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How Siskel & Ebert Changed Movies Forever
by Matt Singer
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.
"Recommended for wide purchase with, what else, an enthusiastic thumbs up." —Booklist (starred review)
"[Opposable Thumbs] deserves two thumbs up." —Publishers Weekly
"Readers who recall Siskel and Ebert will be delighted by this opportunity to reminisce." —Kirkus Reviews
"Nostalgic for some, revelatory for others, this account demonstrates how film evaluators can influence popular culture as much as the films themselves did." —Library Journal
"The role of Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert in changing film criticism may often have been simplified to their signature phrase 'Two Thumbs Up,' but the glory and value of this knowledgeable, deeply entertaining history of their partnership is that it's always expansive, never reductive. We get so much here—a dual portrait of two big personalities at war with one another both as critics and as men, a history of the invention and reinvention of a seminal TV series, and a deep sense of the abiding love for movies that coursed through their work and that courses through Matt Singer's." —Mark Harris, author of Mike Nichols: A Life
"For generations of moviegoers, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert were more than a pair of dueling film critics on TV: They were celebrities in their own right, powerful arbiters of popular taste whose weekly clashes were more entertaining than a big-screen monster-movie battle. In this wildly entertaining book, Matt Singer, a critic who grew up sneaking viewings of Siskel and Ebert at the Movies past his bedtime, chronicles the history of these two very different men's three-decade working relationship—one than was often even more heated than their weekly on-air fights, but which evolved late into their lives into a real and deeply moving friendship." —Dana Stevens, author of Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century
"Like a squabbling couple in a screwball comedy, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert had something undeniable: chemistry. Matt Singer's sharp, affectionate book captures the love-hate professional marriage that changed television, changed film criticism, and changed the lives of two movie-mad rivals turned icons. My thumbs are pointing skyward." —Michael Schulman, author of Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears
"Matt Singer is a nimble, funny writer whose enthusiasms are as quirky as they are infectious. These qualities make his history of the tele-visualization of film criticism a near-irresistible read. Beyond the hilarious and sometimes hair-raising tales of Roger-and-Gene sniping there's a serious and thorough analysis of how they profoundly changed how all of us talk about the movies." —Glenn Kenny, author of Made Men: The Story of Goodfellas
This information about Opposable Thumbs was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Matt Singer is the editor and film critic of ScreenCrush.com and a member of the New York Film Critics Circle. In 2011, he won a Webby Award for his work on the IFC News podcast. He is the author of Marvel's Spider-Man: From Amazing to Spectacular, and lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two daughters.
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