Eugene Kal Siskel (January 26, 1946 – February 20, 1999) was an American film critic and journalist for the Chicago Tribune who co-hosted a movie review television series alongside colleague Roger Ebert.

Siskel started writing for the Chicago Tribune in 1969, becoming its film critic soon after. In 1975, he was paired with Roger Ebert to co-host a monthly show called Opening Soon at a Theater Near You airing locally on PBS member station WTTW. In 1978, the show, renamed Sneak Previews, was expanded to weekly episodes and aired on PBS affiliates across the United States. Siskel and Ebert became celebrated in American pop culture. Siskel was diagnosed with brain cancer in May 1998 but remained in the public eye as Ebert's professional partner until his death the following year.

Early life

Siskel was born in Chicago on January 26, 1946, the youngest of three children born to Ida () and Nathan William Siskel, who were Russian Jewish immigrants. He spent his early years living in a historically Jewish neighborhood on Chicago's North Side. Siskel's father died when he was four and his mother died when he was nine; thereafter, he was raised by his aunt and uncle.

Siskel attended DeWitt Clinton Elementary School in Chicago and nearby was the Nortown Theater where he often frequented to watch movies. This sparked his interest in films.

Siskel also attended Culver Academies, where he experienced anti-Semitism firsthand when a schoolmate gave him a piece of toast on which jam was spread in the shape of a swastika.

Siskel graduated from Yale University with a degree in philosophy in 1967. While at Yale, Siskel was classmates with poet Paul Monette and future New York Governor George Pataki. Siskel studied writing under Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Hersey, whose reference would later help Siskel get a job at the Chicago Tribune in 1969.

Career

Early career

Prior to his job at the Chicago Tribune, Siskel served in the U.S. Army Reserve as a military journalist and public affairs officer for the Defense Information School. For a time afterwards, he was acquainted with Playboy magazine publisher Hugh Hefner.

Chicago Tribune

From 1969 until his death in 1999, Gene Siskel served as the film critic for the Chicago Tribune, producing over 5,000 reviews during this period. In this role, he specialized by evaluating films through a viewpoint that prioritized narrative effectiveness, most notably its plot coherence and its believable character motivations, while often critiquing films that favored stylistic flourishes over substantive storytelling. His first print review, written one month before he became the Tribunes film critic, was for the film Rascal. His review of the film was not favorable ("Because of the excessive gimmickry, most kids will miss the tenderness," he wrote). The demotion occurred after Siskel and Ebert decided to shift production of their weekly movie-review show, then known as At the Movies (later known as Siskel & Ebert), from Tribune Entertainment to The Walt Disney Company's Buena Vista Television unit. Editor James Squires stated on the move, "He's done a great job for us. It's a question of how much a person can do physically. We think you need to be a newspaper person first, and Gene Siskel always tried to do that. But there comes a point when a career is so big that you can't do that." Siskel declined to comment on the new arrangement, but Ebert publicly criticized Siskel's Tribune bosses for punishing Siskel for taking their television program to a company other than Tribune Entertainment. Ebert privately suggested that Siskel join him at the Chicago Sun-Times, but Siskel remained a freelancer for the Tribune until his death in 1999. He was replaced as film critic by Dave Kehr.

The last review published by Siskel for the Chicago Tribune was for the film She's All That, published on January 29, 1999, in which he gave a favorable review, giving it three stars out of four and wrote that "Rachael Leigh Cook as Laney, the plain Jane object of the makeover, is forced to demonstrate the biggest emotional range as a character, and she is equal to the assignment. I look forward to seeing her in her next movie."

Siskel & Ebert

In 1975, Siskel teamed up with Ebert, film reviewer for the Chicago Sun-Times, to host a show on local Chicago PBS station WTTW which eventually became Sneak Previews. Their "thumbs-up, thumbs-down" system soon became an easily recognizable trademark, popular enough to be parodied on comedy shows such as Second City Television, In Living Color, Bizarre, and in movies such as Hollywood Shuffle and Godzilla. Sneak Previews gained a nationwide audience in 1977 when WTTW offered it as a series to the PBS program system.

Siskel and Ebert left WTTW and PBS in 1982 for syndication.

