Opposable Thumbs: How Siskel & Ebert Changed Movies Forever - Hardcover

Singer, Matt

 
9780593540152: Opposable Thumbs: How Siskel & Ebert Changed Movies Forever
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0593540158 ISBN 13: 9780593540152
Verlag: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

Once upon a time, if you wanted to know if a movie was worth seeing, you didn’t check out Rotten Tomatoes or IMDB.

You asked whether Siskel & Ebert had given it “two thumbs up.”

On a cold Saturday afternoon in 1975, two men (who had known each other for eight years before they’d ever exchanged a word) met for lunch in a Chicago pub. Gene Siskel was the film critic for the Chicago Tribune. Roger Ebert had recently won the Pulitzer Prize—the first ever awarded to a film critic—for his work at the Chicago Sun-Times. To say they despised each other was an understatement.

When they reluctantly agreed to collaborate on a new movie review show with PBS, there was at least as much sparring off-camera as on. No decision—from which films to cover to who would read the lead review to how to pronounce foreign titles—was made without conflict, but their often-antagonistic partnership (which later transformed into genuine friendship) made for great television. In the years that followed, their signature “Two thumbs up!” would become the most trusted critical brand in Hollywood.

In Opposable Thumbs, award-winning editor and film critic Matt Singer eavesdrops on their iconic balcony set, detailing their rise from making a few hundred dollars a week on local Chicago PBS to securing multimillion-dollar contracts for a syndicated series (a move that convinced a young local host named Oprah Winfrey to do the same). Their partnership was cut short when Gene Siskel passed away in February of 1999 after a battle with brain cancer that he’d kept secret from everyone outside his immediate family—including Roger Ebert, who never got to say goodbye to his longtime partner. But their influence on in the way we talk about (and think about) movies continues to this day.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Matt Singer is the editor and film critic of ScreenCrush.com and a member of the New York Film Critics Circle. He won a Webby Award for his work on the Independent Film Channel’s website, IFC.com, and is the author of Marvel’s Spider-Man: From Amazing to Spectacular. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two daughters.

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CHAPTER ONE

Ebert Before Siskel

"When you went on an interview, you took eight sheets of copy paper, folded them once, and ripped them in half using a pica stick. Then you folded them again. Now you had a notebook of thirty-two pages to slip in your pocket with your ball-point. You had a press card. You were a reporter from the Chicago Sun-Times." -Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert didn't set out to be a film critic.

He never went to film school. He never even took a single film course; none were offered at his college. He didn't spend his formative years studying the art of motion pictures. He went to the movies as a boy, but not any more than an average American kid growing up in the 1940s and '50s. When the Chicago Sun-Times made him its film critic in March of 1967 it wasn't because he had written extensively about movies, or because he ferociously lobbied his bosses for the promotion (although he happily accepted a $25-a-week raise as a result). At the time, Ebert was working as a reporter at the Sun-Times primarily to support himself while he earned his PhD in English at the University of Chicago. When the film critic position opened up, he was given the job. He was twenty-four years old.

Ebert thought he might someday make a good newspaper columnist, like legendary Chicago Daily News writer Mike Royko. He later said he also would have been very happy taking that doctorate in English and becoming a professor-reading books, traveling, and perhaps attempting to write the Great American Novel. Those were his plans as a young man, as much as he had plans at all.

He never did finish that doctorate-but he remained the Sun-Times' film critic for the rest of his life, eventually becoming one of the twentieth century's foremost writers, thinkers, and speakers about movies. None of that was by design. In his memoir, Life Itself, Ebert wrote that most of the turning points of his career "were brought about by others" and his life had largely unfolded "without any conscious plan." He also says that the writing style that won him a Pulitzer Prize and a devoted audience of millions of viewers and readers throughout more than forty years as a critic emerged "without great pondering" when he first began writing reviews at the Sun-Times and never changed very much through all his years of work. Later in the same book, he said that, at least as he experienced it, "so much of what happens by chance forms what becomes your life."

That was what he privately told the people closest to him as well. His wife, Chaz Ebert, says the word he used to describe many of the biggest moments in his life was "serendipity." One opportunity after another presented itself to him, through no intent or careful calculation of his own. And every time Ebert seized one of those opportunities, it seemed to work out well.

