The Big Picture - 8. “Something Wonderful Is Coming to an End” | Gene and Roger

Episode Date: August 25, 2021

Still reeling from Gene Siskel's death, Roger Ebert tries to bring their show into the new century. But Hollywood is changing, and so is the media landscape Gene and Roger conquered during their time together. And as the story of Gene and Roger ends, it's clear that movies—and movie criticism—will never be the same again. Host: Brian Raftery Producers: Amanda Dobbins, Sean Fennessey, Isaac Lee, Noah Malale, Bobby Wagner Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In the fall of 2000, Roger Ebert introduced a new show and a new co-host. I'm Roger Ebert, film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times. And I'm Richard Roper, columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times. It had taken Roger more than a year to find his new partner. After Gene Siskel died in February 1999, Roger hosted a few episodes of Siskel and Ebert by himself. But as Chaz Ebert remembers, he was never comfortable going solo. He loved the back and forth between he and Gene, and he realized that that was something that he missed a lot.

And he said, let's find someone to replace Gene. It's going to be very difficult. At first, Roger taped episodes with a series of rotating co-hosts. Some were established newspaper critics, like Tom Shales, Kenneth Turan, and Wesley Morris. Roger also recruited filmmakers, including Martin Scorsese, who sat in during the show's Best of the 90s episode. Scorsese had Heat and Malcolm X tied for number 10 on his list, which is kind of cheating. But finding the right person to fill Gene's seat permanently was a tricky task. Some longtime fans, like David Letterman, thought it was a mistake to even try.

The show is worth doing. It is the only show on television. Do your own show. Just do your own show. You have to have somebody else. Gene and I made a format, I think, that is important. And it's the only show on national television that really seriously considers movies, tells you if they stink or not, and talks about little movies as well as big ones.

That's right. And you've got to be... One of Roger's most frequent guest hosts was Richard Roper, a Chicago newspaper writer. Richard had been a Siskel and Ebert fan for years. As a college student, he'd even auditioned for sneak previews when Gene and Roger left the show in 1982. Like an idiot, I'm like, I could do that. So I sent in a VHS. I tried to make it different, so instead of reviewing new movies,

I reviewed like Casablanca and a couple things like that. And they were nice enough to send me a letter and say, you know, you've got potential, but you're 11. You're not getting the job. Decades later, Richard was a pop culture columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times. He appeared with Roger on nearly a dozen episodes before being made permanent co-host.

Their show was given a clunky new title, Ebert and Roper and the Movies. After all those years as part of Siskel and Ebert, Roger finally had top billing. But the media landscape he had known for decades was about to collapse. For The Ringer, I'm Brian Raftery, and this is Gene & Roger. From his balcony seat in Chicago, Roger had witnessed Hollywood's numerous personality crises over the years.

He'd been there for the daring, auteur-driven 70s, the overblown 80s, and the indie-obsessed 90s. At the start of the new millennium, however, the big studios seemed unsure about where to head next. So they tried, not always successfully, to make movies for as many audiences as possible. There were grown-up thrillers, crass comedies, sweeping historical epics. Even musicals came back.

And Roger wanted to see as much as he could, sometimes fitting a half-dozen screenings into a single day. I remember we were in Vegas for some event once, and there was this big hall with 200 movie posters of movies that were coming out in that particular year. And Roger kind of sweeping his arms and saying, how lucky are we that we're going to get to see all these movies this year and be among the first to share with the world whether they should see them or not.

So he still did have that enthusiasm. Over the next few years, Roger's top 10 lists were heavy on R-rated comedies and dramas. Movies like Juno, Monster, and Almost Famous. They were small stories dealing with big ideas, just like the 60s and 70s films that had energized Gene and Roger when they first started out as critics. But the new millennium was also full of expensive spectacles like Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings. And Roger, who'd written pulp stories as a teen, was delighted that fantasy and sci-fi were being taken so seriously again. I think that it indicates a return by Hollywood to the kind of curries that led to great epics

like Lawrence of Arabia and the Star Wars trilogy. A really out there kind of large scale, ambitious undertaking that is too long. I agree with you. It's too long except for the people who are going to go see it. And they won't find it to be too long. Oddly enough, the people The people who have your objections to this film are not the kinds of people that will ever go to see it in the first place. Rogers still despised most sequels, especially if they had the words Deuce Bigelow in the title. But the modern franchise era was young. So young, no one was even calling it the franchise era yet.