The last five movies Siskel reviewed with Ebert on the show before his death aired during the weekend of January 23–24, 1999. On the show, they reviewed At First Sight, Another Day in Paradise, The Hi-Lo Country, Playing by Heart, and The Theory of Flight. Siskel gave thumbs up to all of them, except for Playing by Heart. Janet Maslin, Peter Bogdanovich, Todd McCarthy, Lisa Schwarzbaum, Kenneth Turan, Elvis Mitchell, and the eventual replacement for Siskel, Richard Roeper.

Film and TV appearances

Siskel and Ebert were known for their many appearances on late-night talk shows, including appearances on The Late Show with David Letterman sixteen times and The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson fifteen times. They also appeared together on The Oprah Winfrey Show, The Arsenio Hall Show, Howard Stern, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, and Late Night with Conan O'Brien.

In 1982, 1983, and 1985, Siskel, along with Ebert, appeared as themselves on Saturday Night Live. For their first two appearances, they reviewed sketches from that night's telecast and reviewed sketches from the "SNL Film Festival" for their last appearance.

In 1991, Siskel, along with Ebert, appeared in a segment on the children's television series Sesame Street entitled "Sneak Peek Previews" (a parody of Sneak Previews). In the segment, the critics instruct the hosts Oscar the Grouch and Telly Monster on how their thumbs up/thumbs down rating system works.

In 1993, Siskel appeared as himself in an episode of The Larry Sanders Show entitled "Off Camera". Entertainment Weekly chose his performance as one of the great scenes in that year's television.

In 1995, Siskel and Ebert guest-starred on an episode of the animated TV series The Critic entitled "Siskel & Ebert & Jay & Alice". In the episode, Siskel and Ebert split and each wants protagonist Jay Sherman, a fellow movie critic, as his new partner. In the film, he is seen debating with Ebert over the merits of the film version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. In an interview for the Academy of Television and Radio, his TV co-host Roger Ebert said of him, "I think Gene felt that he had to like the whole picture to give it a thumbs up." Ebert also noted in a memoriam episode of Siskel and Ebert that when Siskel found a movie that he truly treasured, he embraced it as something special. Directly addressing his late colleague, Ebert said: "I know for sure that seeing a truly great movie made you so happy that you'd tell me a week later your spirits were still high."

Preferences

Favorites

One of Siskel's favorite films was Saturday Night Fever; he even bought the famous white disco suit that John Travolta wore in the film from a charity auction. Another one of his all-time favorites were the Stanley Kubrick films Dr. Strangelove and 2001: A Space Odyssey. A favorite from childhood was Dumbo, which he often mentioned as the first film that had an influence on him. In addition, Siskel ranked Orson Welles' 1941 film Citizen Kane as among the greatest films of all time. Other notable favorites included My Dinner with Andre (1981), Shoah (1985), Fargo (1996), and the documentary Hoop Dreams (1994).

Best films of the year

Siskel compiled "best of the year" film lists from 1969 to 1998, which helped to provide an overview of his critical preferences. His top choices were:

  • 1969: Z
  • 1970: My Night at Maud's
  • 1971: Claire's Knee
  • 1972: The Godfather
  • 1973: The Emigrants
  • 1974: Day for Night
  • 1975: Nashville
  • 1976: All the President's Men
  • 1977: Annie Hall
  • 1978: Straight Time
  • 1979: Hair
  • 1980: Raging Bull
  • 1981: Ragtime
  • 1982: Moonlighting
  • 1983: The Right Stuff
  • 1984: Once Upon a Time in America
  • 1985: Shoah
  • 1986: Hannah and Her Sisters
  • 1987: The Last Emperor
  • 1988: The Last Temptation of Christ
  • 1989: Do the Right Thing
  • 1990: Goodfellas
  • 1991: Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse
  • 1992: One False Move
  • 1993: Schindler's List
  • 1994: Hoop Dreams
  • 1995: Crumb
  • 1996: Fargo
  • 1997: The Ice Storm
  • 1998: Babe: Pig in the City

From 1969 until his death in February 1999, he and Ebert were in agreement on nine annual top selections: Z, The Godfather, Nashville, The Right Stuff, Do the Right Thing, Goodfellas, Schindler's List, Hoop Dreams, and Fargo. There would have been a tenth, but Ebert declined to rank the -hour documentary Shoah as 1985's best film because he felt it was inappropriate to compare it to the rest of the year's candidates. Six times, Siskel's number one choice did not appear on Ebert's top ten list at all: Straight Time, Ragtime, Once Upon a Time in America, The Last Temptation of Christ, Hearts of Darkness, and The Ice Storm. Seven times, Ebert's top selection did not appear on Siskel's; these films were 3 Women, An Unmarried Woman, Apocalypse Now, Sophie's Choice, Mississippi Burning, Eve's Bayou and Dark City. While his partner Roger Ebert was very sensitive to films about race and ethnicity; Siskel was sensitive to films about families and family relationships and had a special hatred for films like House Arrest (1996) and Like Father Like Son (1987), both of which were about parents and their children.

