewing movies together for nearly

15 years. They had celebrity and credibility, and in the next decade, they'd leverage both. Not just to root for their favorite films and filmmakers, but to take on big targets, like the Academy Awards, the Movie Ratings Board, even a U.S. presidential candidate. Here's Chaz Ebert. They felt that if it was something that they sincerely believed about a movie, it was okay to advocate for it. And I'm going to use the word advocate or to talk about it or write about it. In a lot of ways, the 90s would be the most impassioned period of Gene and Roger's career.

They'd get caught up in a new film revolution, the kind they hadn't experienced since first becoming critics. And this time around, Siskel and Ebert would be more than just witnesses to Hollywood history. They'd become participants. For The Ringer, I'm Brian Raftery, and this is Gene and Roger. A quick disclaimer here. I don't want to oversell the 90s. I grew up under the thumb of the baby boomers, which means that for the first 25 years of my life, I was subjected to nonstop reminders

of how wonderful the 60s were. So I know how aggravating it is when some middle-aged jerk insists that just because you're younger, you missed out on the good times. All that being said, going to the movies in the 90s was fantastic. Gene and Roger knew it was a special decade.

It helped, of course, that many of the directors they'd celebrated in the past, Altman, Spielberg, Scorsese, were still making adventurous, must-see movies throughout the 90s. At the same time, the decade saw a rebirth in the kind of smart, slick studio films that Gene and Roger had always championed,

the well-made popcorn movie. On July 4th, die harder. Speed. Get ready for rush hour. Harrison Ford. Tommy Lee Jones. In the action adventure of the year, The Fugitive.

As far as Siskel and Ebert were concerned, those were all thumbs-up movies. Gene even put Die Hard 2 in his top 10 list for 1990. Number one was Goodfellas, obviously. And while there were still plenty of bad sequels, the early 90s saw the rise of a smarter, more grown-up brand of blockbuster. There were millions of moviegoers to please, and the studios attracted them with mid-budget dramas and thrillers. Unforgiven, Basic Instinct, Last of the Mohicans. But the early 90s was mostly about the thrill of the new. New filmmakers, new stars,

new ideas about what a movie could be. Especially when it came to cheaper movies made outside of the studio system. Gene and Roger have been covering indie films since the beginning of their careers, even dedicating an entire Sneak Previews episode to them in 1981. Back then, they almost had to hold the viewers by the hand and explain what, exactly, an independent movie was. How do you find them? You have to read the paper. You have to read your regional arts magazines and find out that they might be playing at campus film societies. The bad films have a way of finding you, but you've got to go out and find the good films.

Ten years later, though, moviegoers didn't have to look too hard for smaller movies. The rise of the home video market and the growing strength of the art house circuit had given lower budget dramas and comedies more ways to reach audiences and to make money. That meant studio execs could afford to take risks. And so could moviegoers. The result was a collision of movements.

There was the new wave of American indies, kicked off by Steven Soderbergh's Sex, Lies, and Videotape. The surge of new black filmmakers, led not only by Spike Lee, but by John Singleton with Boys in the Hood, and the Hughes Brothers with Menace to Society. And a remarkable run of documentaries, like Crumb and The War Room.

Many of these movies became hits right away, but others were smaller films that, like My Dinner with Andre, needed some word of mouth to get moviegoers' attention. That's what happened to director Carl Franklin in the summer of 1992. Franklin's new movie, an intense crooks-on-the-run thriller titled One False Move, had picked up rave reviews at festivals. But getting it booked in theaters had been a struggle. At one point, it looked as though One False Move would head straight to videocassette, which in the early 90s was a mark of shame.

