From Roger Ebert

Film Comment's current issue (April 2013) takes the occasion of Roger Ebert's demise to rerun an article for the magazine from 1990 in which he answers Richard Corless's attack on "Siskel & Ebert at the Movies" for being "superficial" and reviews the history of film going and film criticism in America from the Sixties to 1990. Here is the beginning of the article. It is instructive. It also shows how well Ebert wrote. Ebert's valid point is that Corliss's attack notwithstanding, "Siskel & Ebert at the Movies" was not undermining good film criticism but part of a wave of greater interest in it. That's also what I said in my recent personal remarks about Roger Ebert on Flickfeast.uk.. The most devastating part is at the end when Ebert quotes a shameless star-worshiping puff piece on Tom Cruise that Corless had recently turned out-- something Siskel & Ebert would never in their worse moments have dreamed of uttering.

I am glad that in reviewing the ups and downs and ups of film culture and film criticism in his lifetime Roger mentions Dwight McDonald of Esquire. For me too he was the American magazine film critic who taught me that movies could be taken seriously. That was years before Pauline Kael had a national platform on The New Yorker. Dwight McDonald's film criticism seems to be largely forgotten today.

ALL STARS: OR, IS THERE A CURE FOR CRITICISM OF FILM CRITICISM? PT. 2
From the May/June 1990 issue: Roger Ebert responds to Richard Corliss's attack on thumbs-up film criticism culture
WRITTEN BY ROGER EBERT
Read Richard Corliss's original attack here.

[Here's a big opening chunk of Ebert's article. Read all of it on Film Comment's website here. ]

Richard Corliss is generally correct in his discussion of new developments in popular film criticism (FILM COMMENT, March/April 1990). The age of the packaged instant review is here, and lots of moviegoers don't have time to read the good, serious critics—the Kaels and Kauffmanns. Thumbs, star ratings, grades, and the marvelous Franklin scale have made it unpopular, if not impossible, for critics to deliver an ambiguous or uncertain opinion of a movie (quick: Last Year at Marienbad—thumbs up or down?). Newspaper editors around the country want colorful capsule verdicts on the new movies for their weekend pull-out sections, and the TV stations in most major markets have local personalities who narrate clips from the new releases.

What Corliss does not realize is that this is an improvement, not a deterioration, of the situation as we both found it in the mid-Sixties when we started in the business of writing about films. That was a time when there was no regular film criticism on national or local TV. Film magazines did not appear on the newsstands; although Film Quarterly and FILM COMMENT were being published, few outside academia and the film industry knew about them. Variety was the showbiz bible, with the emphasis on biz. As a matter of policy, most daily newspapers did not publish film reviews. In general-circulation magazines, the great influential voice in the late Fifties and early Sixties belonged to Dwight Macdonald, in Esquire, the man who taught me that movies were to be taken seriously.

The single most influential event in the history of modern newspaper film reviewing took place as recently as 1963, when 20th Century-Fox banned Judith Crist from its screenings after she attacked Cleopatra in the New York Herald-Tribune. This development so tickled the public fancy that it became necessary for the trendier papers to import or create their own hard-to-please reviewers.

Before 1963, with the exception of a handful of papers in New York, Los Angeles, Washington, and a few other cities, newspaper film criticism existed on a fan-magazine level, if at all. Most movie reviews were ghosted by various staff writers under a house byline (Mae Tinee—get it?—in the Chicago Tribune). But by the middle years of the decade, any self-respecting paper had its own local critic, and everyone of them had studied Kael's I Lost It at the Movies and Andrew Sarris' The American Cinema.

That was a good time for the movies, as who needs to be reminded. Something called the "Film Generation" made a newsweekly cover, and films like The Graduate, Blow-Up, Weekend, Bonnie and Clyde, Persona, and 2001 were opening. Revival theaters flourished in the larger cities. Film societies did standing-room business on every campus. Harvard students knew Bogart's dialogue by heart, and in Chicago the Second City nightclub cleared its stage on Monday nights for screenings of underground films.

All that was long, long ago. It is probably true that today's average, intelligent, well-informed American undergraduate has never heard of Luis Buñuel, Jean Renoir, or Satyajit Ray, and if you find one who identifies Hitchcock, Truffaut, Kurosawa, or Bergman, hang on to him—he's got the fever.