In particular, he often gave negative reviews to films that became box office champs and went on to be considered mainstream classics: Poltergeist, Scarface, Beverly Hills Cop, The Terminator, Aliens, Predator, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Thelma & Louise, and Independence Day. This even extended to several films that went on to win the Oscar for Best Picture: The Silence of the Lambs and Unforgiven.

Siskel walked out on three films during his professional career: the 1971 comedy The Million Dollar Duck starring Dean Jones, the 1980 horror film Maniac, and the 1996 Penelope Spheeris film Black Sheep. When he mentioned walking out on Black Sheep in 1996, he said it was the first time he walked out on a movie he was reviewing since Million Dollar Duck in 1971; he later explained that he did not include Maniac because he did not review Maniac as an assignment for his newspaper or part of his and Ebert's weekly TV reviews but only as a "Dog of the Week", a feature of the TV show in which each critic would single out the very worst movie they had seen that week. However, he had changed his opinions on films years after his initial reviews, as with the 1990 film Tremors, to which he originally gave a negative review but later gave a glowing positive evaluation in 1994, stating, "I wasn't sure what I missed the first time around, but it just didn't click."

Personal life

On October 4, 1980, Siskel married Marlene Iglitzen, who was then a producer for CBS in New York. They had two daughters, Kate (a marketing and communications executive at Convergent Energy and Power in New York City) and Callie (a poet and writer), and a son, Will (a coordinator of major league operations for the Atlanta Braves baseball team). Their daughters graduated from Siskel's alma mater, Yale University. He is the uncle of Ed Siskel, a lawyer and former White House Counsel under U.S. President Joe Biden, Jon Siskel, a co-founder of the documentary and film-production based company Siskel/Jacobs Productions, and Charlie Siskel, a documentary film producer.

Siskel was a lifelong Chicago sports fan, especially of his hometown basketball team, the Chicago Bulls, and he would cover locker-room celebrations for WBBM-TV news broadcasts following Bulls championships in the 1990s. He wrote hundreds of articles applauding the Film Center's distinctive programming and lent the power of his position as a well-known film critic to urge public funding and audience support. He underwent brain surgery three days later. For a few weeks during his recovery, he participated on Siskel & Ebert by telephone, calling in from his hospital bed while Ebert appeared in the studio. Siskel did not disclose the severity of his illness to anyone outside of his family; publicly, he said that the surgery removed an unspecified "growth" on his brain, and that he was recovering well. He eventually returned to the studio, but was noted to appear more lethargic and mellow than usual. On February 3, 1999, he announced that he was taking a leave of absence from the show, but that he expected to be back by the fall, stating, "I'm in a hurry to get well because I don't want Roger to get more screen time than I."

Legacy

alt=Image of a building on a Chicago street. Text on a sign reads "Gene Siskel Film Center".|thumb|274x274px|The [[Gene Siskel Film Center at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Chicago, Illinois]]

In June 2000, the Film Center was renamed The Gene Siskel Film Center in his honor.

Following Siskel's death in 1999, Ebert wrote:

Ebert once said of his relationship with Siskel:

When both men appeared together on The Late Show Starring Joan Rivers, Joan Rivers conducted a "together and separately" interview with them, which at one point had each of them wear Walkman-style headphones, playing loud music, while the other commented on his partner. When asked what he thought was the biggest difference between himself and Ebert, Siskel unhesitatingly replied: "I'm a better reviewer than he is", but a few moments later, he said that anyone who read an Ebert review would read "an extremely well-written review".

She included the iconic "thumbs-up" gesture; it received a great round of audience applause. In April 2017, Siskel was posthumously inducted into the Silver Circle of the Chicago Television Academy.

See also

  • List of people with brain tumors

References

Further reading

  • Gene Siskel: The Balcony is Closed Article on Legacy.com
  • Gene Siskel's Top Ten List By Year (1969–1998)
  • Bio on Biography.com