Fifty Years Ago This Month: Two Critics in a Balcony Changed Everything

November 1975. Gerald Ford in the White House. "Jaws" is still playing in theaters. “Saturday Night Live” is in its second month on the air at NBC. And on November 23rd, at Chicago PBS station WTTW, something happened that would change film criticism and television forever – though nobody knew it at the time.

The show was called "Opening Soon at a Theater Near You." (Thank goodness they eventually changed that mouthful of a title.) The concept was simple, almost pedestrian: take two newspaper film critics from rival Chicago papers and put them on camera together to talk about what was playing at local theaters. And support that commentary with film clips from the movies that the critics were reviewing, a real novelty for media in those pre-You Tube days, in a time when you couldn’t instantaneously find and watch clips from new releases online.

Gene Siskel from the Chicago Tribune. Roger Ebert, the Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic from the Sun-Times. And film clips from movies that could only be seen in theatres at that time. Thirty minutes once a month. That was it.

Former Sun-Times reporter Eliot Wald came up with the initial idea for the show — he’d later move on to become a writer and producer for “Saturday Night Live” in the early 1980s. After a few episodes, a young PBS producer named Thea Flaum was chosen as the show’s executive producer — she would play a key role in developing the show.

If you watch that first episode (and you can, it's on YouTube), you'll see two guys who look like they'd rather be anywhere else. They're stiff. They're reading from note cards. The energy is... well, there isn't much energy. Ebert later admitted they were "petrified" and would stretch out their pre-show coffee breaks as long as possible because, as he put it, coffee wasn't allowed in the WTTW studio. Those early tapings could take eight hours to get one show finished – with breaks for lunch, dinner, and fights.

In a moving essay written in 2012, four years after he stoped doing “At The Movies” (by that time with Sun-Times colleague Richard Roeper), Ebert wrote about how he and Gene desperately tried to improve the show. He recalled he and Gene meeting with Flaum in her living room during that first season, trying to memorize "discussion points." They were terrible at it. "We can't remember these points," Gene finally said, "but we can talk to each other."

That simple realization – just talk to each other – changed everything.

Who could have imagined? Two newspaper writers, cameras pointed at them, discussing movies. It was television at its most basic. No flashy production values. No celebrity guests. Just two guys talking about films — and brief snippets from those movies. The kind of experiment that could have died after a handful of episodes and been forgotten by Christmas.

But Thea Flaum saw something in the friction between these two competitive journalists. She helped them relax. She got them to ditch the clipboards and 3x5 cards. She encouraged them to just... talk. To argue. To be themselves. And slowly, the magic started to happen. After two seasons, Flaum retooled the show as "Sneak Previews" and expanded it to biweekly, then weekly episodes that aired nationally on PBS. By its fourth season, it was reaching 180 to 190 outlets and had become the highest-rated weekly entertainment series in public television history.

The rest, as they say, is history. It became syndicated by Tribune Entertainment and then by Disney, known as “Siskel and Ebert At the Movies”, before finally becoming just “Siskel and Ebert”, lasting until Gene’s untimely death in 1999. The balcony. The debates. "Two thumbs up." They reviewed more than 4,000 films together. They championed independent and foreign cinema. They fought about everything. And they displayed an on-air chemistry that was unique and unmatched.

“I remember after we first started out,” Ebert recalled after Siskel’s death in 1999. “We were on a talk show and this old actor Buddy Rogers said to us, ‘The trouble with you guys is that you have a sibling rivalry.’ We did. He was like a brother, and I loved him that way.” This Ebert quote, from Rick Kogan’s peerless obit on Roger in 2013, defines the Gene/Roger relationship, which could sometimes seem contentious on-air: “How meaningless was the hate, how deep was the love.”

What started as an awkward local show on a Sunday night in November 1975 – two critics who "didn't see why the other one was quite necessary" – became a cultural phenomenon. They made film criticism accessible. They made it entertaining. They made it matter to millions of people who had never read a film review in their lives.

All this month, my friends at Media Burn are co-sponsoring free Wednesday night screenings and events at the Chicago Cultural Center (78 E. Washington St. in Chicago) The City of Chicago’s DCASE, Truth & Documentary, the Chicago History Museum and the Chicago Film Office) are co-sponsoring. They're showing films Siskel and Ebert championed, with special guests including Chaz Ebert (Nov. 5 along with a screening of “Eve’s Bayou”) and Thea Flaum herself (on Nov. 12 with a screening of “Breaking Away”).

Thea, a wonderful woman who is still active as the President of the Hill Foundation and the founder of the incredible website “Facing Disability”, was key in creating this landmark TV show, so it will be incredible to have her recall her time with the show.

For his part, Ebert always credited Flaum for being the drive force behind the show.

“She was the real “creator” of the show, as TV uses that term,” Ebert wrote in 2012. “She told us she would build a balcony for us, and sit us across the aisle from one another. She told us we couldn’t wear suits and ties–no one wore them to the movies. She came up with the idea of Spot the Wonder Dog.”

The monthly commemoration of the 50th anniversary of “Siskel & Ebert” even includes a live performance recreating the show on November 22nd at the Chicago Cultural Center with Thea, Rick Kogan and WTTW’s Michelle McKenzie-Voigt and Geoffrey Baer.

Fifty years. hard to believe. But then again, watching that first awkward episode from November '75, it's even harder to believe that THAT became... well, Siskel and Ebert. But you never know. Sometimes the most important moments in television history start with two uncomfortable guys in a balcony, trying to figure out what to say about the movies.