Hollywood still had enough room for all kinds of films. And even now, in his fifth decade as a film critic, Roger was still energized by the movies he was seeing, and by the chance to argue about them with others. In January 2002, Roger headed to Utah for the annual Sundance Film Festival. That's where writer-director Justin Lin would be showing his debut feature, Better Luck Tomorrow.

It was an electrifying action drama about a group of Asian-American suburbanites who get tangled up in increasingly violent crimes. Its cast included John Cho and Sung Kang, future movie stars who at that point were still unknowns. Justin, who we heard from in episode two, knew Better Luck Tomorrow would be a tough sell at Sundance, where movies with big stars often get the most buzz. Having a film with no known names and also having an Asian American cast was not very commercial even in the indie world.

I could feel the politics of it. I could feel the business of it. But the response to Better Luck Tomorrow at Sundance had been mostly positive. That is until a Q&A session after one of the screenings. I remember it was last question. You know, I pointed out to this guy in the back and he stood up and just tore into me, tore into us, you know, about like, how dare you make a film about your community in a negative light?

And, you know, I remember just standing there going, whoa. But then the, what was crazy was before I could really even respond and kind of gather my thoughts, other people were standing up and they were screaming in the screening match and you could feel the energy in that room rise and rise.

All of a sudden you hear, I see someone waving and you're like, wait, is that Roger Ebert? And he just stood up on his seat and he started going at it with the guy and they were just started screaming at each other. What I find very offensive and condescending about your statement is nobody would say to a bunch of white filmmakers how could you do this to your people?

Yes. This film has the right to be about these people, and Asian American characters have the right to be whoever the hell they want to be. They do not have to represent their people. I still get people who come up to me and talk about that moment. They always say, well, you know, it's great that Roger Ebert came and defended your film,

you know, and I obviously appreciate and very proud to be part of that moment but what I think was more important to me was not defending my film it was about putting it in context that was more important that was the reason of making that movie and I think the fact that he was able to kind of stand up and really kind of say, hey, man, how dare you tell this filmmaker how to portray his own community? You know, he was putting it in context. And by doing that, it really brought the discourse wide open. When Roger got worked up about a movie, people listened.

After all, he was the best knownknown, most trusted film critic in the country. And with Ebert and Roper, he had a platform any writer would have envied. A hit TV show which drew more than 2 million weekly viewers. But Ebert and Roper had arrived just as the media was undergoing a radical shift. The early 2000s marked the final moments of the pre-digital era. Network TV shows were pulling in massive audiences, and glossy magazines were thick with ads. There was no such thing as second screening. No Facebook, no Twitter, no YouTube. Even Friendster wasn't around. But for those paying attention, it was clear, even back then, that the ways we watched, listened, read, and argued were all about to mutate. At once.

Here's a news report from early 2000. In theory, every internet website could offer TV quality video to the world. With broadband, we're all broadcasters. If I'm looking for information about how to bake bread, and there's a small video there that teaches me how to bake bread in five minutes, that's a powerful solution. But nothing's going to stop the fact that anyone, for very little money, can get on the web and put content up there that anybody in the world can see. Roger had seen it coming. In the late 90s, he noticed that hardcore movie fans

and their hardcore opinions were migrating to the web. So he pushed for Cisco Neighborhood to have its own site, one of the first shows to do so. So he pushed for Siskel and Ebert to have its own site, one of the first shows to do so. And after Gene died, Roger brought on one of the web's most notorious movie nerds, Harry Knowles, to join him as a guest critic. Harry operated his own film gossip site, Ain't It Cool News, from a tiny bedroom in Austin, Texas, and was seemingly online 24 hours a day, publishing anonymous film gossip and reviews from early test screenings. Studios alternated between kissing his ass

and threatening it, but for a brief period in the late 90s and early aughts, Harry was untouchable, the de facto leader of a new breed of film writers. They lacked polish and training, but they worked fast, publishing reviews as soon as they could, sometimes before a movie was even

