Ebert, Roeper Call It Quits

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The New York Sun

The Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert says he’s cutting ties with the television show that he and the late Gene Siskel made famous.

In an e-mail to the Associated Press yesterday, Mr. Ebert said Disney-ABC Domestic Television had decided to take the show “in a new direction” and he won’t be associated with it.

His announcement came a day after the Chicago Sun-Times columnist Richard Roeper said he was leaving the nationally syndicated “At the Movies With Ebert & Roeper.”

Mr. Roeper said in a statement Sunday that he had failed to agree on a contract extension with Disney-ABC Domestic Television, so his last appearance on the show will air the weekend of August 16 and August 17.

Mr. Roeper said he intends to “proceed elsewhere … as the co-host of a movie review show that honors the standards established by Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert more than 30 years ago.”

Mr. Roeper joined Mr. Ebert on the show in 2000, after Mr. Ebert’s original co-host, the Chicago Tribune film critic Siskel, died of a brain tumor in 1999.

Siskel and Mr. Ebert had begun reviewing movies on television together in 1975 on Chicago public broadcasting’s WTTW, which eventually took their program national. The pair jumped to commercial television through the Tribune Co.’s TV syndication wing in 1982, switching to Disney in 1986.

Mr. Ebert has been sidelined the last two years because of health issues that have robbed him of his voice.


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