A Life in the Movies

Roger Ebert was an eager young man fresh from Urbana when he started reviewing movies for the Chicago Sun-Times more than three decades ago. His intervening years have featured unimagined success, abiding friendships, too much booze (for a time), the death of a colleague, bouts with cancer, and (rather late) lasting love. Today, his passion for film has made Ebert a bigger star than many of the people he writes about.

By Carol Felsenthal

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Photo: Courtesy Roger and Chaz Ebert
Baby Roger in 1942
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A Star Is Born

Growing up in the 1940s and 1950s, an adored only child in a modest house in Urbana, Illinois, Roger Ebert enjoyed a childhood that seemed lifted from the pages of The Saturday Evening Post-the rare dinners out at Steak n Shake; elementary school at St. Mary's; serving as an altar boy; secondary school at Urbana High, his parents' alma mater. Television came late to Urbana, and Ebert instead found newspapers and books; he calls the latter his "lifelong consolation."

Neither of his parents had gone to college, but they both encouraged their son's bookishness. His father, Walter, worked at the university as an electrician. He was determined that Roger not follow him into his trade: "I was over at the English building working today," Walter told his son, "and I saw the professors with their feet up on their desks, smoking their pipes and reading their books. Boy, that's the job for you." His mother, Annabel, grew up on a farm and worked most of her life as a bookkeeper. She was tiny and always wore a suit or a dress.

As a boy, Ebert was especially close to his mother's sister, Martha, a nurse who never married and who loved movies. He remembers her taking him to see such adult fare as A Star Is Born and I Want to Live. Ebert grew to resemble Martha so strongly that, his friend Sally Sinden says, "if you put a V-neck sweater on her and gave her a short haircut and a pair of round glasses," they would have looked exactly alike.

In grade school Roger published the Washington Street News, named for the street where he lived; in high school he published a science fiction fanzine and was the editor in chief of the school newspaper and the president of his senior class. He had become enamored with the novelist Thomas Wolfe and wanted to go to Harvard as Wolfe had, but his father said the family could not afford it. "You just thank your lucky stars that you were born in Urbana," Walter told him, "because if you were born in Bloomington, you'd be going to Normal [now Illinois State University]."

Staying home and going to the University of Illinois meant that Ebert could continue to make extra money-less than a dollar an hour-at The News-Gazette in Champaign, where, during high school, he had held a job as a bylined reporter working 25 to 30 hours a week. "They hired you to turn out lots of copy real fast," Ebert recalls.

Shortly before Walter Ebert, a smoker, died of lung cancer in 1960, Roger-still a high-school senior-beat out adults by winning first place in the Illinois Associated Press sportswriting contest. His father, Ebert says, knew that his son was on his way. "I've never seen anybody grow up as fast as he did when his father died," recalls Betsy Hendrick, who worked with Ebert on The News-Gazette. He also started to gain weight.

Ebert continued to work at The News-Gazette, but in the end he hitched his star to The Daily Illini, becoming a general columnist, then night editor, news editor, and editor in chief his senior year, 1963-64. His colleagues remember in near reverential terms the paper that Ebert put out after John Kennedy's assassination. William Nack, the sports editor under Ebert, says that a veteran journalist "could not have put out a better paper."

After college, Ebert applied to become an intern to James Reston, then the Washington bureau chief of The New York Times. In a letter of rejection, Reston, himself a graduate of the University of Illinois, wrote, "I have decided . . . to hire a young man from Harvard."

Pulp Fiction

In 1968, The Wall Street Journal published a letter from Ebert praising the director Russ Meyer, whose soft-porn movies-Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, for example-were widely held in low regard. The men became friends. Always looking for lively talent, Meyer talked to Ebert about writing the script for his next movie. Ebert, then 26, did not accept the offer. Besides, he wrote Dan Curley, he had qualms about working with "the king of the nudies. . . . It would be unwise to get mixed up with movies at that level."

In January 1969, Ebert had failed his physical for the draft (at 206 pounds he was nine pounds overweight) and kept reviewing. The next month, without disclosing their friendship, Ebert gave Meyer's movie Vixen three stars and called Meyer the "skin flick" genre's "only artist."

Several months later, when Meyer was signed to make his first major studio film, Ebert accepted a $15,000 offer to write the script for Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, about a female rock-'n'-roll band struggling to make it in Hollywood. He took a leave from the Sun-Times and moved to Hollywood.