It was very discouraging. We thought the movie was good, but you know, you're always uncertain as a filmmaker. You don't know until you release it out to the public and see what their response is. And here we thought, you know, here we were going to do a movie that was going to play in the theaters, you know, and that was what I was considering my first real

movie. One False Move is a low-budget indie with some harrowing violence and a few remarkable twists. It's great. Seriously, you should see it. But it was also a tough sell. The film's only big star was Bill Paxton of Aliens and Terminator fame. And though Billy Bob Thornton played the main villain,

with one of the most unfortunate movie haircuts of all time, he wasn't a star yet. One false move was the kind of movie that could have easily gotten lost. By the first week of June, the movie was playing in just a handful of theaters, on its way to video store shelves forever. Franklin and his producing partner and wife, Jesse Beaton,

were already working on their next project. That's when their phones started ringing. We just kept getting word, wow, did you know that Roger and Ebert and Gene Siskel were on this show and they said this about your movie? Earlier that week, Gene and Roger had made a brief cameo in a long-running pop culture sideshow, The Late Night Wars. Johnny Carson had just left The Tonight Show after a 30-year run, and Jay Leno was taking over hosting duties amid a swirl of media attention. Live from the NBC studios in Burbank, California,

The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. Leno's arrival was treated as a national news event. More than 15 million people had tuned in for his debut. To keep the hype going, producers booked several big stars for Leno's first two weeks. Stars like Tom Cruise, Mel Gibson, Jean-Claude Van Damme, and Siskel Niebert. Gene and Roger used their time on The Tonight Show couch to praise one false move, a film Leno's viewers probably hadn't even heard of. Suddenly, a movie that had been all but left for dead

was on its way to playing in more than 50 cities around the country. We were in Minnesota, and I remember I was reading actors, and Jesse was, of course, as a producer, was in another part of the production office. 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. It's great. When Roger and Jean began the crusade for the movie, suddenly it became like a cause. In the spring of 1989,

Roger walked out of a Cannes Film Festival screening with tears in his eyes. For someone who turned to movies as a way to understand the worlds of others, Do the Right Thing must have felt like an empathy overload. The story of several intersecting lives in a Brooklyn neighborhood teeming with racial tension. A few days later, when the movie failed to win the festival's top prize, Roger was enraged. Roger thought that the movie had been cheated. He was so angry at that time that he told them at Cannes that he would never come back

because he felt that Do the Right Thing should have won. And there's a very funny note that Spike Lee wrote to Roger and said, Dear Roger Ebert, I give you permission to return to the Cannes Film Festival, even though Do the Right Thing didn't win. Later, when Do the Right Thing was shut out of the major Oscar races, Gene and Roger were livid. They'd both picked the movie as their number one film of the year, which had only happened on their show once before with The Right Stuff back in 1983. They'd also both put Do the Right Thing on their top 10 lists for the entire decade. Nowadays, the Academy, and all of its flaws,

are ongoing points of contention. But that wasn't the case 30 years ago. And while Gene and Roger had complained about the Oscars in the past, the Do the Right Thing snub was a never-ending source of outrage. They brought it up on the air whenever they could. For Gene and Roger, who'd spent so much time battling one another, the Academy gave them a common

foe to team up against. The membership is older, it's white, and they didn't embrace this film, which was clearly way out ahead the best film of the year as far as I was concerned. I want to tell you, they prefer race when it's dealt with at a distance, in glory, a hundred years ago. Or in Driving Miss Daisy. A couple years ago. Now those are both very good movies, but it's much easier to have a movie about how Miss Daisy and her old black chauffeur like each other

than to have a movie about whether or not, the real question in our society today is not whether Miss Daisy likes her chauffeur, but whether Mookie and Sal, the pizzeria man, will ever get to like each other. Because until they can talk to each other, race relations in this country are going to be on hold. In that same episode, they'd also rail against the Academy's treatment of Michael Moore's Roger and Me. The documentary follows Moore as he travels through Flint, Michigan, where General Motors had been closing plants and laying off thousands of workers. It had been one of their favorite movies of the year, and a modest box office success. But Roger and Me had been completely shut out of the documentary Oscar race, and many of its fans, including Siskel Niebert, suspected it was a victim of the Academy's broken voting system. Not to go off on too much of an Oscar history tangent, but

