Siskel Pops Off About Everything but Corn in Bowers Talk

One might think the topic would have been popcorn on Monday when film critic Gene Siskel spoke to clients of the American Maize-Products Co., here from Indiana for a convention. But the only nods to corn were the polenta and the corn salsa on the steaks.

That doesn’t mean folks didn’t get an earful.

Siskel’s planned talk at the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art, on favorite quotes gathered over 26 years of covering the movies, ultimately gave way to discussion of what he called the “subject of the moment”--Republican charges of excessive violence and sex in movies and pop music.

But some of those favorite quotes still made it to the fore:

* From director Federico Fellini: “Two things always look good in a movie. Always. A train, and snow.”

* From Howard Hawks, upon being asked what’s a good movie: “A good movie is three good scenes and no bad scenes.”

* From Steven Spielberg, on his and George Lucas’ unprecedented commercial success: “It might be that we both really love film. I mean the actual film itself. We love touching it, manipulating it, loading it in the camera, exposing it. I think others in the film business like what film can do for them, bring them money, power and fame. But we love film.”

* From Meryl Streep. Siskel had asked her to teach him about acting. He would say a line, and she would tell him how he did. The line was “I love you, Meryl.”

He said it, and Streep said, “Wrong. All wrong. You were focusing on how you were saying the words ‘I love you, Meryl.’ But when you’re declaring your love to someone, you’re not thinking how you’re saying the line. You’re looking at the person and wondering if that person loves you. That’s what good acting is: finding the truth of the scene.”

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The final quote was from Stanley Kubrick, who’d been asked whether movie violence desensitizes viewers and triggers violent behavior in real life.

“This was in 1972,” Siskel noted, “during the release of Kubrick’s ‘A Clockwork Orange,’ a movie some people still might want to ban today, and very much about violence in society.” He recalled Kubrick’s words at the time:

“Even hypothetically granting that [film violence can corrupt viewers], which I am sure it does not, I should think that realistic violence is far less likely to cause violence than the ‘fun’ violence of James Bond or the Tom and Jerry cartoons, in which the eight-inch lumps on their heads shrink and they’re off to the next caper. That’s the kind of violence, if any, that might cause emulation.

“When young boys were fed nonsense about the glory of war,” Kubrick had added, “they might have gone off to war with expectations that didn’t turn out to be true, whereas if they had been exposed to brutal, violent war films, they might have realized what was in store for them.”

In any case, Siskel said he thinks it ludicrous to put the subject of violence in movies on the national agenda.

“We [as a nation] are focusing on one trial, or on a skater’s knee, and we have these major problems that don’t get the same attention. . . This [business about violence in film] is on the front page of every news publication, and it will be on television for the next couple of weeks, until somebody else gets hit on the knee . . .

“Maybe a lot of this is the media’s fault.” He criticized the entertainment news media on other grounds as well, especially for its emphasis on box office results and opening weekend figures reported in newspapers every Monday. Such results, he believes, likely are skewed toward one demographic group and adversely affect what remains in release for the rest of the movie-going public.

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“Who goes that first weekend? Young people,” Siskel said. “Young people run the movie business because they have total disposable income, and total disposable time. They go right away to the newest picture.” Therefore, Siskel feels, opening weekend tallies are a “distortion,” but they nevertheless “determine a lot of what you’re seeing.”