Connie Zonka has a frank explanation for Ebert's attraction to Meyer, who died last year, and his movies: "Roger was crazy about women with big tits," she says, "and Russ Meyer filmed women with big tits." Every morning Meyer would pick Ebert up at the Sunset Marquis and drive him to the 20th Century Fox lot, where he was expected to write nonstop. "When Russ didn't hear the typewriter, he'd say, ‘What's the matter?'" Ebert recalls. "Russ seemed to believe that typing and writing were the same thing." Meyer's biographer, Jimmy McDonough, wrote in Big Bosoms and Square Jaws that Ebert required "good booze and good food . . . [and] at the end of the week he would have to have a girl with outrageous proportions." McDonough claims that Meyer clamped down on the trysts until the script was completed. Ebert finished it in six weeks. (In the book, Ebert contends, "I did not require a girl at the end of every week, nor, for that matter, did I get one.")

Later, writing in the highbrow magazine Film Comment, Ebert claimed that the X-rated Dolls, which was released in 1970, was "a satire of Hollywood conventions." His colleagues were not impressed: "A cesspool on film," wrote Gene Siskel (Ebert recalls that Meyer "offered to throw Gene out of [a] hotel window"). Stanley Kauffmann, The New Republic's critic and a man whom Ebert admired, called it "utter garbage."

Ebert's friends claim that he shrugged off the bad reviews, but, according to McDonough, he was feeling rejected until Meyer came to Chicago with Edy Williams, who was both his third wife and the movie's star. They took Ebert to the Roosevelt Theater in the Loop, "where the trio watched the picture with a live audience. When the crowd went wild, Roger felt redeemed."

Today, Ebert calls Dolls a "cult classic" and boasts that it has been shown at Oxford and Harvard. He claims that every time he goes to the Sundance Film Festival, some director praises the movie. Mary Knoblauch, though, says she suspects that Ebert regrets having written it.

Jim Hoge told Ebert that he had to choose between reviewing movies and writing them, and he chose reviewing. Still, between 1974 and 1979, Ebert contributed to five more Meyer projects; only one, Beneath the Valley of the Ultra Vixens, which Ebert says he wrote in five days, was ever produced. He later told an interviewer for Playboy, "I don't believe that a film critic has any business having his screenplays on the desks at the studios." Today, he clarifies: those five projects were all done as independents, without studio backing. He did explore one more big-studio production, however. In 1978, he worked on what he and Meyer hoped would be a 20th Century Fox feature about the band the Sex Pistols. The band's manager, who was to be the movie's producer, had seen Dolls 150 times, and Ebert and Meyer went to London to meet the Sex Pistols' stars, Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious. "They actually started shooting on that movie," Ebert recalls, "before the Sex Pistols management went broke and the plug was pulled."

The Odd Couple

The idea for the show that would make Ebert and Siskel rich and famous came from the late Eliot Wald, at the time a producer at public television's WTTW. But another producer there, Thea Flaum, made the program work. She insisted on pairing the fiercely competitive critics at the two morning papers, even though they could not stand each other. Ebert later told the Tribune's Rick Kogan, "I think each of us initially said yes because we didn't want the other guy to do it first." Siskel was already reviewing movies for WBBM-TV, and Ebert had done a 20-part introduction to the films of Ingmar Bergman for WTTW and had just won the Pulitzer.

Opening Soon at a Theater Near You first aired in September 1975. The title changed as the pair moved from WTTW to PBS to Tribune Entertainment to Buena Vista Television, a division of Disney, but the idea remained the same: two newspaper critics, one fat, one bald, dressed in casual clothes, talking, often arguing, about the movies. There were no celebrity interviews, no gossip, no visits to movie sets. "The great thing about these two guys was, it wasn't an act," says Harvey Weinstein, who with his brother headed Miramax, also owned by Disney. "When they disagreed, they sure did disagree, and they were both incredibly opinionated and strong-willed. But the thing they both had in common was, they were champions of movies."