back in the 90s, the Academy's documentary committee was mostly made up of older retirees. They didn't go for controversial topics, and sometimes they didn't even finish the movies they were supposed to watch. If one of the voters got bored, he or she would shine a flashlight at the screen. When enough flashlights popped up in the room, the movie was simply turned off. Next time you want to complain about the Academy's voting methods, keep in mind, they used to be even worse. Anyway, back in the 90s, these kind of arcane behind-the-scenes struggles weren't exactly a hot topic, but Gene and Roger made obscure Oscar rules a point of conversation, one that

was picked up by the mainstream press. It was a subject that critics returned to just a few years later, when Steve James' basketball saga Hoop Dreams was also shut out of the documentary category. Which is still a crazy thing to say out loud, even 25 years later. This situation stinks, it's rotten, and until the Academy reforms it, they have shame on their name. Siskel and Ebert took their case to the Late Show with David Letterman, where everyone, including Dave, commiserated over Hoop Dream's shutout. A few months later, the Academy announced they'd be incorporating new voting laws,

and new voters. I'm not saying it was Siskel and Ebert who got the rules changed, but no other critics had the reach or the sway to turn a bureaucratic squabble into a common cause. When you think about what Gene and Roger did, and you look at the types of things that they championed over the years, one of the reasons I think they had such staying power is because of the passion they brought to their movie reviewing and the humanity that they brought to their movie viewing. You know, those are the things that they really cared about the human condition. We'll be right back. Say hello to Tim Selects, Tim's everyday value menu. Enjoy the new spinach and feta savory egg pastry or our roasted red pepper and Swiss pinwheel starting at only $2.99 plus tax. Try one or try our full Tim's Selects lineup.

Terms apply. Prices may vary at participating restaurants in Canada. It's time for Tim's. If Gene and Roger became more heated than usual in the 90s, well, it was a pretty heated decade, especially in Hollywood. Movie studios, TV networks, and record labels were the subject of protests and letter-writing campaigns from groups who seemed capable of being shocked by anything and everything. You could basically do a We Didn't Start the Fire

featuring all the decade's pop culture targets. 2 Live Crew, Ice-T, Murphy Brown and MTV, I'm not saying this by the way, V Chips, Natural Born Killers, Married With Children. Looking back now, a lot of the early 90s culture wars were simply ridiculous. And nearly all of them were steeped in racism and misogyny. But for years, they were a media obsession.

And it would have been impossible for Gene and Roger, as the country's go-to movie experts, to stay on the sidelines. After all, they had a personal stake in some of these fights. For years, Gene and Roger had been fed up with the movie rating system. Roger, in particular, felt that the Motion Picture Association of America, the board that decides if a movie should be rated G or PG or R, was stigmatizing too many grown-up films by giving them an X.

That rating was a kiss of death. Once a movie was given an X, most theaters wouldn't play it, and most moviegoers would never be able to see it. Roger had some first-hand experience with the rating system. Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, the bawdy showbiz satire he'd written earlier in his career had been rated X when it was released in 1970. For years afterward, Roger publicly lobbied for a new rating to be created, one that wouldn't

have the same stigma as the dreaded X. It was an issue that didn't get much traction until 1990. By then, the rating system's flaws had become obvious. A few well-made but very adult films, including Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer, had been released without a rating at all, causing confusion. That year, Roger debated Jack Valenti, the head of the MPAA, on national TV. Their back-and-forth took place on an hour-long Siskel and Ebert special on CBS that drew more than 11 million people, possibly the biggest primetime audience of Gene and Roger's career. Jack, there's not a person watching this show who doesn't know what hardcore pornography is.

We're talking about movies like The Cook, The Thief, The Wife and Her Lover, or Wild Orchid, or Angel Heart, or Nine and a Half Weeks. What are you saying about those films? I'm saying that they do not deserve to be lumped with the X and there's no place for them in the R. You've let the X get away from you. All I'm saying, well, that's your opinion, Roger. The parents of America believe that this rating system is quite suitable to their needs. And frankly, we don't make the rating system for Ebert and Siskel, and we don't make it for producers. Not long afterward, the MPAA introduced a new rating for adult films, NC-17. Unlike X-rated movies, an NC-17 film could, in theory, play in mainstream movie theaters.

