QUIZ SHOW
Grand Scam
In l959, a struggling Robert Redford jumped at the opportunity to appear on a minor quiz show, Play That Hunch, for the exposure and $75.OO. Redford's visibility turned out to be nil: He was one of three extras silhouetted behind a screen in a contest to quess which of them was someone else's twin. Afterwards, he was handed a fishing rod in lieu of the sorely needed cash.
The grift practised upon the guileless actor was small beer compared to the sordid manipulation of guests and audiences on immensely popular shows like The Sixty-Four Thousand Dollar Question. These programs beggared their radio predecessors in prizes awards to contestants, as well as the stupendous advertising revenue they generated for the fledgling networks.
Roughly the same time Redford was being told to go fish, a massive rigging scam was brewing behind the scenes of the popular Twenty-One show. It was detonated when Charles Van Doren -- scion of Columbia English professor/Pulitzer-prize winning poet Mark Van Doren and noted novelist Dorothy Van Doren -- admitted before a Congressional subcommittee that he had been supplied with answers to fiendishly difficult questions, answers which he had seemed to snatch out of the air with ingratiating diffidence.
Redford's own extensive television experience, from the humiliating Play That Hunch debut to later successes as a performer during TV's Golden Era, inform his secure direction of Quiz Show, a handsomely mounted, compelling -- and occasionally problematic -- reconstruction of the Twenty-One scandal. Paul Attanasio's literate script is based upon former White House aide Richard N. Goodwin's recollections (Remembering America: A Voice From The Sixties) of his services as a government investigator probing Twenty-One's corrupt, corrupting milieu. Quiz Show's inquiry into the young industry's greedy situational ethics provides a springboard for Attanasio/Redford's deeper inferences about an ominous watershed in the depth of our literacy and the content of our character, at a time when a media-intense, ad-driven culture of narcissism and celebrity was dawning.
The film opens as an ironic Goodwin -- ably interpreted by Rob Morrow -- is high pressured by a creamy-voiced salesman beside a gleaming, megafinned car. The salesman's intimation that buying the machine will heighten his mark's sexual potency is interrupted by a dire radio announcement about the Sputnik launch -- "All is not well above the USA!" "Well, the USA doesn't own a Chrysler 3OO!", snorts the complacent huckster. The scene adroitly encapsulates an ambience of post-war boom and cold war angst, pervaded by slick Madison Avenue flacking of conspicuous consumption as a panacea for every ill.
Goodwin is first unflatteringly portrayed as no less on the make than the film's plentiful other high or low placed opportunists. He's a Harvard-educated Jewish attorney who bristles at being mistakenly called "Goldman". A once brilliant career has been sidelined into the obscure Senate Oversight Subcommittee, where he longs to nail some corporate macher to the wall in aid of recovering his stride.
Opportunity knocks in the unlikely person of Herbert Stempel, a polymath working class Jew from Queens who enjoyed a flash of fame as an Everman champion on Twenty-One, until Charles Van Doren unseated him. John Turturro wears Stempel's owlish spectacles, ghastly dentition, and exuberant uncouthness with eery authority. He nicely captures the desperate ambition of a chronic loser to recuperate his moment of glory, as well as Stempel's poignant desire to transcend his feckless misdeeds and recover a shred of self-respect.
Stempel has charged before a New York grand jury that Twenty-One's producer, Dan Enright, pressured him to take a dive in favor of Van Doren, holding out a future television career as a carrot. (Dan Paymer plays Enright so oleaginously devoted to serving himself and his crass masters as to suggest someone whose left hand has been unacquainted with his right since birth). Stempel is quickly labelled a crank, and his case thrown out. The proceedings are then suspiciously sealed by a judge under some ancient Gotham legal precedent. Smelling more than one rat, Goodwin undertakes his own inquiry.
Quiz Show unfolds through a complex weave of flashback and intercutting reminiscent of Citizen Kane.(l) Twenty-One featured a champion and opponent sweating out impossible questions from dual isolation booths. Goodwin discovers that, despite Stempel's evident popularity while he beat back challenge after challenge over several months, the sponsor had complained to NBC that his nerdishness was beginning to turn viewers off. The film constructs an anonymous Geritol point man -- played by a silkily vulpine Martin Scorsese -- who is abruptly smitten with loathing for the hapless Stempel and decides to pull the plug.