At the beginning, that was about all they had in common. Ebert was convivial; Siskel, private. Siskel loved sports; Ebert, says one friend, could not name three professional athletes unless they had appeared in movies. Ebert was an intellectual about movies; Siskel, a brilliant reporter, especially in analyzing the economics of the industry. Ebert was a lightning-fast writer who, says Larry Dieckhaus, one of Flaum's many successors, "would go back and maybe make a comma change; Gene would sit there and sweat blood." Ebert was competitive, but mildly so compared with Siskel, who, says Marshall Rosenthal, Siskel's producer at WBBM-TV, "was probably the most competitive guy I ever knew." Ebert traveled to film festivals and watched movies from morning until night. "Movies were Roger's lifeblood," says Gary Dretzka, a former editor at the Tribune. Siskel soon had a wife and children and preferred to stay home with them. Siskel was the more skillful debater, the better wisecracker; Ebert had more tender feelings.

Flaum insisted on a set with a balcony; her stars sometimes had their backs to the camera as they looked at the film clips, which, all agree, were central to the show's success. She forbade them to wear ties; sometimes she would take them shopping. She demanded a simple yes or no response to each film; for the first year, she also refused to let Ebert include the small and subtitled films he championed. "We had to get viewers to trust us-that we weren't going to be public television, off in the stratosphere discussing a foreign film that they didn't care about," she says. (Once the show was established, Flaum relented on the egghead films.) She also decreed that a trained canine, Spot the Wonderdog, later Daisy and Sparky, would jump onto the balcony to introduce the Dog of the Week. The dog sent the message, says Flaum, "that we weren't discussing the cinema; we were talking about the movies."

By the end of the first season, Ebert and Siskel were on more than 100 public television stations. In 1978 the show, renamed Sneak Previews, moved to PBS. It aired in 180 markets and was, according to Television Week, "the highest-rated entertainment show in the history of public broadcasting." Stations in New York and Los Angeles picked it up, which put an end to the question "Who are these Midwest bumpkins to talk to us about film?"

PBS decided to cash in by syndicating it commercially, Ebert says, but "they wanted to continue to pay us PBS salaries." At WTTW they had been making in the lower three figures per show. They ended their time at PBS making about $87,000 each per season, with no share of the profits. By then they were both represented by the same lawyer and agent, Don Ephraim, reducing the chances for a split. Ebert recalls Siskel warning, "If we have separate agents, it'll end in bloodshed."

Ephraim thought he had a done deal with WTTW/PBS when the network hired a Hollywood lawyer who presented an unacceptable deal and told Ephraim his clients could "take it or leave it." He took the show to Joe Antelo, an executive with what became the Tribune Entertainment Company. Antelo eventually offered each of them $125,000 plus 10 percent of the show's profits. He sold the deal to his boss by arguing that the clips cost nothing-the studios happily gave them for free-and Ebert and Siskel starred in and wrote the show themselves. For the first 13-week cycle, Antelo signed 87 stations and quickly sold out the advertising. The next cycle he more than doubled the number of stations. Six months later, he says, it was a major hit. That year, 1982, with the show's name changed to At the Movies, Antelo recalls, Ebert and Siskel made half a million dollars each.

Four years later, in 1986, they were ready to renew with Tribune Entertainment, but the man who was supposed to handle the details let the matter slide. "It was a big boo-boo," says Antelo. Jamie Bennett, a former WBBM-TV executive who had moved to Disney's Buena Vista, offered the pair $1 million each, twice what they were getting at Tribune Entertainment. Siskel & Ebert & the Movies became Buena Vista's first syndicated show. Along with the name change came the switch to thumbs up and thumbs down, an idea that Ebert claims as his own.

The Tribune retaliated against Siskel, charging that it was a conflict of interest for him to work for Disney when the company also made movies that he would review. Ebert lobbied the Sun-Times's editor to hire Siskel, and the paper made him an offer. "I don't think Gene would ever have come to the Sun-Times. I think he just used that as leverage," Ebert says. In the end, Siskel lost his movie critic's title, kept a tie to the Tribune as a high-priced freelancer, and picked up other, more lucrative work, such as appearing regularly on CBS This Morning.

The two men really did disagree with each other. "There's a line you don't want to cross," Flaum explains. "People are uncomfortable watching real enmity, real hostility, real anger. Every once in a while I'd say, ‘You know what? That was unpleasant. Let's do it again with a little less heat.'"

As their careers blossomed, their economic interests converged, and they realized they needed each other. The hostility became more feigned than real. "It was just sport," says Larry Dieckhaus. "They were like people fencing or sparring; they actually enjoyed it."

While they would never be the sort of friends who would hang out at each other's houses, Ebert says, "I loved him, and there were times when I hated him. There were times when he infuriated me, yet we were good friends."