For generations of Chicagoans, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert weren’t just critics. They were ours, two newspapermen who helped turn this city into a national hub for film discussion.
From their first awkward tapings at WTTW to their famous arguments broadcast across America, Siskel and Ebert reshaped how audiences talked about movies and turned a Chicago public television experiment into one of the most influential pop-culture forces of the last half-century.
Their impact still reverberates through the city’s film community, its critics, its theaters and anyone who has ever left a movie wanting to debate it on the sidewalk.
That legacy retook center stage this weekend as Chicago marked the 50th anniversary of the duo’s first broadcast with a heartfelt live performance at the Chicago Cultural Center. Exactly five decades after their debut, audiences gathered to watch Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel come to life on stage in a special presentation titled Siskel and Ebert at 50: A Live Performance.
The show, starring Chicago comedy veterans Zack Mast as Ebert and Stephen Winchell as Siskel, revisited the origins of their unlikely partnership. Framed as a special episode of their early WTTW series Sneak Previews, the performance blended reenacted clips, commentary and behind-the-scenes anecdotes tracing how two rival critics went from stiff on-air personalities to the defining voices of American film criticism. Much of that evolution, as the actors noted, was guided by the show’s original producer Thea Flaum.
The live event capped a month-long citywide celebration that also included screenings of films the pair championed, from Eve’s Bayou and Breaking Away to Drugstore Cowboy, culminating with Lone Star on November 25.
Kenya Merritt, acting commissioner of the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, said the programming honors their legacy and the way their conversations elevated Chicago as a global destination for thoughtful film discourse.
Winchell and Mast have portrayed the critics once before, in a 2024 stage recreation of a famously contentious episode from 1987. For the anniversary tribute, they again immersed themselves in YouTube archives, interviews, and oral histories to capture the critics’ cadence and chemistry.
Winchell leaned into Siskel’s sharp physical mannerisms, while Mast embraced Ebert’s plainspoken directness. Together, they highlighted not only the pair’s disagreements but also the moments where their shared love of movies broke through.
Their performances received high praise from people who knew the critics best. After the show, Marlene Iglitzen and Chaz Ebert joined Flaum, longtime Sneak Previews assistant director Michelle McKenzie-Voigt and critic Richard Roeper, who eventually replaced Siskel, for a panel discussion. Both widows were struck by the uncanny authenticity of the actors’ portrayals. Roeper noted how deeply Siskel and Ebert’s legacy lives on, reflected in every post-movie debate he sees among audiences.
Despite the rocky first episodes of what was then called Opening Soon at a Theater Near You, Flaum recalled she saw potential early, as did PBS stations nationwide. By the late 1970s, the show expanded from monthly to weekly broadcasts and soon reached viewers across the country. The critics became fixtures of American culture during a film renaissance, helping elevate Chicago’s profile in the process.
Today, their influence remains everywhere. Roger Ebert’s writings continue at RogerEbert.com. The Gene Siskel Film Center remains one of the city’s most vital cultural institutions. And as Iglitzen said, if they were still here, the two would “be doing a podcast together.”
Chaz Ebert also shared that she has been approached about a Broadway play centered on the duo, while a feature film about their partnership is in development. And as Roeper put it, the spirit of Siskel and Ebert lives on in every viewer who walks out of a theater and immediately needs to talk about what they just saw.
They created a generation of everyday critics, and Chicago is still better for it.
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