So if you saw the NC-17 rated showgirls on the big screen, you have Gene and Roger to thank. Again, I'm not implying they were solely responsible for making that change possible, but their support definitely helped. There were other battles to be fought during those years, some of them taking place

outside Hollywood. In the mid-90s, Gene and Roger got wrapped up in a very public fight between the movie industry and Bob Dole, the Republican senator who'd just launched a presidential run. In 1995,

Dole gave a speech attacking Hollywood for what he called the mainstreaming of deviancy. He singled out recent hits like True Romance and Natural Born Killers. It seemed like the only movie

he really liked was Forrest Gump. Dole's comments were picked up in newspapers across the country and supported by Michael Medved, one of the critics who'd replaced Gene and Roger on sneak previews a decade earlier. It was all part of a growing concern throughout the 90s that movies with sex and violence were damaging the country's moral fiber.

Gene and Roger were invited to the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., where they gave their thoughts on Dull's comments. In a crowded room full of reporters, Gene went off, partly because he didn't believe violent movies were automatically evil, and partly because the senator hadn't even seen the movies he was railing against.

To Gene, as both an expert movie watcher and an expert debater, Dole's intellectual dishonesty was more offensive than anything on the screen. I have three children, young children. I care about this deeply. And I try and talk to them about why they thought it was bad so they feel comfortable exercising their opinion. That's caring about movies more than saying they're awful out there in Hollywood. That's so easy. It's so cheap. It's so beneath us as we conclude this millennium.

Though Gene and Roger saw themselves as movie critics, not activists, they could afford to pick a few public fights, especially with Hollywood. They knew the studios never fought back, and even if they tried, Gene and Roger were pretty much untouchable. Despite being regular guests on Leno and Letterman, and despite the fact that their own show was produced by Disney, Gene and Roger were, in a lot of ways, showbiz outsiders. During their 25 years together, they remained in Chicago,

far from the studios in L.A., and from the big media empires in Manhattan. In a 1987 appearance on Phil Donahue's show, Gene explained why he put so much distance between himself and the powers that be. How much virginity do you think you have to have? Do you go to lunch with producers?

Sure. Directors? Producers, directors, stars. We live in Chicago, so we don't really participate in the social world. I prefer not to have the meal. I prefer to do the interview for my newspaper, the Chicago Tribune,

so that when I meet these people, I am a working journalist trying to find out information that they don't want to give me necessarily. But can you? Gene didn't want to get too friendly with the people making movies. In his early days at the Tribune, he had star-struck encounters with legends like Cary Grant and John Wayne, whom Gene once took for a late-night bar tour around Chicago.

But by the time he was a nationally known critic, Gene was far more weary of Hollywood. He skipped the festivals that often threw together filmmakers and critics. And even when Gene championed a filmmaker, like Carl Franklin, he tried not to get too close. He didn't want anything to influence his reviews. I think it was Gene who I saw and I said, you know, I don't know if it's

appropriate for me to thank you. And he said, no, it's not. And he said, plus, I may not like your next movie. Roger was much more comfortable being around talent. He loved interviewing actors on the sets of their films. And he was a regular at festivals where he'd have long meals with directors. It was all part of his job, of course, but it's not hard to imagine Roger being bemused by it all. Here he was, a kid from small-town Illinois, hanging out with movie stars. On that 1990 TV special, Roger cruised the south of France on a private boat with one of the biggest names in Hollywood, and you could see the look of delight on his face. I'm Clint Eastwood. This is Roger Ebert. And we're on the way to see my new film at the

