Note on the text: I used Matt Singer’s Opposable Thumbs: How Siskel and Ebert Changed Movies Forever as published in 2023 by Putnam
In many ways this is a real life version of the “enemies to friends” trope that we’ve seen a million times. For many people the show Siskel and Ebert became a part of their consciousness in the same way a show such as Mister Roger’s Neighborhood did or Friends. It even helped people deepen their love and appreciation for the movies as a whole which makes it interesting to read more about the people who put the show together, especially it’s two stars Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel.
Now as the real world equivalent of frenemies like Charles Xavier and Magneto it’s important to talk about just how much they hated each other in the beginning. They could not stand each other and saw each other as bitter rivals. They worked at competiting Chicago newspapers (Roger at the Sun-Times and Gene at the Tribune) and were working on establishing their respective reputations in the relatively niche world of film criticism while being almost the same age (Roger was only four years older than Gene). In fact when they first met to discuss starting the show in 1975 everyone commented that they did have chemistry- it was just the kind that “causes glycerin to explode when it’s mixed with nitric and sulfuric acid” (2). For whatever reason they knew how to set each other off and more often then not, especially in the beginning, they would do just that. They competed over everything, both on and off the screen. They fought with each other over everything from the title of their show, to who got the bigger interviews for their respective papers, to where to order lunch from that day, to who was the better critic. It irked Gene to no end that Roger won a Pulitzer Prize for film criticism in 1975 (just before the show got picked up) and he never did, and you can easily see how this rivalry was there ever since these two Midwesterners started reviewing films in the 1960s. Roger first joined the Sun-Times as their critic in 1967 and not long after, in 1969, the Tribune hired Gene to become their own film critic, a move which Roger perceived as
a deliberate attempt by the paper to compete with him head on. . . . Shortly after Siskel got the job at the Tribune, he even started using stars to rate the movies he reviewed. Previously, Ebert had been the only critic in Chicago to use such a system. These developments left Ebert certain: Siskel was explicitly hired to knock him off (2).
In his own way Gene also viewed Roger as a rival although he needed no motivation to do so. In fact one of Gene’s roommates at Yale said that Gene was the most competitive person he had ever known. Even more than “Michael Jordan or Bill and Hillary Clinton. So if Roger viewed him as an adversary that was just fine with Gene who always loved a good contest. Now he had one: destroy Ebert” (2-3). So for as successful as the show wound up being, putting these two together definitely came with its own set of risks. This could have absolutely blown up in the worst way possible. And it almost did.
The pilot episode was, by and large, a disaster. In fact the only thing that everyone appears to agree on all these years later is that the only thing that became increasingly clear while filming that first episode was that the two stars hated each other and wanted nothing to do with each other. It fell to producer Thea Flaum to figure out how to get the show’s two star players to play together as a team: “there was no chemistry. They didn’t even like each other. . . . But they had a style of relating to movies which both of them loved. They were good critics and very smart” (5-6). Then all of a sudden everything changed. About nine minutes into the first episode Roger made on offhand commented about the Chicago International Film Festival which had just concluded its eleventh year that changed everything:
I can remember when it could have been held in a so few people turned up’ . . . [and] without skipping a beat Siskel shot back ‘I can remember when some of the films they showed deserved to be shown in a back room.’ [Yea,] and they probably were [shot] there too.’ Ebert replied (6).
It was in that moment that Flaum realized that with the right guidance her two stars could learn how to play as a team, and that this team could go really far. Because as much as they hated each other they understood each other and the understood how to play the game. Which is to say that they knew how to talk about the movies.
The answer about how to get them to play on the same team was a relatively simple one: allow them to bond on screen over the one connection that they shared: their love of the movies. Prior to that moment Roger and Gene had seen each other rivals, as bitter enemies to be crushed and thrown out. But as time went on, and more specifically as the format of the show changed enough such that all the time and attention was focused on the conversation that those two people were having about the movie in question, they actually grew to understand and respect each other more and more, and eventually became friends. They even started to look forward to what the other person had to say about certain films. They became such good friends in fact that when the Tribune decided to demote Gene, Roger became his biggest advocate saying that he was “angry about the way they were treating him after years of loyal service” and even lobbied for the Sun-Times to hire him (175). Gene, talking in 1998, in talking about his relationship with Roger said “I think there’s a lesson there which is that you should be encouraged to meet your competitors, to engage them because you can learn from them, be stimulated by them. I enjoy these discussions. It sharpens both of us (273). What their show did on a macro-level was show how two bitter rivals could choose to bond over their mutual love of films and both be better off because of it.
