Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert’s Catty Outtakes Are Pure Comedy Gold

What if Statler and Waldorf from The Muppets occasionally turned their scathing, condescending wit on one another? I imagine the resulting bickering would look a lot like the incredible cat fights left on the cutting room floor of Siskel & Ebert.

Nearly 50 years ago, the fruitful and antagonistic working relationship between late and legendary film critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert began, forming the foundation of the single greatest movie review television series of all time. Siskel and Ebert were similarly smarmy, headstrong and entirely convinced that theirs was the expert opinion on any topic related to the medium of film, and given their positions as the senior film critics of the rivaling newspapers the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times respectively, the local Chicago PBS affiliate WTTW’s decision to cram both Siskel and Ebert into the same monthly TV show in 1975 with what was originally titled Opening Soon at a Theater Near You set the stage for a legendary competition between two wits and two egos that eclipsed all but the finest cinematic satire in terms of pure comedy potential.

This week, fans of movies and movie criticism who either weren’t alive or weren’t paying attention during Ebert and Siskel’s heyday during the 1980s and 1990 stumbled upon an outtake from the dueling duo’s original show that gets two thumbs way up:

Siskel and Ebert’s TV collaboration would go by many names during their long frenemyship — Sneak Previews, At the Movies, Siskel & Ebert and the Movies and simply Siskel & Ebert — but their explosive chemistry stayed mostly the same throughout their long careers. “We never had a single meaningful conversation before we started to work on our TV program,” Ebert wrote about Siskel in 2012, more than a decade after the latter passed away from brain cancer. “Alone together in an elevator, we would study the numbers changing above the door.”

“It would take eight hours to get one show in the can, with breaks for lunch, dinner and fights,” Ebert remembered of those early years featured in the above exchange. “I would break down, or he would break down, or one of us would do something different and throw the other off, or the accumulating angst would make our exchanges seem simply bizarre. There are many witnesses to the terror of those days.”

However, Ebert clarified, for all the butting of heads and hilarious acrimony between him and Siskel, there was an underlying love and respect between them that made the bickering bearable. “The public image was that we were in a state of permanent feud, but nothing we felt had anything to do with image. We both knew the buttons to push on the other one, and we both made little effort to hide our feelings, warm or cold,” Ebert claimed. “In 1977 we were on a talk show with Buddy Rogers, once Mary Pickford’s husband, and he said, ‘You guys have a sibling rivalry, but you both think you’re the older brother.’”

In case the above video doesn’t perfectly capture such an assessment of Siskel and Ebert’s relationship, in what would be his final appearance on Siskel & Ebert, Siskel announced his imminent medical leave by remarking, “I’m in a hurry to get well because I don’t want Roger to get more screen time than I.”