Quiz Show

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?