Siskel & Ebert at the cinema celebrates its 50th anniversary

Half a century ago, a low-budget public television station in Chicago invited film critics from the Chicago Sun-Times and the Chicago Tribune to talk about the films coming out each week. Producer Thea Flaum invited Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel to host what was originally called “Opening Soon at a Theater Near You.” When asked by Siskel why he should do the series, Flaum told StartTV, “I told him that if we did this right, before it was finished, our series would become the most popular half-hour series with the highest ratings on public television. And that’s what happened.”

People loved the series because of the movie clips and advice on what they should see and what they should skip, and because Siskel and Ebert often took the time to cover small films that they might not have known existed. One episode that meant a lot to me featured a documentary called “Gates of Heaven,” about a pet cemetery. My only idea of documentaries was the ones we saw at school about science or history. Their criticism opened up to me a world of documentaries made with singular visions of ordinary people.

Audiences loved “Siskel & Ebert” because it taught them what to look for in movies, what made them work and how they told stories. For many, it was the first time they were exposed to serious conversations about films.

And above all, they loved arguments. Ebert and Siskel worked for rival newspapers and were often combative. It was great fun to hear quick-witted fights from opinionated, highly knowledgeable, and even more competitive critics. When the films were good, Ebert and Siskel were very, very good, but often when the films were bad, or when they disagreed, they were better. Someone even made a compilation of their most heated arguments. The series inspired Matt Singer’s wonderful book, Opposable Thumbs: How Siskel and Ebert Changed Movies Forever.

Siskel and Ebert became stars in their own right, appearing on “Saturday Night Live,” late-night talk shows, and being parodied in MAD Magazine by artist Sam Viviano. I was there when they spoke together at the National Press Club in Washington DC, and the video in its entirety is worth watching.

The filmmakers couldn’t resist some retaliation. Siskel and Ebert didn’t like the cliché of overturned fruit carts in chase scenes. For example, in “Police Academy 6: City Under Siege”, a character in a chase scene shouts: “Watch out for Gene and Roger’s fruit stand!” » And in the 1998 version of “Godzilla”, the mayor is called Ebert and his assistant is called Gene.

Here are some of our favorite moments from the series that later became “Sneak Previews” and then “Siskel & Ebert At the Movies.”

It’s a lot of fun to go back and take a look at the very modest first episode, where they talk about a movie that was going to win the first five Academy Awards.