Geritol's imperious demand for a more "acceptable" new champ is passed up a ladder of waffling corporate executives. The buck eventually stops at NBC president Lawrence Kintner, who orders Enright to get rid of Stempel. A taint of anti-Semitism hangs over Stempel's dismissal -- the more ironic, since Enright himself actually was Jewish, as were key players amongst the cadre of NBC and Geritol executives. The film hints these individuals were as glossily assimilated as Stempel was not. It's moot whether, in imagining gentile viewers were becoming dissafected, they were ruled by their own covert prejudice.
Enright needs an "intellectual Joe DiMaggio" to replace Stempel. As if in answered prayer, Charles Van Doren, a popular literature instructor at Columbia, appears in the producer's antechamber to audition for a second-string program (as did Redford). Sequences at the Van Dorens' comfortable Connecticut home show Charles dazzling his family and cognoscenti of the day like Edmund "Bunny" Wilson with obscure Shakespearean quotations, historical trivia.
The mellow gentility of the Van Doren household is light years removed from Stempel's seedy apartment. Charlie is everybody's darling, everything Herbie is not. Boyishly good-looking, articulate and witty, he wears the mantle of privelege with becoming lightness. But, in Ralph Fiennes' acute portrayal, there's a fatal yielding about his amiability, the undiscriminating desire to please and be pleasured of a "heart too soon made glad."
Sensing Charles' lack of bottom, the predatory Enright plays him like a fish on the line, offers him a shot on Twenty-One, sweetening the lure by insinuating the wealth of good Charles could be doing to help "the crisis in education". Then he asks if Charles would be willing to answer the same questions on the air he had passed during his office screening. "I wonder what Kant would make of this," Charles demurs.
Perceiving that his quarry already teeters on the brink of subornment, Enright cannily backs off. Charles descends a twisting staircase, as his slippery super-ego twists around a dim recognition that something unwholesome might have lurked in the producer's pitch. By the time he reaches bottom, he wears a brisk little smile: Kant has gone by the board for sure.
Several weeks later, the traduced Stempel deliberately flubs his round on the show. Charles fields the questions from his first interview with barely a moment of hesitation, and Stempel is shuffled back to lumpen-Queens oblivion, where his increasingly shrill calls to Enright go unreturned. As Twenty-One's ratings soar, Charles becomes an overnight celebrity, an egghead man about town, with his face on the cover of TIME, a classy new apartment, and a girl in every lecture.
But Goodwin continues dogging his heels to Charles' escalating discomfort. The lawyer tracks down one pointed, frustrating lead after another, until he stumbles upon the appalling revelation that fixing Stempel's dethronement was only the tip of Enright's sordid iceberg. Every contestant was given answers in advance, all had their roles carefully orchestrated. Hopelessly at odds with his conscience, Charles now opts to take the fall. But after his defeat, NBC promptly offers him a jury-rigged post as "cultural correspondent" on the TODAY show. His lust for renewable fame is thus disconcertingly pitted against a wiser wish to fade quietly back into private life.
Unlike Citizen Kane's reporter,
Goodwin is no anonymous narrative device. His deepening personal entanglement
with Stempel, Van Doren, and their respective families precipitates an
upper-middle class identity crisis, well observed and -- after the fashion
of Ordinary People (l98O) -- arguably a shade too pat.
As a Jew and a seeker after
justice, Goodwin is offended by the crude Stempel's cruder humiliation
at the hands of Twenty-One's contemptible honchos. But the careerist investigator
is simultaneously racked with ambivalence about Charles, whose actions
he detests but who he grows to like, even pity.
He also admires, and is not a little intimidated by the father (Paul Scofield plays Mark with acerb wit, and a formidable restrained dignity); by the bright excellence, probity and easy grace the members of the Van Doren circle evidently incarnate for him (in line with a nicely balanced Chekovian take upon the dramatis personae, minor and major, Attanasio's screenplay is also appreciative of a self-congratulatory tone sounding just beneath the set's lightly self-disparaging style).
Despite his wife's angry chiding him for a "Jewish Uncle Tom", Goodwin persists in attempting to keep Charles from the pillory. He focuses instead on pressuring the indited Enright to implicate his superiors, who have hypocritically plead ignorance of the producer's wrongdoing. To Goodwin's dismay Enright refuses to accuse anyone beside himself, in aid of preserving his future. (True to the prediction of the Mephistophelean sponsor's man, Enright went on to be rehabilitated a few years later, and made millions with yet another show.)
