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Though bickering has made them famous, the best-kept secret about Siskel and Ebert is that they agree much more often than they disagree. Their tastes are generally similar (two thumbs up for Prick Up Your Ears and Swimming to Cambodia; two thumbs down for Blind Date and The Secret of My Success). Both rail regularly against teen sex comedies, violent horror films and car chases. Good movies are almost always those that have "characters you can identify with."
"It is the emotional content that comes through on TV," says Ebert. "People can pick up a lot about the film through the exchange of feelings between two critics." Siskel too defends their TV criticism against charges that it is oversimplified and superficial: "It is the distillation between the two of us of 39 years of writing about movies."
Ebert, 44, got a journalism degree from the University of Illinois, went to work for the Sun-Times at age 24 and landed the movie-reviewing spot a year later. Siskel, 41, majored in philosophy at Yale, became a reporter for the Tribune at 23 and the paper's film critic soon afterward. They have been aggressive rivals in print ever since, though the competition hit a snag last year when the Tribune removed Siskel as daily critic and relegated him to feature pieces and capsule reviews.
The two have little in common outside the TV studio, aside from their reported $1 million salaries from TV alone. Ebert, a bachelor, lives in a three-story Victorian house (where he keeps the curtains drawn to protect his collection of watercolors), teaches a film course at the University of Chicago, and once wrote scripts for Erotic-Film Producer Russ Meyer. Siskel lives with his wife and two children in a fashionable ten-room co-op and is such a fan of Saturday Night Fever that at a celebrity auction he bought the % white suit John Travolta wore in the film. They rarely socialize with each other and never sit together at screenings: Siskel is typically near the back, Ebert farther down the aisle, usually munching from a box of Good & Plenty.
Is their feud a fake? "On all the movie sets I've been on," says Siskel, "I've never seen people get as angry as Roger and I get." Nor are the fights confined to the TV cameras. On a recent plane trip, Siskel was trying to teach Ebert to play Michigan rummy. At one point, Ebert accused Siskel of throwing a card into the wrong pile. Siskel denied it, and Ebert suddenly tossed up his seat tray. "That's it," he cried. "No more cards!" Hmmm. Conflict, characters you can identify with -- definitely a thumbs up.