Robert Redford Directed This Oscar-Nominated True Story About a Rigged Game Show
The message is that it’s not necessary to know anything, because you can be ignorant and still get lucky. Yet Van Doren can’t be blamed for readily accepting the fame and fortune that comes his way, considering life has always been handed to him on a silver platter. Redford, who spent his career fighting against the pretty boy image that was so easily assigned to him, uses Quiz Show as a means to explore our never-ending obsession with those who seem to exemplify the American dream. It’s what drives Stempel to cheat, as he hopes to win money in order to get his wife and kid out of the Bronx. It’s what makes Van Doren accept a job on The Today Show when he top 10 movies ends his winning streak and NBC is desperate to keep him on the air.
Herbert Stempel (John Turturro) is the nerdy, trivia-spouting Jew from Queens who has had a long run as Twenty-One’s most successful contestant — helped along for an unspecified but significant amount of time by being told the questions and answers in advance. The show’s producers, Dan Enright (David Paymer) and Albert Freedman (Hank Azaria), are told by the network, who have been told by the sponsor, that Stempel is no longer a favorite with the viewing public and will have to take a dive… Just as Charles Van Doren (Ralph Fiennes), the handsome, impressive, telegenic son of prominent poet Mark Van Doren (Paul Scofield), decides he’d like to take a crack at appearing on a quiz show. Quiz Show is a 1994 American historical mystery-drama film[3][4] directed and produced by Robert Redford. Dramatizing the Twenty-One quiz show scandals of the 1950s, the screenplay by Paul Attanasio[5] adapts the memoirs of Richard N. Goodwin, a U.S. Congressional lawyer who investigated the accusations of game-fixing by show producers.[6] The film chronicles the rise and fall of popular contestant Charles Van Doren after the fixed loss of Herb Stempel and Goodwin’s subsequent probe.
A big budget picture about mass media fakery that’s somewhat rigged itself, a docudrama that stretches the facts, an exposé on class prejudice that almost succumbs to [that] vice. We rank the highest-scoring films directed by Ridley Scott from throughout his entire career. Quiz Show is a 1994 American film directed by Robert Redford, Based on a True Story about the scandal surrounding the rigging of the Game Show Twenty-One in The ’50s. Despite its rich, morally relevant personality profiles, Quiz Show has one blemish. This otherwise outstanding motion picture includes nearly a dozen inappropriate uses of the Lord’s name, five s-words and an outburst punctuated with the f-word.
It is fun as a thriller; we find ourselves sort of hoping Van Doren doesn’t get caught. It works as a memory of the first decade in which a society that used to sit on the front porch went inside and stared at the tube. And then it asks us what we might have done, if someone offered us a lot of money and popularity for pretending to be smarter than we were. The early quiz shows rewarded knowledge, and made celebrities out of people who knew a lot of things and could remember them. On “The $64,000 Question” and “Twenty-One” you could see people getting rich because they were smart. Today people on TV make money by playing games a clever child can master.
Ralph Fiennes
A big-money quiz show did not return until ABC premiered 100 Grand in 1963. It went off the air after three shows, never awarding its top prize. Quiz shows still held a stigma throughout much of the 1960s, which was eventually eased by the success of the lower-stakes and fully legitimate answer-and-question game Jeopardy! Upon its launch in 1964.[37] The biggest winner across the 11-year original NBC run of Jeopardy!
When a bitter Stempel decides to go public, and Congressional investigator Dick Goodwin (Rob Morrow) listens to him, a national scandal erupts. Producers Dan Enright and Albert Freedman are surprised when Columbia University instructor Charles Van Doren, son of a prominent literary family, visits their office to audition for a different, less difficult show by the same producers, Tic-Tac-Dough. Realizing that they have found an ideal challenger for Stempel, they offer to ask the same questions during the show which Van Doren correctly answered during his audition. He refuses, but when he nears a game-winning 21 points on the show, he is asked one of the questions from his audition. Stempel deliberately misses an easy question and loses, having been promised a future in television if he does so.