"Each move," she says, "was a good move, but not a planned move."

Roger Ebert's preternatural skills as a critic grew out of his roots as a journalist, which he began honing at an age when most children are still mastering basic writing skills. While in grade school, he received a toy version of a hectograph, a crude printing press that used jelly to transfer ink to paper. With it, he produced his own newspaper, the Washington Street News, which he then gave to neighbors.

His interest in publishing could be traced back to his interest in reading, which developed even earlier, and which he attributed in turn to one of the central facts of his life: that he was an only child who spent much of his early years feeling pitifully lonely. Born on June 18, 1942, to Annabel, a bookkeeper and business manager, and Walter Ebert, an electrician at the University of Illinois, young Roger grew up with few playmates. To occupy his time and sate his curiosity about the world, he found himself drawn to the books in his childhood home at 410 East Washington Street in Urbana, Illinois.

"I always felt left out," Ebert recalled in a 1989 interview. "I was the only kid in my neighborhood who went to Catholic school. And everybody else of my age for six blocks around went to the public school and got to belong to the public Boy Scout troop. And so they were all off winning their merit badges and I was at home reading. And I was able to go on and be much more successful in life as a result."

Those feelings of isolation did not entirely dissipate as an adult. The Roger Ebert described by family and friends is a complicated and in some ways contradictory person. On the one hand, he was an incredible storyteller and showman; the consummate life of the party. Director Ramin Bahrani, a fan of Siskel & Ebert since childhood, struck up a friendship with Ebert after the critic accepted Bahrani's personal invitation to attend a Sundance Film Festival screening of his debut feature, Man Push Cart. Bahrani says he was shocked by the Roger Ebert he spent time with at Ebert's Overlooked Film Festival (nicknamed "Ebertfest"). When the day's screenings were done, Ebert would take festival guests, including Bahrani, to his favorite restaurant-Steak 'n Shake-where he would hold court telling dirty jokes.

"It was a whole side I didn't know," Bahrani says. "Seeing him unleashed, he was a force of nature. He was so funny and charming, and he knew how to run an event and keep everybody entertained."

Ebert's longtime colleague at the Chicago Sun-Times, media columnist Robert Feder, describes him as a similar presence in the paper's newsroom. "It was always a treat when he came in," Feder recalls. "He would hold court-literally. He would stand in the middle of the features department and start telling these incredible stories and just carrying on. In the beginning, it would be to no one in particular and then a crowd would form. That was a common occurrence. It was incredible. He would imitate other people at the paper-he'd have their voices down, he'd tell these stories. And he would always laugh the loudest at his own jokes."

That was one side. But there was another, quieter side that his more gregarious public persona was in some ways a cover for. Ebert later blamed his feelings of isolation on his poor eyesight as a child, which went undiagnosed for years because his parents never got his vision checked by a doctor. "I was an earnest little boy," he said. "I was very nearsighted, so I read all the time. I was an only child, introspective. Real loud and demonstrative in class, but that was just a cover-up." Living with his parents on Washington Street, he would ride his bike around Urbana and the campus of the University of Illinois as, in his words, "a solemn kid, ignored and invisible, studying the students."

"Roger saw himself as kind of alone against whatever was out there," explains Chaz Ebert. "Not in an angry way; in an almost existential way. He identified a lot with people, individuals who took a stand and it wasn't a group decision. It was an individual decision to do something, to change something, to challenge some standard. That's how he saw himself in the world. . . . One of his favorite things to do is sit at a café alone by himself and have a cup of coffee."

Indeed, in Ebert's book about the Cannes Film Festival, Two Weeks in the Midday Sun, he describes a moment of "enormous happiness" of a kind he only felt once or twice a year while sitting "at a table in a square where no one I knew was likely to come, in a land where I did not speak the language, in a place where, for the moment, I could not be found. I was like a spirit returned from another world." In this passage, which Ebert later reprinted in Life Itself in a chapter titled "All by Myself Alone" (in which he also describes a beloved pastime he calls "Being by Myself in a City Where No One Knows Who I Am and No One Knows...

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Verlag
G.P. Putnam's Sons
Erscheinungsdatum
2023
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593540158
ISBN 13 
9780593540152
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
352
Kontakt zum Hersteller
G.P. Putnam's Sons
https://www.penguin.com/putnam/

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