completed. And they had lots of eager sources, as Harry explained to Inside Edition. If you believe in something like a worldwide geek network, people that are out there digging and working in the trenches, wearing disguises to see movies early to tell you if they're good or not, there's a sort of romance to that. Harry grew up watching Siskel and Ebert

and had emailed Roger asking for a chance to sit in as a guest host. To some, Roger and Harry made an odd pairing, a Pulitzer-winning journalist and a guy who'd never done time in a newsroom. But Harry, who was almost three decades younger than Roger, represented a generation of movie brats who discussed film with the same zeal,

if not the same pedigree, that Gene and Roger had when they began in the 60s. The new movie geeks were armed with voracious appetites, sped-up metabolisms, and an endless supply of all-caps opinions. And they were only going to get louder. By the early aughts, Roger was in his 60s, which meant that as pop culture figures go, he was in his elder statesman phase.

He'd been on television for three decades, a feat usually reserved for news anchors and talk show hosts. His on-air wardrobe hadn't changed much. He was still wearing sweaters and blazers. But his hair had grayed, and his voice had become lower and raspier. His show looked different, too. In the 70s and 80s, Gene and Roger could fill an entire half hour with just four reviews.

But viewers' attention spans were plummeting, and the number of digital distractions was rising. So Ebert and Roper and the Movies became a faster-paced show, sometimes squeezing in as many as six films an episode. The thumbs-up, thumbs-down format, however, would never go away, even if it sometimes drove Roger crazy. In an Ebert and Roper episode from 2005, Roger pointed his thumbs down on Steven Spielberg's remake of War of the Worlds,

while giving thumbs-up votes to a couple of lousy remakes. That decision didn't make much sense to his co-host. Well, how many times do I have to explain to you that ratings are relative, not absolute? You know, I understand it. I'm just saying that if ET gets four stars and Close Encounters gets four stars, this gets two stars.

And Longest Share gets thumbs up and this gets thumbs down. Well, you know, oddly enough, no. It doesn't work that way. Well, how does it not work that way? Because people should be smart enough to listen to what we say instead of looking at the dumb thumbs and the dumb stars

because there are gradations and contexts that go on. Roger may have grown tired of the dumb thumbs, but they've become part of his and Gene's legacies. Taking a set of complex critical ideas and reducing them to a simple yay or nay vote had once been seen as hacky. Now it was how many TV reviewers talked about movies. Sometimes with stars, sometimes with grades, sometimes with produce.

That's why I have this big apple rating scale. Four apples, three apples, two apples, one apple, and half a wormy apple. Still, Gene and Roger's impact went far beyond just their thumbs. The dueling critics format they'd created with producer Thea Flohm had seeped into the DNA of TV. There had been other debate shows before sneak previews, of course. But Gene and Roger had perfected a specific conversational style. One that was combative, but mostly cordial,

with plenty of room for interruptions and asides. That off-the-cuff, head-to-head approach had become the norm. Here's CNN executive Jim Murphy, who worked as a producer and director on Siskel and Ebert. Pick any two show where two people host together and try to compete and argue all the time, and whatever format they have was based on Siskel and Ebert. Find out who's in the crossfire weeknights, 730 Eastern on CNN.

But, you know, again, you could say this about any state, but let's just wait and see how it returns. I was beginning, Joe, to respect your demeanor because this is a serious issue. Let's not play politics and let's not play games. I was joking with you, Bob. Don't lose your sense of humor tonight. I don't want to blame Gene and Roger for all the arguing that dominates TV, but they had invented a brisk, entertaining way to do battle, one that can be applied to any subject, from movies to politics to sports. In 2001, ESPN introduced Pardon the Interruption, a news and debate show starring journalists

Michael Wilbon and Tony Kornheiser. What if, and I'm playing devil's advocate here, what if the Lakers continue to shoot poorly even when Shaq comes back? They won't. Why? It's magic. He sprinkles magic dust.

