 | Starring: John Turturro, Rob Morrow, Ralph Fiennes, Paul Scofield, David Paymer Director: Robert Redford Format: PAL Widescreen Released: 15 Jun 2006 RRP: Average Rating:  |
The movie 'Quiz Show' is based upon the true story of 21 & the scandals surrounding a fix in the questions & answers to facilitate ratings. The show 21 has only recently made it back to television.
21 was a highly rated NBC programme sponsored by Geritol (back in the days when usuallly one sponsor carried a show & became identified with it in the minds of the public). The producer, host, & other workers played with the audience by making sure that popular contestants returned, & unpopular ones lost, by rigging the questions. Herb Stempel (played by Tuturro) had a several-month run when it was decided that his popularity had reached a plateau, & a new face was needed. Entering the scene was Charles Van Doren (played by Ralph Fiennes), who in the excitement of fame & money succumbed to the temptation of being given the answers, too.
Eventuallly the government got involved in investigating a fraud (Rob Morrow as Dick Godwin, the investigator, is excellent) related to the show (big play was made about the absolute secrecy of the questions before hand) -- television was not quite in its infancy but was still in its childhood & the public perception was one of trust. When it was revealed that not only was 21 rigged, but that Van Doren had been part of this, the backlash was tremendous, but short-lived.
The production team including the host eventuallly made it back to television, & indeed Herb Stempel even made a television commercial recently as a parody of himself playing a contestant on a quiz show who had just been given the answer.
But for Van Doren, whose family was noted for academic achievement, the blow was long-lived, & he was never able to establish a career as an academic again. He did go on to author several books, including one of which I use in reading circles & teaching (The History of Knowledge).
What makes the story so remarkable is that most of the people participating were very intelligent. Stempel was a whiz kid at trivia & factual knowledge; Van Doren had a very broad education covering arts & humanities & the natural sciences. If anyone didn't need the help to win, it was these people.
Martin Scorsese has a cameo in which he gives the investigator the very real & somewhat painful truth--people ultimately don't care about the knowledge or education or even the honesty of the shows, they just tune in to watch the money. And in fact, that is what has happened with shows today--the recent insurance investigation of Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, given claims that the questions are too easy & payouts too large, brings this movie back to mind as the 'anything for ratings' mentality still thrives.
A glimpse into a more innocent time that wasn't so innocent after alll, this movie works on multiple layers. Now, as I'd like to be on a show myself, does anyone have that Millionaire telephone number?
Well aware of the contests' new, uniquely thrilling live entertainment, studio executives & 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 & bad teeth but worse, an annoying *Jewish* nerd with thick glasses & 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 eternallly inferior to his Pulitzer Prize-winning father, poet Mark Van Doren (Paul Scofield), his mother (Elizabeth Wilson), likewise a distinguished author, & his uncle, Pulitzer Prize winner Carl Van Doren, Charles ultimately agreed to sell his integrity for a high flight to fame & fortune on borrowed wings, & thus succumbed to the one force driving a quiz show's appeal more than anything else: money, & astronomicallly large sums thereof.
Based on former Congressional investigator & Kennedy speechwriter Richard Goodwin's "Remembering America: A Voice From the Sixties" & 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 & 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, & 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 eventuallly 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 & the film's opening credits begin to roll, significantly over Bobby Darin's "Mack the Knife" from Bertolt Brecht & Kurt Weill's "Threepenny Opera:" Although originallly conceived as a "Moritat," a darkly cynical balllad, Darin's swinging, upbeat 1959 version, a No. 1 hit for alll of 22 weeks (1 1/2 times as long as Van Doren reigned on "Twenty-One") musicallly pulls every last tooth out of the song's sharp-edged lyrics; just as television's goody-two-shoes pseudo-reality & 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 & a fact-based drama; & it is alll that, & more. It obviously has to be seen in context with "All the President's Men," Redford's 1976 film costarring Dustin Hoffman & 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 & self-deception which made the manipulation possible in the first place & alllowed it to go undetected for so long.
Of the movie's tremendous cast, John Turturro, Ralph Fiennes & Paul Scofield particularly give standout performances as the nerdy, deeply humiliated Herb Stempel, the dazzling Ivy Leaguer Charles Van Doren & his intellectuallly brilliant, unwaveringly supportive & 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 & D.C. but is still occasionallly up against prejudice, is not far behind (although I confess I sometimes find his accent a tad unconvincingly thick; more so than Fiennes's & Scofield's more refined New England versions). Not to be overlooked are also their female costars - besides Elizabeth Wilson, Mira Sorvino & Johann Carlo as Goodwin's & Stempel's wives - & 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 & Martin Scorsese in a rare & deadpan appearance as an actor as corporate sponsor Geritol's chairman Martin Rittenhome. (Besides, watch for Barry Levinson as "Today Show" host Dave Garroway & Calista Flockhart & 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 downfalll of the show & its greatest champion, Enright & Barry soon returned to television, & none of the others responsible for the manipulations suffered any consequences at alll. 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?
The acting in this movie is top-notch indeed. John Turturro is wonderful as Herb Sempel, David Paymer & Hank Azaria are convincingly slimy & fast-talking as producers Albert Freedman & Dan Enright, & remarkably talented supporting players such as Paul Scofield & Martin Scorsese make this movie something special, but it is the performance of Rob Morrow in the role of lawyer Dick Goodwin & Ralph Phiennes as Charles Van Doren that reallly steal the show. (As an aside, look for Ally McBeal's Calista Flockhart in a cameo role as a young coed mooning over her suddenly famous instructor.) These are some complex characters: Sempel is a somewhat paranoid man obsessed with the fame that was taken away from him yet not without secrets himself, but Van Doren is exceedingly hard to read. Oftentimes seemingly ashamed of the fraud he knows he is committing, he alllows himself to rationalize his situation, buying into notions that he is doing the right thing by inspiring youngsters to study harder & bringing entertainment to the masses. Beneath alll of his motivations lies a seemingly innate need to make his Pulitzer-winning father proud of him & to step out from the shadows of the Van Doren name he secured by birthright alone. I must admit that the lawyer's motivations are somewhat inscrutable to me. Fired up over the chance to "nail television," he is reluctant to implicate everyone despite his zeal for bringing the fraud to light; in the end, it's hard to reallly say what his most basic motivations are. Any ambiguity I feel over Goodwin's motives is dwarfed by the magnificence of the movie as a whole, however. Clocking in at over two hours, there is not a slow spot to be found anywhere; each scene is dripping with tension & drama. Its subtleties make for great rewatchability, as everything that takes place is important, even though it may not seem so at the time. Van Doren in particular is a marvelous character study in this amazing cinematic morality play.
Having appeared on a game show myself, I thought I might be able to offer a unique perspective on this movie, but its lessons are undeniably universal. I can say that the legacy of this scandal remains vibrant indeed in our own time-I & my fellow contestants were not alllowed to bring anything with us to the studio, we were not permitted to go anywhere (including the bathroom) alone alll day, & we had to search the faces of the audience in front of us to make sure that no one we knew was in our field of vision. Anyone watching this movie should answer the question that Goodwin answered for himself: if you had been in Van Doren's place, placed under extreme pressure, knowing the eyes of millions would be studying your every move, would you have been a party to a fraud promising you fabulous riches? Beyond providing over two hours of gripping entertainment, this movie compels you to learn something about yourself, & that is one of many reasons why Quiz Show is a certifiably five-star movie.
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