Quiz Show (1994, Dir. Robert Redford)
Before Richard Goodwin became a speechwriter and Latin American policy expert for the Kennedy administration, he was counsel for the House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce. As he liked to remind people, he was first in his class at Harvard Law School and a very capable lawyer.
It was in his House Committee capacity that he investigated the 1950s quiz show scandal, in which producers and contestants conspired to rig the outcome of shows including Twenty-One and Dotto. It was a moment of mass deception and innocence lost, a breach of public trust that led to an amendment to the Communications Act of 1934. Post-scandal, networks were no longer allowed to fix the results of their profitable quiz shows.
The story is now best known through the superb 1994 movie Quiz Show, featuring Rob Morrow as a tenacious but deeply conflicted Goodwin investigating suspicions over Twenty-One.
It’s an uncommonly smart Hollywood movie, probably the best that Robert Redford directed (although Ordinary People might have something to say about that), about corruption, ambition, pride and, of course, greed. It is also very wise to the ways of social class and how society (particularly ‘50s society) might accept a well-bred, handsome, patrician WASP versus a working-class, socially awkward Jew.
The WASP is Charles Van Doren, a Columbia University literature professor and son of esteemed literary critic Mark Van Doren (Paul Scofield, who earned one of the film’s four Oscar nominations). Played by rising star Ralph Fiennes, Charles Van Doren is witty, urbane, clean-cut and quietly vain. He’s also fascinated by the quiz shows, and when he shows up at NBC to inquire about participating, the producers of Twenty-One, Dan Enright (David Paymer) and Albert Freedman (Hank Azaria), swoon.
They’re tired of the show’s current champion, Herbie Stempel (John Turturro), a Queens-bred kvetcher who isn’t long on graces. Enright, following the orders of corporate sponsor Geritol (in the person of a slick executive played by Martin Scorsese, making you wish he acted more often), has Stempel take a dive to make way for Van Doren, the smoother, more telegenic new flavor.
The cheating begins with some subtlety.
The producers come up with questions to which Van Doren already knows the answers or give him the questions in advance so he can look up the answers himself.
Then they drop the charade and just give him the actual answers. Van Doren, torn between dignity and vanity, chooses vanity. In other words, he’s perfect for TV. Fiennes deftly wears the devil’s bargain on his face, allowing flashes of guilt to break through his façade. The professor is from a good family. He’s polished to a shimmer. Who would suspect him of swindling?
Goodwin certainly doesn’t want to.
Like Van Doren, the investigator is an Ivy Leaguer. But, like Stempel, he comes from a working-class Jewish family, and part of him is dazzled, if not blinded, by the Van Doren charm. He visits Mark Van Doren’s idyllic Connecticut spread and joins in a garden lunch with guests including the eminent critic Edmund Wilson. He plays poker with Charles Van Doren and his swell friends.
Even as evidence mounts, Goodwin wants to take it easy on Van Doren. In one of the movie’s funniest lines, Goodwin’s wife, Sandra (Mira Sorvino), calls him “the Uncle Tom of the Jews.” He finds it easy to look down on Stempel, who seems to represent a past self he’d rather leave behind. Goodwin has upper-crust WASP fever. Can he get over it in time to seek justice?
Quiz Show, written by Paul Attanasio and based on a chapter from Goodwin’s book Remembering America: A Voice from the Sixties, does a masterful job connecting these personal conflicts to a larger story of illusion and institutional dishonesty, fed and delivered by television, the medium that stole the public’s imagination in the ‘50s. The fact that Van Doren’s vocation isn’t just education, but literature, makes the theft seem even more brazen.
Quiz Show feels quaint by today’s standards, and not just by virtue of being a splashy movie about ideas and people, intended for grownups. Imagine, a ’50s world in which intellectualism appealed to a mass audience that tuned in week after week to see a literature professor show how smart he was (or, at least, how smart he pretended to be).
Today he’d more likely be derided as an egghead elitist than celebrated by an adoring public. It was a different time, and a different kind of country, hooked on a different kind of TV. And yet, the programming was more than happy to pull the wool over everyone’s eyes.
Chris Vognar is a Texas arts and entertainment reporter who writes frequently for the Houston Chronicle, Los Angeles Times and New York Times.