Created by Matt Zoller Seitz
Directed by Judith Carter
“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
Haruki Murakami
Photo by Carlos Torres on Unsplash

Opposable Thumbs: How Siskel & Ebert Changed Movies Forever (Hardcover, NEW)

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You asked whether Siskel & Ebert had given it “two thumbs up.”

On a cold Saturday afternoon in 1975, two men (who had known each other for eight years before they’d ever exchanged a word) met for lunch in a Chicago pub. Gene Siskel was the film critic for the Chicago Tribune. Roger Ebert had recently won the Pulitzer Prize—the first ever awarded to a film critic—for his work at the Chicago Sun-Times. To say they despised each other was an understatement.

When they reluctantly agreed to collaborate on a new movie review show with PBS, there was at least as much sparring off-camera as on. No decision—from which films to cover to who would read the lead review to how to pronounce foreign titles—was made without conflict, but their often-antagonistic partnership (which later transformed into genuine friendship) made for great television. In the years that followed, their signature “Two thumbs up!” would become the most trusted critical brand in Hollywood.

In Opposable Thumbs, award-winning editor and film critic Matt Singer eavesdrops on their iconic balcony set, detailing their rise from making a few hundred dollars a week on local Chicago PBS to securing multimillion-dollar contracts for a syndicated series (a move that convinced a young local host named Oprah Winfrey to do the same). Their partnership was cut short when Gene Siskel passed away in February of 1999 after a battle with brain cancer that he’d kept secret from everyone outside his immediate family—including Roger Ebert, who never got to say goodbye to his longtime partner.But their influence on in the way we talk about (and think about) movies continues to this day.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Matt Singer is the editor and film critic of ScreenCrush and a member of the New York Film Critics Circle. He won a Webby Award for his work on the Independent Film Channel’s website. His latest book is Opposable Thumbs: How Siskel and Ebert Changed Movies Forever. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two daughters.

REVIEWS

One of People’s Must-Read Books for Fall 2023

“Opposable Thumbs is a welcome reminder of an era when film criticism actually mattered...But it was Siskel and Ebert who, in Singer’s words, ‘democratized criticism, turned it into mass entertainment.’”—The New York Times

"A wonderful book." —RogerEbert.com

"The role of Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert in changing film criticism may often have been simplified to their signature phrase 'Two Thumbs Up,' but the glory and value of this knowledgeable, deeply entertaining history of their partnership is that it's always expansive, never reductive. We get so much here—a dual portrait of two big personalities at war with one another both as critics and as men, a history of the invention and reinvention of a seminal TV series, and a deep sense of the abiding love for movies that coursed through their work and that courses through Matt Singer's." —Mark Harris, author of Mike Nichols: A Life

"Critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert changed how we talked about the movies. A fascinating look inside their enduring partnership." —People

"Siskel and Ebert bustled into the world at a time when movie critics mattered more, before the culture fragmented into a million voices and “influencers,” and they ruled that world with iron thumbs. In this sense Singer’s book is a time capsule of a bygone era every bit as irreplicable as the partnership at its core." —The Los Angeles Times

Publisher ‏ : ‎ G.P. Putnam's Sons (October 24, 2023)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 352 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0593540158
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0593540152
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.25 x 1.2 x 9.3 inches

About Our Store

MZS.Press is the online arts bookstore founded by author, critic, and filmmaker Matt Zoller Seitz and Directed by Judith Carter. It offers new, used, signed, collectible, and rare books on film, TV, music, photography, and the visual arts. The store was launched in 2019 on a different platform and has expanded to incorporate arts books published by MZSPress's private imprint: titles currently include Seitz's The Deadwood Bible: A Lie Agreed Upon and Dreams of Deadwood, about the HBO Western, and Walter Chaw's A Walter Hill Film.

Our deepest wish is to promote, encourage, and distribute work by small presses, academic presses, and individuals. Extraordinary work tends to get swallowed up on giant platforms like Amazon and Barnes & Noble. The titles featured here are personally selected by a group of curators and advisors, including Seitz and an array of critics, artists, journalists, educators, publishers, and arts mavens who are known for their ability to suss out what Seitz's jazz musician dad liked to call "the good sh*t."

About the Partners

Matt Zoller Seitz

Critic, Author, Filmmaker, MZS Press Creator

Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Large and film critic of RogerEbert.com; Features Writer for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, Contributing Writer for D Magazine and Texas Highways as well as finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism. His writing on film and TV has appeared in Sight and Sound, The New York Times, Salon.com, The New Republic and Rolling Stone. Seitz is the founder and original editor of the influential film blog The House Next Door, now a part of Slant Magazine.

Seitz has written, narrated, edited or produced over a hundred hours’ worth of video essays about cinema history and style for The Museum of the Moving Image, Salon.com and Vulture, among other outlets such as Texas Highways and AARP. His five-part 2009 video essay Wes Anderson: The Substance of Style was spun off into the hardcover book The Wes Anderson Collection. This book and its follow-up, The Wes Anderson Collection: Grand Budapest Hotel were New York Times bestsellers.

Other Seitz books include the New York Times bestsellers The Sopranos Sessions and Mad Men Carousel; TV (The Book), The Deadwood Bible: A Lie Agreed Upon, The Wes Anderson Collection: The French Dispatch and the new The Wes Anderson Collection: Asteroid City. He is also an interviewer, moderator, and film programmer who has curated and hosted film and TV presentations for the Museum of the Moving Image, IFC Center, San Francisco's Roxie Cinema, and other venues. In October 2024 he brought the legendary filmmaker Oliver Stone back to Dallas for a historic return to the city and the Texas Theatre, considered the biggest film event of Dallas in 2024 by Dallas Observer!

Judith Carter was in the Upscale and Luxury Hospitality Industry for most of her life. In 2004 she had a beautiful baby boy with Special Needs and put the pause on her career until 2017 to dedicate herself to him and then others, assisting and volunteering as a legal advocate ensuring the best medical care, evaluations and educations for Special Needs children and their families.

Matt and Judith were family friends for over 20 years. She was there with her family in support when his wife Jen passed away suddenly in 2006. Then just 6 weeks later while Matt was in Dallas; he and his Father, Dave, and Step-Mother, Genie, were there as support, when Judith was alone and her son received the first of many diagnoses that changed the trajectory of their lives. So it made sense in the turbulent year of 2020, Matt asked Judith to take over running the online store that has become MZS.press. The rest as they say is, "Their"-story.

The Arts Bookstore of the Internet

The Arts Bookstore of the Internet

Created by Matt Zoller Seitz
Directed by Judith Carter
“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
Haruki Murakami
Photo by Carlos Torres on Unsplash

Opposable Thumbs: How Siskel & Ebert Changed Movies Forever (Hardcover, NEW)

The Arts Bookstore of the Internet

The Arts Bookstore of the Internet

Created by Matt Zoller Seitz Directed by Judith Carter“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”Haruki MurakamiPhoto by Carlos Torres on Unsplash

Opposable Thumbs: How Siskel & Ebert Changed Movies Forever (Hardcover, NEW)

About Our Store

About the Partners

Created by Matt Zoller Seitz
Directed by Judith Carter
“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
Haruki Murakami
Photo by Carlos Torres on Unsplash