Opposable Thumbs by Matt Singer
Once upon a time, if you wanted to know if a movie was worth seeing, you didn't check out Rotten Tomatoes or IMDB.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.
Matt Singer is a Webby Award-winning writer, critic, and podcaster. The current editor-in-chief of ScreenCrush, Matt has been a frequent contributor to the television shows CBS This Morning Saturday and Ebert Presents At the Movies, and his writing has also appeared in print and online at The Village Voice, The Dissolve, and Indiewire. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two daughters. His parents swear one of his first words as a baby was Spider-Man. J. M. DeMatteis is an Eisner award winning comic writer renowned for his work on Justice League, Batman, Captain America, The Defenders, Spider-Man, and more. DeMatteis famously wrote Kraven's Last Hunt, which has been hailed as one of the greatest Spider-Man stories of all time. Andrew Robinson is a comic book artist and painter, known for his cover work on Starman and Hawkman, Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man, and The Fifth Beatle.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780593540152 |
| ISBN 10 | 0593540158 |
| Title | Opposable Thumbs |
| Author | Matt Singer |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | Penguin Putnam Inc |
| Year published | 2023-10-24 |
| Number of pages | 352 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |