Well aware of the contests' new, uniquely thrilling live entertainment, studio executives and sponsors quickly capitalized on their appeal, eager to maximize the resulting profits. To that end, however, the shows' outcome couldn't be left to chance: Then as now, viewers were looking for the "right" kind of hero to identify with; so ultimately it was unthinkable to let someone like Herbert Stempel (John Turturro) - not only an annoying nerd with thick glasses and bad teeth but worse, an annoying *Jewish* nerd with thick glasses and bad teeth - win the famous "Twenty-One" for more than a couple of weeks. A more suitable replacement was found in Columbia University lecturer Charles Van Doren (Ralph Fiennes), descendant of one of New England's foremost intellectual families and, in the words of the show's co-producer Albert Freedman (Hank Azaria), soon the TV nation's new "great white hope." A brilliant intellectual who nevertheless felt eternally inferior to his Pulitzer Prize-winning father, poet Mark Van Doren (Paul Scofield), his mother (Elizabeth Wilson), likewise a distinguished author, and his uncle, Pulitzer Prize winner Carl Van Doren, Charles ultimately agreed to sell his integrity for a high flight to fame and fortune on borrowed wings, and thus succumbed to the one force driving a quiz show's appeal more than anything else: money, and astronomically large sums thereof.
Based on former Congressional investigator and Kennedy speechwriter Richard Goodwin's "Remembering America: A Voice From the Sixties" and scripted by Paul Attanasio, Robert Redford's 1994 film brilliantly traces the "Twenty-One" scandal - the biggest of several scandals involving rigged quiz shows - from the moment Stempel was told to take a humiliating dive and pass the helm to Van Doren (Goodwin also co-produced). The movie's tone is set from the opening scene, which focuses on neither of the contestants but Goodwin himself (Rob Morrow), newly arrived in Washington with a first-in-his-class Harvard Law School degree in his pockets, and admiring the latest thing in automobile technology in a Chrysler showroom ("Used to be the man drives the car, now the car drives the man," he eventually comments, wowed by the dealer's sales talk). Turning on the radio, they catch an announcer's remark on the Sputnik launch: "All is not well with America" (but "America doesn't own the [Chrysler] 300," the dealer responds). Then Goodwin changes the station and the film's opening credits begin to roll, significantly over Bobby Darin's "Mack the Knife" from Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's "Threepenny Opera:" Although originally conceived as a "Moritat," a darkly cynical ballad, Darin's swinging, upbeat 1959 version, a No. 1 hit for all of 22 weeks (1 1/2 times as long as Van Doren reigned on "Twenty-One") musically pulls every last tooth out of the song's sharp-edged lyrics; just as television's goody-two-shoes pseudo-reality and America's newfound prosperity seemed to obliterate the era's grimmer sociopolitical truths.
"Quiz Show" has been described, in turns, as a political thriller, a morality play, a parable on the loss of innocence and a fact-based drama; and it is all that, and more. It obviously has to be seen in context with "All the President's Men," Redford's 1976 film costarring Dustin Hoffman and Jason Robards, based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning Woodward-Bernstein account on Watergate. Just as America lost its political innocence there, it had already lost its innocence vis-a-vis showbiz in the quiz show scandals. But this is also a fascinating exploration of the scandal's underlying psychology; of that mix of insecurity, greed, ambition, hero-worship, prejudice and self-deception which made the manipulation possible in the first place and allowed it to go undetected for so long.
Of the movie's tremendous cast, John Turturro, Ralph Fiennes and Paul Scofield particularly give standout performances as the nerdy, deeply humiliated Herb Stempel, the dazzling Ivy Leaguer Charles Van Doren and his intellectually brilliant, unwaveringly supportive and profoundly moral father Mark, who can snap out a Shakespeare quote appropriate to any situation at the drop of a hat. Rob Morrow's Dick Goodwin, the Jewish kid from Brookline who made it to Harvard and D.C. but is still occasionally up against prejudice, is not far behind (although I confess I sometimes find his accent a tad unconvincingly thick; more so than Fiennes's and Scofield's more refined New England versions). Not to be overlooked are also their female costars - besides Elizabeth Wilson, Mira Sorvino and Johann Carlo as Goodwin's and Stempel's wives - and of course the gang responsible for the goings-on at "Twenty-One:" David Paymer as slick producer Dan Enright, Hank Azaria as his sidekick, Christopher McDonald as host Jack Barry, Allan Rich as NBC boss Robert Kintner and Martin Scorsese in a rare and deadpan appearance as an actor as corporate sponsor Geritol's chairman Martin Rittenhome. (Besides, watch for Barry Levinson as "Today Show" host Dave Garroway and Calista Flockhart and Ethan Hawke [uncredited] as star-struck students).