The death of the repertory and revival houses in most cities has been duly mourned, but who is there to grieve the death of college film societies, which have shut down on one campus after another? Douglas Lemza of Films Incorporated, the largest 16mm film rental company, tells me that classic and foreign film exhibition on the campus is dying or dead, replaced by videocassettes on big-screen TV. The auditoriums where once we saw Ikiru are silent now on Sunday nights, but down in the dorm lounge the kids are sitting in front of the 50-inch Mitsubishi watching Weekend at Bernie's.

The most depressing statistic I know about patterns in U.S. film exhibition comes from Dan Talbot, veteran head of New Yorker Films. He says that an average subtitled film will take 85 percent of its box-office gross out of theaters in only eight North American cities, and will never play at all in most of the others. Vast chains like Cineplex Odeon have gobbled up the smaller local and regional exhibitors. Chicago's Biograph, which used to be an arthouse, was playing a Steven Seagal thriller the last time one drove past; the Cinema Studio, home of subtitled films, is the latest Manhattan art theater to close. In the late Fifties, more than 40 college towns had theaters booked by the Art Theater Guild. Such a chain is unthinkable today. The growth of the Landmark chain of revival theaters in the Seventies was brought to an end by videocassettes. The bottom line is that mass-produced Hollywood entertainments dominate U.S. movie exhibition, and most moviegoers seem to like it that way.

In the days of my youth, the film societies and arthouses provided the environment where a serious film community flourished. People stood in line together, sat in the theater together, and hung out afterwards to talk about the best new movies.

Places where that kind of gathering can take place no longer exist in most cities. A few revival houses survive, and the largest cities have film programs at the art museums, or in subsidized cultural centers. There are more film festivals than ever. Every city worth its salt has one, and festivals like Telluride, Park City, and Mill Valley specialize in showcasing independent films. Even so, a young person seriously interested in film has little sense, these days, that he is part of a community. The collapse of campus film societies is the single most obvious reason for this. Serious discussion of good movies is no longer part of most students' undergraduate experience.

Yet what about film criticism in these dark ages? It is thriving. There is more of it than ever before. Corliss can be forgiven, I think, for the elegiac tone of his farewell article; he is saying goodbye to FILM COMMENT after many productive and valuable years, and his leavetaking must be painful because a large portion of his life was invested in the magazine. But at least part of his discontent is a textbook case of mid-career crisis. He started with grand ambitions, he has achieved most of what he hoped for, and now he asks, with Peggy Lee: Is that all there is? Like many others his age (which is more or less my age), he finds the cause of his malaise in the disintegration of everything in general and other people's standards in particular.