No, it's not magic. When the ball goes into the big fella, you collapse your defense to stop him, and all of a sudden, Derek Fisher is open, Robert Horry is open. PTI began when ESPN executive Jim Cohen pitched the idea to co-creator Eric Ridehome, who'd grown up in Chicago. Ridehome immediately thought of Siskel and Ebert as a model. What struck him about the show, years later,

wasn't so much what Gene and Roger thought about each movie. It was how they expressed those thoughts. What I do is I tend to watch television shows for the sort of rhythm of it. So I can't remember too many of the specific points, but I do remember the rhythm. You start off with two sort of monologues, if you will, juxtaposed, and then you move into the discussion where things can go back and forth and so the velocity of it was two minute clip or minute long clip soliloquy 30 seconds soliloquy 30 seconds and now back and forth back and forth back and forth back and forth and so there was an accelerant

or an acceleration to their discussion that's what i noticed and made the deepest impression on me. And it's the type of thing that years later resurfaced when we developed PTI. I loved that rhythm. Think about how often you hear that rhythm now. On podcasts, radio programs, cable news shows. It's a friendly fire approach to debate. One that lets people raise their points and raise their voices before quickly moving on to the next subject with no harm done. It's become the default method of fighting in public.

And nobody did it as well as Gene and Roger. Nor for so long. We'll be right back. In the summer of 2006, Roger made one of his last on-screen appearances. It was to review A Prairie Home Companion, the final film from one of Roger's favorite directors, Robert Altman. I felt good during this movie from the beginning to the end. It was as warm and embracing as the radio show itself, and yet it was something more. There's a sense of elegy in the film, a sense that something wonderful is coming to an end,

and the way to handle that is not to regret it of elegy in the film. A sense that something wonderful is coming to an end, and the way to handle that is not to regret it, but to treasure the memories. A few weeks after that review aired, Roger was in the hospital. Though viewers didn't know it at the time, he'd recently undergone a pair of cancer surgeries. And in July 2006, while being

treated for surgery in his jaw, he had an emergency procedure. It wound up keeping him in the hospital for almost a year. During that time, Roper co-hosted the show with a mix of critics, filmmakers, and celebrities. Kevin Smith took a seat on the set. So did Fred Willard, the New York Times' A.O. Scott, and John Mellencamp. But it was always the feeling that this is a placeholder and that eventually Roger's going to come back. And I felt that way, even though I was not naive or in the dark about how serious his illness was. The cancer meant Roger's lower jaw had to be removed,

making it impossible for him to speak, eat, or drink. For a while, Roger stopped watching movies. But he eventually began working again, posting essays on his personal website, writing reviews for the Sun-Times, and at one point publishing three books within a single year. And in 2009, he joined Twitter and immediately became one of their most popular and prolific users. Roger tweeted constantly,

about movies, politics, literature. He also tweeted out a lot of celebrity birthdays. Within a year, he had hundreds of thousands of followers, a giant number in those days. And he used the internet to keep Gene's memory alive. One year, to celebrate what would have been Gene's 67th birthday, Roger tweeted every hour about their time together. News articles, essays, clips of them on Letterman.

He was still in touch with Gene's fans, as well as his family. Later in life, I started writing poetry, and he sent me links to poems he loved and a YouTube channel of poetry that he listened to and loved. Callie Siskel, Gene's younger daughter. And again, I always felt, you know, now of course I regret it, but I always felt he was there. Like he would be there to talk to us about our dad. He would be there for us. Not long after Roger began tweeting, Kate Siskel, Gene's older daughter, asked him for a favor.

She just started a new marketing job, and her boss was trying to get a press release to go viral. Something bosses actually used to ask people to do a decade ago. So she asked Roger to tweet it out, even though it had nothing to do with movies. He was like, of course, I'd be so happy to do it. You know, I'll tweet anything you send me, you know, anything you want me to tweet, you know, happy, happy to do it.

So he did, and of course I hadn't said anything to any of my colleagues about my dad being, you know, half of Siskel and Ebert. But, you know, we're in the office and some one of my colleagues is scrolling Twitter and he's like, why is Roger Ebert tweeting about our Series B financing? And I was like, oh, well, I'm like, I asked him to. And then, you know, my coworker just kind of does this like beat and he's like, wait, wait a minute. Wait, wait. And I was like, yeah, you know, you know, I think our families have a really strong, strong bond because we shared something, you know, our fates were intertwined, really.

