E! Siskel True Hollywood story

I was a kid when Gene Siskel was alive, so I remember him from TV as the supreme authority on movies.  And when I came to Chicago and would walk by this handsome film center renamed after him, that only added to his legend.  So this little passage was a tad deflating:

Chicago film critics who often attended the same screenings as Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel were aware that the former is a hardcore film buff and the latter, who died in early 1999, was someone whose interest in film, at least to all appearances, was almost exclusively professional. (When Siskel first started writing for the Chicago Tribune, his main beat was real estate.) For instance, Ebert attends several film festivals every year and Siskel generally made it to few or none. After attending Cannes only once, as a TV reviewer in 1990, Siskel showed no interest in returning.  Ebert reviews a good many film books, and to my knowledge Siskel never did; if he ever read any books about film on his own, it would have surprised me. - Jonathan Rosenbaum, Movie Wars: How Hollywood and the Media Conspire to Limit what Films We Can See. 

 

Comments

[Brian]

I guess one has to ask, are blueberries any less tasty if they are raised in your back yard, or picked in the wilds of the Northern Minnesota Boundary Waters? How they get to the point where you experience them may be different, but should it diminish the experience? IMHO,I don't think so.

Gene Siskel did what he did very well. The analysis doesn't need to go much further than that.

Brian