What strikes me as slightly disingenuous is his lament for serious film criticism. Here is a critic who did important work for the late New Times, who writes in FILM COMMENT as a sane, acerbic stylist, but who has chosen for himself the space and style restraints of Time where the best way for a writer to get more space is to sell the editors on a cover story about a star, then try to sneak criticism into the crevices of a personality profile. He praises our program Siskel & Ebert with faint damns (we are the best of a bad lot, I am a jolly chap, etc.) and then says, "I simply don't want people to think that what they have to do on TV is what I'm supposed to do in print:' But that is not the real problem facing Corliss, who might better have asked why what he has to do in Time is what he's supposed to do in print. This is particularly sad because, with this farewell article, Corliss' distinctive critical voice may actually disappear from view: That isn't his own voice in Time, but a compromise with the magazine's patois. To put it another way, his manifesto would read more convincingly if he were leaving Time to join FILM COMMENT. Corliss' apocalyptic vision notwithstanding, good film criticism is commonplace these days. FILM COMMENT itself is healthier and more widely distributed than ever. Film Quarterly is, too; it even recently abandoned aeons of tradition to increase its page size. And then look at Cineaste and American Film and the specialist fan magazines (you may not read Fangoria, but if you did you would be amazed at the erudition its writers bring to the horror and special-effects genre). At the top of the circulation pyramid is the glossy Premiere, rich with ads and filled with knowledgeable articles that are not all just puff pieces about the stars—although some are. It is Corliss' opinion that good film books are no longer published, but has he read David Bordwell on Ozu, Patrick McGilligan on Altman, or Linda Williams on pornography? Kael, our paradigm, continues at The New Yorker. Kauffmann gets more sense into less space than any other critic alive, at the New Republic. Denby is at New York, Rosenbaum at the Chicago Reader, Hoberman at The Village Voice, Mark Crispin Miller just had a cover story in the Atlantic, and on and on. The weekly Reader in Chicago, born in 1969, has spawned a new kind of national newspaper, the giveaway lifestyle weekly, and each of these papers—The Phoenix, LA Weekly, etc. has its own resident auteurist or deconstructionist. Daily newspaper film criticism at the national level is better and deeper than it was in Corliss' golden age. Corliss mentions the invaluable Dave Kehr of the Chicago Tribune. Has he read Michael Sragow in San Francisco, Sheila Benson and Peter Rainer in Los Angeles, Jay Scott in Toronto, Howie Movshovitz and Bob Dennerstein in Denver, Jay Carr in Boston, Jeff Millar in Houston, Philip Wuntch in Dallas? And what about the college newspapers, where the explosion in film education over the past 20 years has generated dozens of undergraduate critics who already know more than some of their elders will ever learn? Yes, they are writing "Journalism" for the most part, and, yes, their reviews will yellow with age as those of Corliss' fondly remembered Cecelia Ager did. But then they are journalists. It is not dishonorable to write for a daily deadline. No art form is covered more completely and at greater length in today's newspapers than the movies. A lot of papers review virtually every film released—and, in many cases, no books at all (even The New York Times feels that one book review is sufficient on a daily basis). All this film criticism has not resulted in a more selective North American moviegoing public, nor has it created larger audiences for foreign or independent films or documentaries. It exists in a time when alternative films, theaters, and audiences are in disrepair.

But what of movie criticism on TV? Is it the culprit? What about Siskel & Ebert? I am the first to agree with Corliss that the program is not in-depth film criticism, as indeed how could it be, given our time constraints.* But Corliss has not bothered to really engage the program, to look at it closely and say what he thinks is wrong. He disapproves of the idea of Siskel & Ebert, but leaves it at that. (I wonder if Corliss watches the show very much—he gets the title wrong in his article and cites not a single moment from any segment. He would be incapable of writing a movie review as unfocused as his dyspepsia about S&E.)

The weekly program takes two basic forms—the review shows and the "theme" shows. The review shows are indeed as formatted as Corliss reports; typically, each involves reviews of five movies, with an ad-lib discuss ion after the written portion of each review, and then a summary featuring the infamous thumbs. Although Corliss thinks he has heard us telling jokes, in fact we have a house rule against any deliberate or scripted jokes—especially puns on names. Nor are our reviews limited to Corliss' "five Ws— warm, winning, wise, wacky, wonderful." In fact, his invention of this witty formula shows him using the very sort of jokey criticism he accuses us of practicing, although I will not deny the formula applies to many TV-based critics. Gene Siskel and I have an advantage over many other critics on the tube: we both still write for newspapers, where we have spent most of our time for more than 20 years. Most TV-based critics have never written a movie review longer than eight sentences.

I wish we had more time on the program. It would be fun to do an open-ended show with a bunch of people sitting around talking about movies—but we would have to do it for our own amusement because nobody would play it on television. The program's purpose is to provide exactly what Corliss says it provides: information on what's new at the movies, who's in it, and whether the critics think it's any good or not. Our show reaches audiences in nearly 200 cities. A typical letter from one of the smaller markets says, "None of these movies ever play within 50 miles of here, so thanks to your show at least we know what we're missing." In the golden age of the late Sixties, no film commentary of any sort reached most of the households in most of these markets (although faculty members on the local campus knew who Kael was, and huddled over the glow from their 16mm projectors like monks in the Dark Ages treasuring manuscripts from far lands). When we review a film that is not being released simultaneously on Siskel & Ebert's 1,600 screens, our review is the only local exposure th at film receives in many cities. When we have an opinion about a movie, th at opinion may light a bulb above the head of an ambitious youth who then understands that people can make up their own minds about the movies. And when we try to explain why Do the Right Thing is a better film than Driving Miss Daisy, although admittedly less enjoyable, it is a message not previously heard in many quarters.