And to me, they were like family and we are family in a way. And it's just, I don't know. I think it's really beautiful. By 2008, Roger's show was in trouble. Roper and his guest hosts were still taping Ebert and Roper every week. But Roger had been off the air for nearly two years, and the show was losing momentum. One night, Roper had dinner with some new executives at Buena Vista Television,

the company that had syndicated Roger's show since 1986. They told him it was time to make some changes. They'd say, after you review Tom Cruise's movie, we'll go to Tom Cruise and he'll do a rebuttal. And I'm like, well, first of all, they're not going to do that. Second of all, no. And many, many other ideas like that were my feeling was it was not going to honor the legacy of what Gene and Roger had done, at least in a way that I wanted it to be done. That summer, Roger and Richard left the show for good. In any other year,

the end of Ebert and Roper would have been seen as a milestone. But in 2008, it was just another casualty of a full-on media meltdown. Magazines and newspapers, hit hard by the recession, laid off thousands of employees. On TV, even hit shows were shedding millions of viewers. And the movie industry was trying to rebound after years of audience decline. The two worlds in which Roger had happily embedded himself for decades,

journalism and show business, were both in crisis mode. The culprit, not surprisingly, was the internet. During the two years Roger was away from the show, Facebook and Twitter had taken off, and YouTube had begun paying creators to make their own content. Anyone who wanted to broadcast their thoughts could now beam them to an audience of millions from their own home. If you wanted to know what people thought of the latest movies, you didn't need to wait for the big critics to weigh in. There were now millions of first responders

posting their opinions right after the closing credits rolled. Even Harry Knowles, once the king of the geeks, was struggling to keep up. It was a tough environment for a weekly TV show about movies. But for a few years, Disney kept trying.

They relaunched At the Movies twice, including a version co-hosted by A.O. Scott. But the end was inevitable. In 2010, 35 years after Gene and Roger had taped their very first pilot, At the Movies was canceled. Roger spent his last years doing what he loved, watching movies. He wrote more than 300 reviews in 2012.

And he rewatched old films too, sometimes inviting friends and loved ones to sit with him. He'd always shared his favorite movies with others, movies that meant a lot to him, even if people didn't always see what Roger saw in them. We had a house out on the lake in Michigan, our summer cottage, and we used to invite people out to spend the weekend

and watch movies with us. And one night, sometimes people want to just watch something funny, or Roger would say, nope, I'm the film critic. I get to choose the movie. And he made us all watch Joe and the Volcano. In case you missed it, Joe vs. the Volcano stars Tom Hanks' Joe, a factory drone who's told he only has a few months to live. So he quits his job and decides to make good use of his remaining time.

I've been working here four and a half years. The work I did I probably could have done in five or six months. At least four years left over. Four years. If I had them now, I'd gold in my hand. When Joe vs. the Volcano was released in 1990, Roger was one of the few major critics

to give it a glowing review. A lot of people just didn't get it. Like Chaz, who couldn't even make it through her first viewing. But seeing it through Roger's eyes changed that. Some of the themes of the movie really became so clear to me that I didn't see before about humanity and people helping and about what do you carry with you if everything is lost and you have only like one suitcase full of

stuff? Or how do you connect with people who are so different than you? All of these things I saw and I said, oh my God, of course, somebody like Roger would have seen that when some of us were looking at it and thought, yeah, it's just a weird movie. And it was only toward the end, after he was sick, that I realized how much that movie meant to him. On April 2nd, 2013, Roger wrote a post on his website, announcing he was taking what he called a leave of presence. He wasn't going to stop reviewing movies, he said.

He was just going to slow down a bit. Roger died two days later, at the age of 70. His death inspired eulogies from several directors, including Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and Spike Lee. But that's just a small sample of the filmmakers whose work Gene and Roger talked about, and raved about, during their decades together. For millions of people, Siskel and Ebert was their introduction to Errol Morris, Carl Franklin, Mira Nair, John Sales, Steve James, John Singleton, and so many other writers and directors from the 70s through the 90s. But Gene and Roger's influence goes beyond those years. There's now a whole generation of filmmakers who learned about movies and movie makers from Siskel and Ebert.

