Book Time #10: Books About Movies
Hey everyone, welcome to another edition of Book Time! Thanks for all your suggestions on future starter packs. If you missed last month’s edition or are new around here (welcome!) you can read more about starter packs and what I’m looking for here. I’ll be taking suggestions for another month or two. If anything else comes to mind, don’t hesitate to reply to this email and let me know.
This month’s edition is about a book that is about movies and many other things too. There is also a Q&A with the author about his favorite books about movies. Enjoy!
Opposable Thumbs: How Siskel and Ebert Changed Movies Forever, Matt Singer
Not so long ago, two men yelling at each other on TV was considered an innovative form of entertainment. Those two men were Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, and they were yelling about movies. In Opposable Thumbs, Singer makes the case that viewers tuned in by the millions to hear about the movies as much as the yelling. I enjoyed Singer’s fun book about the two men yelling on television and came away with a sharper understanding of what makes good television and good criticism.
The word “childish” comes up often in Opposable Thumbs, but probably not as much as it ought to. Siskel and Ebert fought both on screen and off like adolescent brothers, picking on each other, bickering over the most inconsequential details of the show’s production so one never appeared superior to the other. They behaved, and argued, like children fighting over who gets to ride in the front seat. Singer is quite explicit that their stated goal with the show was to turn criticism into a contest. One of them had to be right and the other wrong, and it was this completely authentic competition between them which made the show a success. Here lies the paradox with Siskel and Ebert. Two of the most passionate advocates of film in its highest artistic form reduced the discussion of it to a stupid contest. And yet, that contest succeeded in getting millions of people to share that passion.
This is not to say Siskel and Ebert’s childishness towards one another precludes them from being good people, but it is important in the context of all the men who have tried to replicate their success. This implicit competition became explicit in so many of their television descendants. Some segments of ESPN’s Pardon The Interruption—a descendant so direct that Siskel and Ebert are namechecked in the top section of PTI’s Wikipedia page—had a scoring system judged by a producer, Tony Reali, who then became the host of a separate People Arguing About Sports show, First Take, which aired just before PTI and just after yet another rotating cast of people arguing about sports shows. First Take was a competition in which Reali awarded points for good or bad arguments and eliminated contestants round by round. There was a literal scoreboard. Whoever spoke loudest generally won. The winner's prize was getting one minute at the end of the show to yell about whatever they wanted.
These and all the other yelling shows are a curious legacy of sorts for Siskel and Ebert, but especially Ebert who is generally regarded as one of if not the finest critic in film history. Any time I watch a movie, I immediately look up his review afterwards. I often get more from the review than the film itself. A great critic can turn a brief review of a work of art into a work of art itself. For example, I recently saw and then looked up Ebert’s review of a forgotten Richard Linklater gem called SubUrbia about a group of late teen slackers hanging out in a strip mall in suburban Texas. A former high school classmate they all thought was a loser turned out to hit it big as a guitarist for a rock band and came by to see them after a gig. He shows up in a stretch limo and, in a brilliantly scripted and choreographed scene, talks to the main slacker dude about how disappointing life as a rock star is. “It's just airport, hotel, show, airport, hotel, show.”
From this modest launch point, Ebert takes control:
There is, I believe, a seductive quality to idleness. To be without ambition or plans is to rebuke those who have them: It is a refusal to enlist in the rat race, and there may even be a sad courage in it. But what Linklater sees is that it is so damned boring. Life without goals reduces itself to waiting. What it finally comes down to is airport, hotel, show--but without the airport, the hotel or the show.
I thought of that line again while reading Opposable Thumbs. SubUrbia was largely a movie about men arguing with each other about nothing while they waited for nothing to happen. This is also the central proposition of every failed Siskel and Ebert imitation, argument as a form of passing time, to fill the void, to produce cheap content.
At one point in Opposable Thumbs, Singer mentions that Siskel would be so thrilled by a great film he would be in a buoyant mood for a week. Siskel and Ebert may have been two men arguing on television, but they had a goal. They wanted you to love movies as much as they did. All the other men yelling on TV will never do what they did because they have no goal, they’re just yelling, and it’s so damned boring.
Matt Singer Q&A
1. What was the most influential book you read as you reported Opposable Thumbs?
I was so wrapped up in research and then writing, I didn’t really read any other books as I worked on Opposable Thumbs. When I was initially conceptualizing the book, though, I definitely thought about older books in this same vein that I loved. One I definitely thought about was The Late Shift: Letterman, Leno, and the Network Battle for the Night by Bill Carter. That was a book I loved and read multiple times as a kid, and the showbiz stories in it were so wild and juicy.
By design, Opposable Thumbs has other sides to it; I wanted half the book to be the crazy behind-the-scenes TV production stories and the other half to be more of a serious history of film and film criticism. But hopefully the stuff about Siskel & Ebert backstage captures a little of the flavor of The Late Shift.
2. What is your favorite book about movies (that you didn’t write)?
Books about movies make up the majority of what I read in my free time, so it’s hard to pick just one. I love most of the famous ones: Hitchcock/Truffaut, Making Movies by Sidney Lumet, The Devil’s Candy by Julie Salamon, and of course pretty much everything Roger Ebert published, including I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie and his Great Movies series.
The best movie book I’ve read in the last few years that maybe hasn’t quite entered that pantheon yet but should is Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of Masterpiece by Michael Benson. I can’t imagine a more comprehensive book about the making of a movie, from its earliest development to the execution of its groundbreaking special effects. It’s not only a fascinating book, it really makes you appreciate the achievement of 2001: A Space Odyssey even more.
3. What’s your favorite non-fiction book you read on any subject over the last year?
I really enjoyed Nick de Semlyen’s Wild and Crazy Guys: How the Comedy Mavericks of the ’80s Changed Hollywood Forever. Great stories, great interviews, and Nick really knows his stuff. He approaches his work as both a smart journalist and a smart critic. I learned a bunch, and wanted to go back and watch/rewatch a ton of movies he wrote about. His recent about action movies, The Last Action Heroes, is really good too.
4. Please explain how Siskel and Ebert justified giving Speed 2: Cruise Control two thumbs up.
You can watch their review of the film, but I suppose beyond that, some things cannot be explained. Look, some people like Speed 2. I’m honestly less mystified by that two thumbs up vote than by Ebert giving a thumbs down to the original Die Hard. If he just loved the Die Hard formula and gave a thumbs up to every single movie in that style? That might make sense to me. But a thumbs up for Speed 2 and a thumbs down for Die Hard ... that one is a real head scratcher.