Cannes Film Festival, right here in beautiful downtown Cannes. Roger developed friendships with several filmmakers over the decades. Eastwood, Robert Altman, Ava DuVernay. And it was at Cannes that Roger first got to know Quentin Tarantino. They met at the festival in 1992, while Tarantino was promoting his debut Reservoir Dogs, which would eventually get a thumbs down from both Gene and Roger. A few years later, though, Roger got his first look at a movie that soon became one of his 90s obsessions, Pulp Fiction. 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. But I kind of knew I had him by that point in time, if he's saying that. And he saw it again, and then he started becoming like the prophet of it. The way he used to show Citizen Kane and stop it from time to time and point out this and point out that, he started doing screenings of Pulp Fiction. Not long afterward, Gene and Roger filmed a special dedicated to the work of Tarantino,

who at that point had directed just two movies. And in that episode, they stood by their original thumbs-down review of Reservoir Dogs. Roger's relationships with filmmakers never seemed to affect his reviews of the movies they made. In 1994, Robert Altman, another of Roger's favorite directors, was about to release his latest film, a fashion industry satire titled Ready to Wear. That's when Roger received a call from one of the film's producers, Harvey Weinstein. Roger wasn't crazy about Ready to Wear. And as Chaz recalls, Harvey was trying to talk him out of a bad review.

I do remember that he was like, oh, but you know that he's really sick, Roger. He's going to die. And Roger said, you know what? I really doubt that my review or higher review is going to keep him alive. Roger's final verdict? A thumbs down. It was one of several negative reviews he and Gene would give to directors they'd gotten to know over the years. In 1982, they helped organize a tribute to Martin Scorsese,

a director both of them loved. Just a few years later, Scorsese released the pool hall drama The Color of Money. Gene and Roger both gave the movie very emphatic thumbs-down reviews, a decision I do not agree with. That's not pool, that's gimmickry. It looked like it was set up for a TV commercial or something. And it's all the more disappointing because The Color of Money was directed by Martin Scorsese,

who is one of the two or three best movie directors around today. Less than a decade later, in 1995, Gene went negative on another Scorsese film, Casino. He sounds almost personally let down by the film. And as I watched this movie, repeatedly I felt that director Martin Scorsese, America's best, may have come to the end of this mob milieu. He's told this story in different times and places in much more exciting ways. Not one of my favorite Scorsese takes. But those reviews demonstrate why Gene and Roger's quasi-outsider status was so valuable.

It gave them the freedom to take down a movie or take up a cause without being influenced by others. They could be truthful, even when the truth hurt. By the 90s, Gene and Roger had developed an unusual relationship with Hollywood. On the one hand, they were well-known celebs who were invited to talk shows and awards season parties, and who would rush to defend the movie business when they felt it was being unfairly attacked. But on the other hand, Gene and Roger also served as the industry's best-known antagonists, criticizing the showbiz status quo, pushing for big changes, and they refused to let personal friendships with filmmakers and actors cloud their judgment. Gene and Roger kept their distance from Hollywood in every way possible.

They were their own two-man industry, and over time, that only brought them closer. There's a moment from the 90s that would stay with Roger for years afterward, a mark of how much their relationship had grown. Gene and Roger had been invited to appear at Harvard Law School, where they were supposed to give an academic film talk. Instead, it turned into a goofy, uproarious two-man comedy bit. It went so well that afterward, Gene told Roger, in all seriousness, that they should consider taking their act to Vegas. We were never funnier, Roger later wrote. I'm not making this up. I don't know what happened.

Afterward, over dinner, Gene and Roger had their longest conversation ever, one that touched upon life, death, and everything in between. At one point, Gene talked about what he'd learned from studying philosophy and from his Jewish upbringing. He'd been raised not to dwell too much on the afterlife. What was important, Gene told Roger,

was this life, how we live it, what we contribute, our families, and the memories we leave. It was the kind of discussion they couldn't have had when they started out as Siskel and Ebert. But it was a talk that now came easily to Gene and Roger. next time on gene and roger they started to realize i think over time you know they were each great critics in their own right and great journalists and well-known and big stars but they had a thing together that made them much more valuable. I mean, it isn't to say that they weren't competitive, but the edges started to soften. I'm standing far apart, but I hear Roger say, how's Marlene taking this? So immediately I know it's about Jean and something's not okay with Gene. Roger really stepped up and carried the bigger load on those tapings

when it was clear Gene just wasn't up to it. We had made plans to go see him, I think that Monday, and I think he passed away that Saturday. Gene and Roger is written and reported by me, Brian 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.