The Siskel & Ebert rivalry, and its legacy, comes alive in the new book ‘Opposable Thumbs’

Like any great rivalry, the competition and, later, the lucrative partnership between Chicago Tribune film critic Gene Siskel and Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert has been dissected and debated a lot over the past few decades, nowhere more avidly than in the city they called home.

The book “Opposable Thumbs: How Siskel & Ebert Changed Movies Forever” comes out Oct. 24. It’s a sharp-witted account of how these two neatly contrasting Chicago media paragons no longer with us — Siskel died of a brain tumor in 1999 at age 53; Ebert died at age 70 of thyroid cancer in 2013 — learned how to argue about movies on TV and made a few million in the process.

The author is Matt Singer, a critic, journalist, author and longtime “obsessive Siskel and Ebert fan” (his words) best known as editor of the screencrush.com website. If you watched the final iteration of the movie review program, “Ebert Presents: At the Movies,” which ran 2010-2011 on PBS stations, you may recognize Singer as a segment contributor.

That’s his first-hand experience with the Ebert universe. Here’s mine: In 2007 I filled in, off and on, opposite co-host Richard Roeper after Ebert got sick. Later I did a few months straight with Roeper and then co-hosted with A.O. Scott (then a chief film critic of the New York Times) for the final season, 2009-2010.

Two middle-aged white guys, in sweaters, disagreeing even in agreement on a film: How Siskel and Ebert parlayed that formula into international stardom, with regular appearances on Letterman, Leno and beyond — it’s a good story, told adroitly and often movingly by Singer. Our interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Q: Where did it start for you with these guys?

A: When I was 14, summer of 1995. One show that summer, they talked about “Trainspotting,” and in Providence, Rhode Island — I grew up in suburban New Jersey — there was a theater showing Danny Boyle’s film. I shouldn’t have been allowed in; I was the smallest 14-year-old that ever existed. But I was and it blew my mind, and I have Siskel and Ebert to thank for it. By that time I’d probably been watching the show since I was 12.

Q: Let’s go back, as you do in your book, to how they got to their respective papers in the beginning. Ebert’s working on his doctorate at the University of Chicago and needed a job. Herman Kogan of the Chicago Daily News published a couple of Ebert freelance pieces. Impressed, Kogan arranges a lunch for Roger and two editors over at the Sun-Times. The job offer with the Sun-Times Sunday magazine section arrives even get the dessert order in. This was in 1966 and Roger’s made film critic the following year.

Two years later, Siskel’s at the Tribune and film critic Clifford Terry goes on a year-long leave for a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard, and Gene makes his move. So you have these two fiercely competitive writers, Ebert and Siskel, who at the time hardly knew each other and rarely spoke to one another. When you watch the very first episode of their first venture, “Opening Soon at a Theater Near You” produced by WTTW-FM for public TV, you don’t get a lot of the competitive juice, do you?

A: It’s striking how little you get. In the beginning, in 1975, they authentically didn’t like each other yet it actually doesn’t come across that way on TV because it’s pure discomfort. Fascinating dichotomy. What you see (in the pilot) is what the Siskel and Ebert imitators later were like, some of them, anyway.

It was (WTTW producer) Thea Flaum who saw it through, kept them around and together, saw the potential — and figured out how to bring their off-camera energy, so combative and combustible, to what they could do on-camera. Both men always said she was the one who figured it out.

Q: In the book you quote Letterman’s “Late Show” producer Rob Burnett, who said: “There was just this undercurrent of disdain between the two of them that I always found so entertaining.” That’s the question for a lot of people, even those who knew them well: How much of the disdain was genuine? A lot, I think!

A: So many people I talked to said that things changed when Roger met and then married Chaz Ebert in 1992. (Longtime Chicago media columnist) Robert Feder, who was a huge help to me on the research, said that. It’s a cliché I suppose to say Roger and Gene’s was a sibling rivalry. That’s how they referred to it. And it may be the best way to look at it. I have two kids now, almost 6 and almost 8. I dedicated the book to them, and the dedication originally read “To Riley and Eloise.” I showed them the early copy of the book, and immediately a fight broke out. The younger one, Eloise, said: “Why is her name first? Why isn’t my name first?” And that fight over billing was exactly what Roger and Gene fought about with the show! So I changed the dedication to read:

For Riley and Eloise

And for Eloise and Riley

(Like Gene and Roger, they both wanted their names to be first.)

Q: Your subtitle, “How Siskel & Ebert Changed Movies Forever,” is a bold assertion. Talk to us a little more about that.

A: It is a bold assertion. But I think their influence and importance looms large. Certainly they influenced the way we talk about movies even today. When they made it on TV, they used their megaphones for the good of the movies, and for a force for change. In 1990, I think it was, Entertainment Weekly had their 100-most-powerful-people-in-Hollywood issue. And Siskel and Ebert landed at No. 10, behind Michael Eisner (then CEO of the Walt Disney Company which owned the show in its most popular stretch). Behind Eisner, but ahead of Jeffrey Katzenberg (then chairman of Walt Disney Studios), their boss, more or less at Disney at the time.

Q: You write in “Opposable Thumbs,” while there may not be a show like Siskel and Ebert’s on TV, “there are hundreds — maybe thousands — of websites, podcasts, YouTube channels, message boards and social media threads dedicated to the discussion of movies not as objects of commerce but as works of art.” You go on to say: “A more evolved version of what Siskel and Ebert created” has emerged in their wake, with “more focus on the movies, less focus on the arguing and the snappy insults.”

A: Right, and the complicated legacy of the thumbs. I talk about that in the book. Certainly the studios loved the thumbs; they were valuable as marketing tools to them. But what they did (on the show) was complicated in so many ways. They didn’t settle for saying: “I don’t like this movie.”

Q: Both Roger and Gene had less than rosy childhoods, with Gene losing both parents by the time he was 10 and Roger a fairly isolated kid growing up.

A: Roger used to talk about how the defining characteristic of his childhood was loneliness. Didn’t have a lot of friends. Reading, and then writing, mostly. There was a lot of melancholy there in the beginning, for both of them. And then of course so much sadness with what happened to both of them at the end. But then there’s everything that happened in between.

(Before writing the book proposal) I looked back at Ebert’s memoir and thought: That’s a great book. But there are only three chapters on Siskel and Ebert. So maybe there’s room for a book like mine to exist.

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“Opposable Thumbs” author Matt Singer will be in conversation with the Tribune’s Michael Phillips Nov. 28 at the Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State St.; www.siskelfilmcenter.org .

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.

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