When first setting out to investigate "Twenty-One," Goodwin aimed no lower than putting television itself on trial. But while the Congressional hearings did cause the downfall of the show and its greatest champion, Enright and Barry soon returned to television, and none of the others responsible for the manipulations suffered any consequences at all. Quiz shows are more popular than ever. "Give the public what they want ... It's entertainment. We're not exactly hardened criminals here. We're in showbusiness," was Al Freedman's cynical conclusion. And the movie's last words are again those of Berthold Brecht, but this time in Lyle Lovett's much darker version of the Moritat: "Mackie, how much did you charge ...?"
"Millionaire," anyone?
Paul Attansio adapted the screenplay from the book written by Richard N. Goodwin who was the government investigator at the time. In the film this role is played by Rob Morrow who is determined to uncover the deception. All the other actors are excellent too - most notably John Turturro who is cast as a Jewish man from Queens who is allowed to win for seven weeks before being replaced by Charles Van Doran, a professor at Columbia who came from a long line of scholars. Paul Scofield also shines in the role of Van Doran's father, who stands by his son even though the family is disgraced by the publicity.
It's not just the quiz show phenomenon that comes alive in this film. It is the nature of the times as well as the anti-Semitic undercurrent and cultural conflict that was endemic. Usually, when I see a film about the fifties, it looks like someone's imagination of what those times were like. But this film was different. I really felt I was right back there, many years before computers or even color television, sitting wide-eyed in front of that black and white set and admiring the contestants for being so smart. Times have changed. Now, we know we're being manipulated. And there is no outrage.
I was unprepared to love this film so much. There is tension throughout and consistently wonderful acting. The dialog was authentic and the actors all played their roles with subtlety. They became the characters in the film and I wound up caring about all of them. "Quiz Show" is a simply wonderful film and I give it one of my highest recommendations. Don't miss it.
However, Robert Redford's film is not really about the massive changes in the business of television that resulted from the quiz show scandals. The final word in this film is given to Dan Enright (David Paymer), the producer of "Twenty-One," who insists that because the show was entertainment and everybody made money, there was nothing wrong with giving contestants the answers and rigging the game. The point of this film is the human wreckage left behind by the scandal in terms of the two "Twenty-One" contestants at the center of the storm. Herbie Stempel (John Turturro) and Charles Van Doren (Ralph Fiennes) are polar opposites in terms of looks and religion but what they have in common is a vast knowledge of what can be called facts or trivia depending on your point of view. As Van Doren's father observes, if you are going to ask a question worth $64,000 it should be about the meaning of life.
Stempel is the reigning champion on "Twenty-One," but the show's sponsor (Martin Scorsese) has grown tired of Stempel's looks and grating personality. So the producers order him to take a dive and in a calculated move that backfires on them insist that Stempel blow an easy question on what film won the Oscar for best picture in 1955. Enright thinks that for 70 grand Stempel can be humiliated, but the producer grossly underestimates the importance of a reputation for being a smart guy has to someone like Stempel. The producers also think they have the perfect replacement for Stempel in Van Doren, the son of a famous American intellectual family. They offer to feed him the answers to ensure victory, but when Van Doren refuses they go ahead and find a slightly different way of producing the same results. Van Doren blinks, but takes the money, and sales for Geritol go up fifty percent.
Between these two is Dick Goodwin (Rob Morrow), a young lawyer who works for the Senate committee with oversight responsibilities on television. Goodwin is Jewish like Stempel but also Ivy League like Van Doren, and while he is pursuing the truth regarding how "Twenty-One" is run he is also attracted to the life lived by Van Doren, who exchanges Shakespeare quotations with his poet father Mark (Paul Schofield) over a family lunch. The great irony of the script by Paul Attanasion, based on Goodwin's book "Remembering America: A Voice from the Sixties," is that Stempel wants to get "Twenty-One" and Goodwin wants to get television, and while neither wants to do it with Van Doren, that becomes unavoidable. Not that any of these three men comes close to getting what they want out of this experience.
It is impossible not to consider "Quiz Show" to be a morality play, but as such it is a rather disheartening one since nobody gets what they deserve at the end of this one. But Redford sees the quiz show scandals as being a point in American history that ended a period of innocence. After this point Americans could not longer believe what they saw on television as being the truth and Redford, who did star in "All the President's Men," sees it as the first in a series of violations of the public trust that extend through Vietnam, Watergate and beyond. But the performances by Turturro and Finnes are so compelling that they keep this film grounded on the personal level, so that the larger social issues are lost in the personal wreckage of Stempel and Van Doren's lives. Enright claims that nobody lost with these quiz shows, but that is obviously not the case.
My only complaint about this film is that it really does not do a good job of capturing the excitement of such shows. Stempel and Van Doren played each other four times before Van Doren became the new champion. Van Doren also played Vivienne Nearing three times to a tie before losing (and had beaten her husband Victor earlier that year). I do not think we get a sense of the drama or the addictive nature of the game. Fortunately, it was only a few years after this film that game shows made it back to prime time with "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" With that show we could really appreciate what it was like for the country to be riveted by a game show. Ironically, "Twenty-One" was brought back, but it did not catch on.
