The Rivals? A Treatise on Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert’s Howard Stern Appearances and an Extended Commentary on Opposable Thumbs

In his book, Opposable Thumbs: How Siskel & Ebert Changed Movies Forever, Matt Singer provides readers with a thoughtful examination of the twenty-three-year collaboration of two of the most successful and widely known film critics ever to appear on television. As the author discusses, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert worked at rival newspapers—the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times—and they were fiercely competitive, even “mortal enemies” (3). They fought with each other to write the best reviews and land the biggest interviews. In 1975, this sense of competition became even more pronounced when Roger Ebert won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. One year later, however, the two newspaper journalists set aside their differences to argue the merits of current films face-to-face on a small screen pilot on WTTW, Chicago’s public television station.