Movie Criticism Gets Dumbed Down Since Thumbs-Up Days Of Siskel And Ebert

By WALT BELCHER
Media General News Service
Published: August 7, 2008

TAMPA, Fla. — Getting “two thumbs up” from Siskel and Ebert used to mean something.

Before the OMG-The-Sky-Is-Falling state of the newspaper industry, thoughtful movie criticism was valued.

An insightful, creative critic was respected and could even win a Pulitzer and get a TV show. Movie buffs valued the opinions of scribes such as Pauline Kael of The New Yorker and Richard Schickel of Time magazine.

During the 1980s and ’90s, Roger Ebert, the arrogant, intensely opinionated Chicago Sun-Times movie critic, and Gene Siskel, his easygoing, insightful rival at the Chicago Tribune, were arguably the most-well known movie critics in the country.

They were friendly rivals with giant egos. They were fun to watch. And I got to see them up close when all three of us were locked in a screening room at Disney MGM Studios (now Disney Hollywood) in Orlando. I’ll explain later in this column.

Today, we don’t even know the blurbologists whose “funniest movie of the year!” quotes appear in ads for bombs such as “Get Smart.” Thoughtful movie criticism can be found on the Internet, but you have to dig through a lot of half-baked fan gibberish to find it.

But the weekly movie review TV series started by Siskel and Ebert 33 years ago doesn’t even make a blip on the Nielsen Media Research radar. The biggest surprise about the pending overhaul of “At the Movies” is that it still exists.

In recent years, WTVT, Channel 13, buried the show, bumping it around the schedule during predawn hours of Saturdays and Sundays. It is scheduled at 5:30 a.m. Sundays.

The series started in 1975 on a Chicago PBS station. After it went national as “Sneak Previews,” it aired on Thursday nights on WEDU, Channel 3, and had a large following here.

The title changed to “At the Movies With Siskel and Ebert” when the Walt Disney Co. put it into syndication in the 1980s. Siskel and Ebert were stars. They hosted a couple of prime time Oscar specials on which they previewed their favorite nominees.

One of the specials was taped at Disney’s Orlando theme park, and I was invited over to interview them. Siskel delighted in teasing Ebert. He liked to get him flustered and riled up. It wasn’t hard to do.

After our interview, the three of us watched a 15-minute preview tape of the special in a screening room. A Disney intern let us in, started the film and left. The door locked behind him.

The kid apparently forgot about us or underestimated the running time because he didn’t come back for an hour.

Siskel noticed the locked door right away but didn’t say anything. After the film ended, he winked at me and said, “Watch this,” nodding at Ebert, who began pacing and then pounding the door.

Ebert wanted out, badly. He began calling the intern, the studio and the entire Disney organization a lot of things that I can’t print here. Siskel just laughed.

That’s my memory of the guys who made “thumbs up” and “thumbs down” their trademark.

I was saddened by Siskel’s death from a brain tumor in 1999. And I never warmed to his replacement, Richard Roeper.

This week Roeper and Ebert both left the show, which is going in a new, younger, hipper direction. In recent years, Ebert hasn’t been on even though the current title is “At the Movies With Ebert & Roeper.” A battle with cancer left him unable to speak.

I say the overhaul is overdue. New hosts Ben Lyons and Ben Mankiewicz will bring fresh views.

Lyons, 26, the son of film critic Jeffrey Lyons, has worked as a reporter and critic for MTV, E! and “Access Hollywood.” Mankiewicz, 41, is the grandson of Herman Mankiewicz, who won an Oscar for co-writing “Citizen Kane” with Orson Welles.

WALT BELCHER is a staff writer for The Tampa Tribune