My dinner with Gene and Roger | Roger Ebert

In the fall of 1981, Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel fell in love with two men named Andre and Wally, and they told the world about it, saving a quirky, flirty little film from quickly disappearing into commercial oblivion. I went to see this movie, like a few hundred thousand or more other people, because of that love.

At the time, their show was called “Sneak Previews,” soon to be renamed “At the Movies” when the PBS success moved to a national syndication deal at Tribune Entertainment and then to Buena Vista Entertainment, aka Disney/ABC. The film about Andre and Wally, “My Dinner with Andre” by director Louis Malle, was perfect for undergraduate viewing, at least for my undergraduate viewing. Big ideas, elaborate anecdotes, two real-life friends: struggling playwright and performer Wallace Shawn and adventurous, restless experimental theater guru Andre Gregory, sharing a meal and some ideas. The film feels like a play that you watch from the next table or near an omnipresent waiter.

When “My Dinner with Andre” opened, he was barely there. In Opposable thumbsMatt Singer’s book about the enterprising company known as Siskel & Ebert, Shawn recalls that the film had a handful of unpromising showings at New York’s Lincoln Plaza Cinema, before the film’s distributor began running tiny ads saying, in effect, “closing soon at a theater near you, if it’s playing at a theater near you.”

And then the “Sneak Previews” episode of Roger and Gene aired on a Thursday. Sold-out theaters began, and “instead of closing,” as Singer writes, the film “stayed at the Lincoln Plaza theater for a year straight, and it ended up being shown in over nine hundred theaters all over the United States.” Its construction cost just under $500,000. This brought in about ten times as much.

I saw it at the Cedar Theater on the West Bank of the University of Minnesota’s Twin Cities campus, the same theater where I attended a midnight showing of “Eraserhead” as a freshman and where I never fully recovered. “My Dinner with Andre” was verbose and easy listening, and exactly the kind of movie I wanted at that age, when I was discovering the joys of what University of Michigan theater majors (I was just a parasite) called “the pointless second dinner after rehearsal,” an excuse for hours of rudderless, ridiculous, whirlwind late-night conversation.

This is what Roger and Gene did, in miniature, and without the “ridiculous” side, apart from a few of their sweaters. Before reading them, I would listen and watch them converse and debate, sometimes in an angry way, yes, more often in a thoughtful way, always in an engaging way. I saw “My Dinner with Andre” because it had champions in Roger and Gene, and my first film critic, Pauline Kael, whose essay “Trash, Art and the Movies” was from my seventh-grade textbook, Facing mass media. In the days of “previews,” the show was so simple and fair, one of those unpretentious comets that appear every 76 years or so. What they said and how they said it mattered a lot.

The summer before “Sneak Previews” saved “My Dinner with Andre” from flopdom, I worked as a part-time janitor at a machine parts factory northeast of Minneapolis. The guys at the store talked a lot about movies. “I took my kid to see ‘Cannonball Run,’ the nicest guy told me during the break. “Just, you know, stupid. But fun. And this Adrienne Barbeau. I mean! Cripes. I wouldn’t kick her out of bed. I watched “Maude” every week because of her, and I hated “Maude.” I rather liked “Cannonball Run”. (pause) (laughing) And Roger and Gene hated that one! »

My factory cohort watched “previews” every week. He saw his first film with subtitles because Roger and Gene recommended it to him. I wish I knew what movie it was, but regardless, he took a chance based on his loyalty to “my guys,” as he called Roger and Gene. Given where most populist imports at the time were coming from, my colleague may have taken this risk because the film was either French or Italian, and one of the female leads may have looked like Adrienne Barbeau. But the boost came from a few film critics.

This sort of thing happened a lot over the years of their television series, the 50th anniversary of which Chicago is celebrating this year.

I never knew Gene; I knew Roger and, thanks to Roger, I have a brave and good friend in Chaz Ebert. When Roger got sick, somehow, improbably, there I was, in 2006, in the Ebert (gulp) chair across from longtime co-host Richard Roeper, trying to say something quick and interesting before wait until the segment is already finished, better luck for the next segment. This somehow improbably turned into a regular rotation with AO Scott of The New York Times facing Richard, then Richard and I for a while before Richard left, and Tony and I exhausted the syndication deal for the final year of the show.

When I was in trouble, which was early and often, Roger more or less saved the day with some very simple advice:

One: Determine the ONE THING you MUST say about everything you review during your on-camera time. Maybe two things. But really, one. Don’t try to cover the waterfront. You will drown.

Second: there are ways to interrupt or, more politely, intervene without speaking. Whatever physical thing you tend to do in real life when you hear someone say something worth discussing—shaking your head or making a “waaaait a minute” with your hands—do it, but bigger than you would in real life. Do this thing and the camera will switch to YOU. And then you speak, quickly.

“Time is running out,” Roger told me. He was referring to the segment’s unscripted conversations, which made the show the show. Now that he and Gene are long gone, although still with us, I realize that perhaps he was talking about something larger than effective on-camera debate tactics.

As Chicago marks the 50th anniversary of these two, let’s also remember why we watched, listened to and read them in the first place. The thumbs weren’t really the problem. What I remember about Roger and Gene talking about “My Dinner with Andre” is the excitement of discovery.

At their best, like Andre and Wally with a different, more irritating kind of friendship beneath the double act, Gene and Roger bonded and started new conversations (or arguments) about the movies we’d seen — and the ones we’d see this weekend, thanks to them.