Q 6

PLAYBOY: Which movie star do you think you look like?

Gene Siskel: Elliott Gould. When I was younger, I used to be compared to Jimmy Stewart a lot. But that doesn't seem to happen anymore.

Roger Ebert: Let me put it this way: I resemble a handsome Buddy Hackett. Gene is more of an ugly Elliott Gould. Actually, Gene looks exactly like George Gershwin. They have the same profile, the same lack of hair. We're often called the Laurel and Hardy or the Abbott and Costello of film criticism. We really have to thank our lucky stars that there were three Stooges.

Q 7

PLAYBOY: To which movie star do you relate most closely?

Gene Siskel: I love Jack Nicholson. I identify especially with his characters in the early Seventies. I've always felt a kinship with him. Gene Hackman once told me. "I always go to a Nicholson movie thinking he knows something about life, about girls, and he's going to tell me the secret in the movie, but he never does. And I still keep coming back."

Roger Ebert: Marcello Mastroianni in La Dolce Vita, playing a gossip columnist in Rome. That character is the character in the movies most like me, not in terms of physical details but in terms of his spiritual dilemma: being torn between getting out the daily piece and writing that great novel that he knows he has in him. I'd like to write a novel someday. It would be about a frustrated Midwestern movie critic who thinks he's Jack Nicholson.

Q 8

PLAYBOY: If it were consistent with the dramatic intent of a film, which actress would you most like to see shed her clothes?

Gene Siskel: Nastassja Kinski excites me sexually more than any other person in the movies today. I think she is capable of unbridled lust. And she looks great without her clothes on. I had the pleasure of interviewing her over breakfast in the coffee shop of the Sherry-Netherland Hotel. I drank 12 cups of coffee and almost passed out afterward. She was not as hot in person, though, as she is on the screen. But who would be? Movie critics, for some reason, don't often talk about the erotic elements in films--maybe because they're embarrassed to admit they got sexually aroused by a movie. But, clearly, you don't get neutered when you become a movie critic.

Roger Ebert: I object to that question. You have to ask what character you would like to see drop her clothes, otherwise you're just turning it into a flesh market. I recently interviewed Joanna Pacula, the young Polish actress who was in Gorky Park, and she explained with real pain in her voice how hard it was for her to do the sex scene in that movie. As I heard the tone of her voice, I realized that it's altogether too easy for movie audiences to sit back in their chairs, like judges at a livestock auction, and watch people take off their clothes. At the point when an actress takes off her clothes, something very strange happens. We are no longer looking at a fiction film; we are now looking at a documentary. These are real people. So to sit back and talk about what actress I'd like to see lose her laundry is, I think, extremely distasteful, and I'm disappointed in Gene for having that kind of attitude toward Nastassja Kinski or anyone else.

Q 9

PLAYBOY: How many porno films do you see? How would you improve them?

Roger Ebert: I see fewer than one a year. They're boring. The only thing I remember about Debbie Does Dallas is that Debbie should have cleaned her fingernails.

I would improve hard-core movies by making them soft-core. Graphic detail is not erotic. What's erotic is character, situation and suggestion, along with attractive nudity. A new trend in erotic movies is dialog in bed. You get a promising situation and then the characters talk. The French know better than that. They don't do a lot of talking during sex scenes. But it's almost as if an American star can't get into bed without delivering a few wise-cracks or pseudo-significant psychological insights. Eroticism comes out of situation, not dialog.

Gene Siskel: I don't go to many porno films. I see some on cable at home, but they are really kind of boring.

To help eroticism, you have to reduce the number of elements: Remove dialog, put music on the sound track and repeat action. Allow people to concentrate on the sex taking place. The most erotic moments for me in movies, typically, are quiet, simple moments with more and more intense lovemaking stretched out over time. Don't cut away from the action. Let it play. Let people get into a trancelike state, into some kind of sexual fantasy. You do that by simplifying. Most porno films are overcut. All the cutting to the various body parts, oddly enough, works against the eroticism.

Q 10

PLAYBOY: How do you shut up an obnoxious movie talker or a crying baby?

Gene Siskel: The general decline of manners in society is reflected in the limited society called the movie theater. And that's too bad. Movie talkers are really unaware of how well they can be heard. My solution is to say, "Excuse me, I'm a movie critic." I show them my note pad and say, "Believe it or not, I'm working here, and if you could whisper more quietly, I'd appreciate it." People respond to that. They understand trying to make a living.

As for the crying baby, that's my number-one pet peeve. Throw him out. He doesn't belong there. Hire A baby sitter or leave the kids at home alone. I have a standing offer of ten dollars to any usher who will throw a crying baby out of a theater with his mother. That's a lot for someone who gets paid three bucks an hour. I've paid off only once in ten years. So all of you ushers out there, I may be in your theater tomorrow.

Roger Ebert: I get up and change seats. People have been raised on television. They think they're home in their living rooms. Appropriate noise in a movie theater is part of the fun: when people are laughing or screaming together or when they think something is ridiculous together. But the chronic talker is an incurable condition, and the only thing you can do is get away from him--babies included.

Q 11

PLAYBOY: Some critics are much more vicious than you. Who goes too far?

Roger Ebert: Critics who are cruel are probably extremely lacking in self-confidence. John Simon has as little self-confidence as any human being I've met. He absolutely vibrates in reaction to any perceived challenge to his stature. He is obsessed by what people think about him.

I wouldn't name anybody else in particular. There is a point at which you are describing a movie and there is a point at which you are trying to hurt somebody. There are just too many people working on a movie to be able to single anyone out in that way.

Gene Siskel: It pays nothing to knock your colleagues, and a question such as this almost puts a positive spin on the word vicious. There are so many critics in New York that some of them--in an effort to have their voices heard--may feel a need to shout, positively or negatively, a little more loudly than they would if they were writing someplace else. And that's unfortunate, because so many of the New York critics are excellent. They have great minds and they love movies intensely. But the environment can force some of them to speak to one another instead of to the general moviegoer.

Q 12

PLAYBOY: Neither of you owns home-video equipment. Are you holding out for a clearance sale?

Gene Siskel: I have an aversion to technology in general. Until last year, I had the 12-inch Sony TV set I bought in 1970. I have never owned a record player. I go out to the movies, and when I go home I prefer to read. I am just a mechanical nincompoop. I suspect I will get some of the stuff. Frankly, we need it for our work. You can study films; it's great preparation. I mean, there's a real business use here that is going to compel me to----

Roger Ebert: Sounds like you're hoping this will get into print to justify your tax return, right? Well, I'll have a lot of business use for a cassette player, too. In fact, I probably won't use it except for business. Probably the main advantage for both of us in seeing movies in a theater is that a professional projectionist turns on the machine. I don't have an audio tape deck, but I do have a turntable. I mean, I do know how to put a record on and start the needle at the right end of it. But I'm baffled by a lot of this stuff. I'll probably get a VCR, but I'm going to have to have somebody install it and paste little labels on all the buttons for me.