Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel were always known for their brutal honesty when it came to film criticism. But the time they bashed “The Three Amigos” to Chevy Chase’s face once led to an unexpected realization about why people were drawn to their show.
This latest story appears in Matt Singer’s new book “Opposable Thumbs: How Siskel and Ebert Changed Movies Forever.” Ebert and Siskel appeared on the December 12 episode of “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson” in 1986. Chase was also a guest on the episode to promote his new Christmas comedy, “The Three Amigos.”
During the show, Carson asked the film critics to pick a movie “that is really so bad.” Ebert didn’t hesitate before slamming the very movie Chase was there to promote.
“I can’t really recommend ‘Three Amigos,’” Ebert said at the time, eliciting a round of boos from the audience. “It’s the Christmas picture I like the least. This is kind of hard to say because Chevy Chase has made a lot of good movies and God willing he will make a lot more good movies in the future.”
“With your help!” Chase quipped back.
In an excerpt obtained by EW, Singer’s book reveals that Chase later told Ebert and Siskel that he didn’t like the movie much either. It wasn’t Chase’s response but that of viewers and fans that changed how the two approached their work moving forward.
A year after the “Tonight Show” appearance, Ebert told an interviewer that he “got a lot of letters from that.” Many of those letters asked him how he could be so mean and rude to Chase, but there was another response that emerged.
“But other people sent in letters saying, ‘It was refreshing to hear someone telling the truth on television for once,’” Ebert said at the time. “Siskel and I talked about this afterward and we thought that maybe the reaction to that helps explain why people are interested in the format of our show. They sense that we are actually telling the truth about what we think about the movies.”
In 1975, Ebert and Siskel started hosting a weekly film review show titled “Sneak Previews” on the Chicago public broadcasting station WTTW. That led to PBS’ “At the Movies With Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert” in 1982 and Buena Vista Television’s “Siskel and Ebert and the Movies” in 1986. The series continued after Siskel’s passing in 1999, rebranding to become “Roger Ebert and the Movies.”