Filmmakers like Justin Lin. As a kid, I was sitting there and even if I didn't quite understand it, I was being open to other pieces of work, other, you know, other filmmakers. It was very helpful for me in a way, just being, in film, and that half hour I got to spend with them, there'll be times I get excited because they're reviewing Bachelor Party or something, but then right next to Bachelor Party is

a Scorsese movie. To me, that's what I feel like is missing a lot now. Because now it's like you're only getting fed what people think you want or what you want. That may be why old clips from Gene and Roger's shows keep resurfacing online decades after they aired.

They're a reminder of a time when movies dominated the culture and our lives. A handful of new films would arrive every weekend, seemingly at random, each one full of promise. And for nearly 25 years, Gene and Roger would let us know if they were worthy of our time. And for all the critics, podcasters, and writers they influenced, there's still nobody out there as forceful, as thoughtful, or as funny as Gene and Roger were together. They had a history that went back decades.

A history that was the source of both their tension and their camaraderie. It's what made exchanges like this possible. If this movie had a theme song, it would be, Dumbbells Keep Falling on My Head. The story makes no sense. I feel for every family that's going to be suckered into seeing Home Alone 3. Now this is going to astound you, but I'm giving the movie thumbs up. It does astound me. Are you okay? Better than you were the day that you liked Starship Troopers. Okay. Oh no. Half a million people watched that video earlier this year. It wasn't because they loved Home Alone

3. It's because for those of us who grew up with Gene and Roger, those old reviews remind us of our own peak moviegoing years and of the two critics who helped guide us through them. And for those of us who grew up with Gene and Roger, those old reviews remind us of our own peak moviegoing years, and of the two critics who helped guide us through them. And for those who weren't around during the Siskel and Ebert era, those clips give them something to discover, learn from, and argue about. Here's Kate Siskel. I like it a lot when these things pop back up because, you know, for the first chapter of my life that's what I knew which was they were doing this thing and people were reacting to it and so it feels kind of restorative in a way to have that somehow be able to continue after they're they're both gone and because also I think it's exposing potentially some new folks to to them or to the show who didn't see it in real time.

And I also like to read some of the Twitter comments. And I think some of them are funny to me, even the ones that are critical. It feels okay to me in some ways because there's two of them. So it doesn't feel like everyone's just taking like a swing at my dad. You know, it's like either they're like, some people are like, I'm an Ebert or I'm a Siskel or, you know, like Siskel's pretentious or Ebert's pretentious. A few years before Roger's death, he published a lengthy tribute to his former partner. Gene, Siskel and I were like tuning forks, Roger wrote. Strike one and the other would pick up the same frequency.

And it's true. You saw it. You saw it. When they were together, the air in the room changed. It just felt like even the vibrations in the room were higher when they were really joyful together. Back in October 1994, Gene and Roger appeared on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. It was a few years before Gene's diagnosis. They were halfway through what would turn out to be their final decade together, and their happiest. Sitting with Roger, Gene told a story he'd brought up in other interviews

about how Meryl Streep had given him an impromptu acting lesson by teaching him how to say, I love you. So Leno decided to put it to the test. Between the two of you, we would see which was the better acting. You mean we're supposed to tell each other that we love each other? Well, that would be the ultimate acting exercise.

It sure would. Gene, why don't you go first? At this point, Gene and Roger turn and look each other right in the eyes. Roger? Yes? This isn't going to be easy for me to say. My wife's backstage. We've been happily married for almost 15 years.

But I love you. All right, let's try Ebert. Ebert, I love you. Take one. Ready? Action. Jane, this is going to come as an enormous surprise to my wife and to everyone else who knows us, but you know, big guy,

I love you. was executive produced by Sean Fennessy. Our producers were Amanda Dobbins, Noah Malalay, Bobby Wagner, and Isaac Lee, with music and sound design by Isaac Lee. Copyediting was done by Craig Gaines, and fact-checking by Kellen B. Coates. Our art director was David Shoemaker. Illustration by Eddie Feig. Before we wrap, two quick things.

In episode four, I mentioned Siskel and Ebert's review of Porky's 2 the next day, when I was actually referringbert's review of Porky's 2 the next day, when I was actually referring to their review of Porky's Revenge. As someone who worked in a video store for several years, and rented the Porky's films to many a teenage doofus, I humbly apologize.

More importantly, I want to add a special thanks to Chaz Ebert and Marlene Igleton for all their help, and to my wife Jenny Williams for all her support. And most of all, thank you for listening.