American Jewish History
In a way, the movie subtly argues, Goodwin arrived at the same casting decision as the sponsors. A class act — a big, important film, more relevant than ever, questioning the ways art and information and truth are rejiggered by TV as it increasingly blurs the line between news and entertainment. Fiennes’ ability to project the pain behind a well-mannered facade, to turn intellectual and emotional agony into a real and living thing, is devastating. Robert Redford’s soft-spoken, intelligent but never less than entertaining movie reminds us of exactly what we’ve been missing — a story that seems utterly fresh and a filmmaking style best described as civilized. The film buff can defend these historical distortions according to the thematic aims of Quiz Show. Sputnik discredited the faith in the scientific supremacy of the United States, and makes admiration for Van Doren as an intellectual celebrity plausible and his motives more complicated than mere greed.
Van Doren is nothing like Schindler’s List’s Amon Goeth, but, taken together, both roles display the actor’s ability and versatility. If he continues to choose his parts carefully, Fiennes will soon be a major motion picture draw. There’s a secondary theme dealing with the shortness of the public’s memory. Less than twenty years following his “Twenty-One” disgrace, producer Dan Enright returned to the game show business with another hit. Today, programs like Jeopardy are big draws, and the lure of a repeat champion is as strong as ever. Goodwin believes that he is close to a victory against Geritol and NBC, but realizes that Enright and Freedman will not jeopardize their own futures in television by turning against their bosses.
He is a man with keen insight and sensitivity who looks sadly upon the track of his son’s ambitions. Following events such as the quiz show revelations, Vietnam, and Watergate, the nation’s perceptions have changed. We have grown up, becoming a jaded society given to skepticism about everything from TV programs to the word of presidents.
Towards the end of the movie, David Paymer’s Dan Enright comments that the sham of “Twenty-One” created a situation in which nobody lost — not the sponsor, NBC, the public, or the contestants. Viewers of Quiz Show, however, are likely to form the opposite impression — that, in the end, there were no winners. Crisply directed by Redford from a thought-provoking script by Paul Attanasio, and featuring a slew of strong performances (including appearances by Barry Levinson and Martin Scorsese), Quiz Show is the first giant of the Fall 1994 movie schedule.
Under the current scoring model, Cameron’s wins would be worth $391,400 ($141,400 for his five day winnings and $250,000 for the Tournament of Champions win). Americans tune in every week to root for the charming, erudite Charles Van Doren (Ralph Fiennes) in his quest to vanquish new challengers. Following his defeat of the previous champion, Herbie Stempel (John Turturro), Van Doren, the son of the well-known poet Mark Van Doren (Paul Schofield), has become a national celebrity, sending sales of Geritol, the sponsor of “Twenty-One”, through the roof. Van Doren’s victories are cheats, the results of pre-supplied answers guaranteed to keep him on the air.
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And it’s what makes Goodwin reluctant to subpoena Van Doren, having been won over not only by his charm, but by the life of luxury his friendship might offer. As Goodwin’s wife, Sandra (Mira Sorvino), points out, he’s just as guilty of falling for this guy as the audience is. It shouldn’t be surprising that Redford, who played Bob Woodward in All the President’s Men, would be drawn to Quiz Show, considering it concerns many of the themes he has explored throughout his career as both an actor and director. Like All the President’s Men, Quiz Show takes the form of an investigative thriller, with Goodwin chasing down leads and talking to witnesses in order to uncover massive fraud at the highest levels of power. And like that 1976 Oscar winner, it shows the lasting ramifications that loss of institutional trust can have even in the face of triumph.
In 1958, the questions and answers to be used for the latest broadcast of NBC’s popular quiz show Twenty-One are transported from a secure bank vault to the studio. The evening’s main attraction is Queens resident Herb Stempel, the reigning champion, who correctly answers every single question he is asked. Eventually, both the network and the program’s corporate sponsor, the supplementary tonic Geritol, begin to fear that Stempel’s approval ratings are beginning to level out, and decide that the show would benefit from new talent.