"It Stinks!" "You're Crazy!"

By Richard Zoglin

Twelve years ago, Roger Ebert, film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times and now better known simply as "the fat one," was asked if he would appear on a new movie-review program being produced by WTTW, the local PBS station. He was intrigued by the idea but not by the prospective costar: his archrival from the Chicago Tribune, Gene Siskel. "The answer," Ebert recalls, "was at the tip of my tongue: no." Nor did Siskel, now frequently referred to as "the other one," relish the thought of sharing a stage with "the most hated guy in my life."

Siskel and Ebert still do not get along, at least in public, but they have put that antagonism to good use. Their show, originally called Opening Soon at a Theater Near You and later Sneak Previews, went national in 1978 and soon became the highest-rated series in PBS history. In 1982 they moved to commercial syndication. Today, under the title Siskel & Ebert & the Movies, they reach an audience of 8 million, ranking in the Top Ten of all once-a-week syndicated shows on TV.

The Mutt-and-Jeff pair are certainly the most popular and conceivably the most powerful movie critics in the country. Probably no encomium is more sought after by film publicists than "Two thumbs up -- Siskel and Ebert" (reflecting their device of signaling thumbs up or thumbs down for good reviews or bad). Just how much impact they have at the box office is less certain, but some in Hollywood think it is substantial. Said Comedian Eddie Murphy at a recent press conference: "Siskel and Ebert go 'horrible picture,' and, I'm telling you, ((they)) can definitely kill a movie."

Maybe, maybe not, but what keeps viewers tuning in is the chance to see them try to kill each other. The format of their show is simple. For each film (four are reviewed in a typical half-hour, plus an extra segment on videocassette releases), one of the pair will introduce clips, describe the plot and give a capsule review. Then comes an ad-lib passage in which the other offers his comments or rebuttal. The cross talk often gets testy. After the two disagreed about Susan Seidelman's comedy Making Mr. Right, Ebert concluded defiantly, "I enjoyed myself from beginning to end." Replied Siskel: "You usually do enjoy yourself; it's the film I didn't like." Or here is Ebert trying to convince Siskel that Alan Parker's thriller Angel Heart is not too slow moving: "You want television . . . let's hurry and tell the story." Siskel: "Don't lay that on me . . . you know I don't want television any more than you do." Ebert: "In that case, I'm sorry you have to be on this show."

Samuel Johnson and Matthew Arnold it's not, yet the program has virtually invented a new TV genre. Two sets of clones are currently trying (mostly in vain) to match their success: Rex Reed and Bill Harris on At the Movies; Jeffrey Lyons and Michael Medved on Sneak Previews. Meanwhile, Siskel and Ebert are frequent guests on the Tonight show and have mock-settled their differences in a basketball-shooting contest on Late Night with David Letterman. Movies now even make fun of them: in Hollywood Shuffle, two streetwise blacks review movies in a takeoff called Sneakin' in the Movies.

Though bickering has made them famous, the best-kept secret about Siskel and Ebert is that they agree much more often than they disagree. Their tastes are generally similar (two thumbs up for Prick Up Your Ears and Swimming to Cambodia; two thumbs down for Blind Date and The Secret of My Success). Both rail regularly against teen sex comedies, violent horror films and car chases. Good movies are almost always those that have "characters you can identify with."

"It is the emotional content that comes through on TV," says Ebert. "People can pick up a lot about the film through the exchange of feelings between two critics." Siskel too defends their TV criticism against charges that it is oversimplified and superficial: "It is the distillation between the two of us of 39 years of writing about movies."

Ebert, 44, got a journalism degree from the University of Illinois, went to work for the Sun-Times at age 24 and landed the movie-reviewing spot a year later. Siskel, 41, majored in philosophy at Yale, became a reporter for the Tribune at 23 and the paper's film critic soon afterward. They have been aggressive rivals in print ever since, though the competition hit a snag last year when the Tribune removed Siskel as daily critic and relegated him to feature pieces and capsule reviews.

The two have little in common outside the TV studio, aside from their reported $1 million salaries from TV alone. Ebert, a bachelor, lives in a three-story Victorian house (where he keeps the curtains drawn to protect his collection of watercolors), teaches a film course at the University of Chicago, and once wrote scripts for Erotic-Film Producer Russ Meyer. Siskel lives with his wife and two children in a fashionable ten-room co-op and is such a fan of Saturday Night Fever that at a celebrity auction he bought the % white suit John Travolta wore in the film. They rarely socialize with each other and never sit together at screenings: Siskel is typically near the back, Ebert farther down the aisle, usually munching from a box of Good & Plenty.

Is their feud a fake? "On all the movie sets I've been on," says Siskel, "I've never seen people get as angry as Roger and I get." Nor are the fights confined to the TV cameras. On a recent plane trip, Siskel was trying to teach Ebert to play Michigan rummy. At one point, Ebert accused Siskel of throwing a card into the wrong pile. Siskel denied it, and Ebert suddenly tossed up his seat tray. "That's it," he cried. "No more cards!" Hmmm. Conflict, characters you can identify with -- definitely a thumbs up.

With reporting by Scott Brown/Los Angeles and Toni Schlesinger/Chicago