If they gave a film their trademark “two thumbs up!”-whether it was My Dinner With Andre or Anaconda-moviegoers would take it seriously. If that sounds quaint now, remember that back then, there was no internet.
ROGER AND EBERT MOVIE
Instead, Gene and Roger brought the movie conversation out of the theater lobby and into your home-and invited you to listen along.Īt the end of each episode of Siskel & Ebert, Gene and Roger would deliver their verdicts on the week’s big movies: thumbs-up or thumbs-down?
And they did so in a way that didn’t make you feel intimidated or uneducated about film. About old movies, and why they’re so important to understanding new movies. Mostly, he watched Gene and Roger to learn about film. Brian Raftery was one of them: Every Sunday, he’d rush home to catch the bald guy and the big guy. But millions of viewers tuned in to watch Siskel & Ebert.
ROGER AND EBERT FULL
This was a very unusual formula for a hit television show-especially in the ’80s, when prime time was full of dopey sitcoms and glitzy soaps. Just two smart, middle-aged writers … from Chicago … debating whatever movies they’d seen. He didn’t have long to live.Every week, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert-movie critics and Chicago newspaper rivals-sat in an empty theater, showed a few clips from the latest releases, and talked. What no one knew, aside from a few family members, was that Gene had terminal brain cancer. He didn’t release a statement to the press, and he didn’t address the show’s staff. The details of Gene’s illness were kept private. Word soon got out in the press that Gene had undergone surgery to remove a brain tumor. “He was professional, and he held it together, but I could tell: He was this teddy bear with all the stuffing pulled out.” You don’t know anything about this, and you don’t repeat anything about this.’ I don’t know about it.’ And he said, ‘Gene has perhaps an inoperable problem. I think something must be wrong with Gene. “Chaz is clutching one of Roger’s hands, and I just clutched the other one,” Rickey said. He’d just left a screening with Carrie Rickey, another film critic, when Chaz pulled him aside.Īfterward, the three of them headed to Roger’s next screening. He knew Gene had gone to a hospital to undergo some tests. Less than two weeks later, Roger was in France, covering the Cannes Film Festival. Afterward, he went to a Bulls playoff game. He wasn’t up for chatting with Leno, and let Roger do most of the talking that night. In their limo on the way to the set, Gene complained of a severe headache. In May 1998, Gene and Roger returned to The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, which was shooting a week’s worth of episodes from Chicago. Even talk-show hosts had grown tired of bringing it up.īut while their relationship was in a great place, one of their healths was about to take a turn for the worse. Whatever the reasons, the rivalry that had once fueled Gene and Roger’s career now seemed like old news. Or the simple fact that they didn’t have the time to duke it out like they once did. But they had a thing together that made them much more valuable.”Īs the decade went on, the personal differences between Gene and Roger just became less incendiary. “They started to realize, I think, over time that they were each great critics in their own right, and great journalists and well known and big stars. “They were doing stuff outside of work that required the two of them to work together,” Murphy said. I mean, it isn’t to say that they weren’t competitive, but the edges started to soften.”Īccording to Siskel & Ebert producer and director Jim Murphy, who worked on the show in the late ’80s and early ’90s, time on the road doing late-night shows helped smooth over Gene and Roger’s relationship as well. And it just became a strong bond between the two of them. And when Roger married Chaz, he experienced the same thing with her, and her children and her grandchildren. “Gene was, above all, a husband and a father. “The most dramatic change came about after Roger’s marriage to Chaz in 1992,” Marlene Iglitzen, Gene’s widow said. Gene and Roger’s sometimes awkward union becoming less contentious as the ’90s went on was likely due to some big events in their off-screen lives. And it would end sooner than anyone could have imagined.
Their partnership would become closer than ever before. But Gene and Roger’s lives would undergo major changes throughout the decade. There was still tension there, of course-that would never go away.
Things were going pretty well between Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert by the mid-’90s.
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