'At the Movies' gets new hosts
Ben Lyons, a Hollywood reporter and film critic for "E! News" and others, and Turner Classic Movies host Ben Mankiewicz will take over "At the Movies" when its new season begins in September, Disney-ABC Domestic Television said this week.
Don't look for the syndicated program's "thumbs up-thumbs down" ratings to return. Roger Ebert shares a trademark lock on it with the widow of his late co-host, Gene Siskel, and Ebert has said they're hanging on to it.
Both Lyons and Mankiewicz have show business and media roots.
Lyons' father is film critic Jeffrey Lyons, and his grandfather was New York Post columnist Leonard Lyons.
Mankiewicz's grandfather, Herman Mankiewicz, won an Academy Award for the screenplay for "Citizen Kane" (with Orson Welles); his great-uncle, writer-director Joseph Mankiewicz, won Oscars for "All About Eve and "A Letter to Three Wives," and cousin Tom Mankiewicz wrote several James Bond movies, including "The Man With the Golden Gun" and "Diamonds Are Forever."
The new hosts will continue to debate the merits of current movies and DVD releases, but other segments will be added to the show, including a "critics roundup" in which the hosts are joined via satellite by reviewers from around the country, Disney said.
A revamped set, music and graphics also are planned.
The original TV show was born when Chicago newspaper critics Siskel and Ebert started "Sneak Previews" in 1975 for Chicago station WTTW. They moved to PBS nationally in 1978 with the renamed "At the Movies" and then went commercial with Tribune Syndication.
Walt Disney Co.'s Disney-ABC Domestic Television, then called Buena Vista Television, acquired the show in 1986, renaming it "Siskel & Ebert & the Movies."
Siskel died of a brain tumor in 1999; the following year, film critic Richard Roeper became Ebert's co-host.
Ebert has been battling cancer in recent years, undergoing a series of operations in which doctors removed a cancerous growth from his salivary gland and part of his right jaw.
He has been unable to appear on the show since doctors performed surgery in July 2006 that left him unable to speak. But the Pulitzer Prize-winning Chicago Sun-Times critic continues to write reviews and has published a number of books.
Last year, as he negotiated a new contract with Disney-ABC Domestic Television, Ebert, according to the Walt Disney-owned company, had "exercised his right to withhold use of the 'thumbs' until" he had a new contract. Ebert subsequently has said the show could continue to use the "thumbs" during negotiations and that he never withheld their use.
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