Upon Van Doren falls the major stigma of the scandal. For his terminal moment in the spotlight, Charles delivers a self-condemning speech so artful as to almost exonerate him with the subcommittee bluebloods, until a member of humbler birth sardonically comments that all he has done is tell the truth for once. Charles and his broken parents depart, hounded by the press. A vindicated Stempel discovers he can't savor his erstwhile adversary's downfall, as he watches Charles suffer on the dark side of Warhol's precious fifteen minutes. After all, he has been consigned to a corner of the same ashheap. "You guys never know how to leave a guy alone," he poignantly rebukes the reporters, "unless you leave him alone!"
For what mess of potage did Charles Van Doren ruin a promising career, sully his heritage? Quiz Show postulates his insouciant silver-spoon narcissism. A simmering Oedipality also underpins his banter with the wryly affectionate Mark, who dotes distantly upon his son and sniffs at his infatuation with the media. It's clearly suggested that Charles resented living as a perennial instructor in the elder Van Doren's professorial shadow; that Twenty-One offered him the chance to garner, with little effort, a season in the sun that would far outshine his father's.
The psychoanalyst reflexively theorizes that such an anti-hero, driven by a conflation of envy, vindictiveness, and guilt, could well bring the palace masochistically crashing down upon his own head, sadistically crushing the author of his woes in the same process. "An ill favored thing," Charles quotes As You Like It, lamely trying to gloss over his derelictions. For once Mark's congenial facade shatters. "I gave you my name!," he cries angrily. Other Shakespearean lines placed upon the Van Dorens' lips in a scene at the Cornwall house invoke an Oedipal dynamic. I"How ill white hairs become a fool and jester!" quotes Mark from Henry V's last speech to Falstaff. Prince Hal descended into profligate delinquency as a function of his turmoil over a father he both admired and resented (Henry IV complained, not without cause, of his son's ill favor, even rating him a potential parricide in the famous scene where Hal places the moribund king's crown upon his head).(2) Later, freshly crowned after his natural father's death, Hal's repudiation of his mentor/surrogate father breaks Falstaff's heart, and precipitates the old man's death.
Yet another citation is drawn from Measure For Measure. This dark comedy's Oedipally tinged plot turns upon the Duke of Vienna's decision to entrust his morally bankrupt city's governance to his protege, Angelo, a bloodless puritan. Supposing his patron/father-surrogate gone, Angelo lapses into rank profligacy. Analogies abound to the Van Doren affair; a charismatic, distant father; a (surrogate) son thrust into the limelight to be corrupted, so forth.
Unlike Goodwin and Stempel, Charles Van Doren refrained from being interviewed for Quiz Show, as he refrained from making any other statement about the scandal since his testimony. Little is known about his relationship with his father beyond banalities. The Oedipal configuration foregrounded by the screenplay must therefore be carefully evaluated as a construct -- and as the construction of a movie which takes other significant, if dramatically justified, liberties with historical truth (e.g., most evidence about the scam was uncovered by a team from the Manhattan District Attorney's office, not by Goodwin working solo). In any case, dwelling overmuch upon the status of Charles' unconscious neglects the role played by the awesome sway of the media's siren song sui generis upon his too-willing spirit; by the allure of media celebrity, which can seduce the unconflicted and the neurotic alike to betray talent or principle.
Quiz Show's potential hurtfulness towards the still living Stempel and Van Doren (inter alia) -- its frequently derisive depiction of the former, the unpacking of the latter's psyche on slimmest grounds -- has not been much remarked upon. The implicit headlessness towards its subjects and occasional tinkering with historical reality put the film at risk of becoming what it beholds. (At times, such strategies smack perilously of docudrama -- that dubious excursion around the truth which hyperbolically mimics the questionable locutions of the Fifties' quiz programs.
Since Charles Van Doren fell from grace, the status -- and recognition level -- of intellectuals like those in the Van Doren circle has declined, arguably articulating with the increasing shallowness of intellectual life entire. The readible, audible, or viewable learned who once commanded -- and deserved -- a reasonably informed public's respect have given away to the disposable experts who hawk their theories about female orgasm or O.J.'s personality on Ophra.
Neither the film nor this reviewer supposes any simple connection between the Van Doren affair and the eventual dumbing of America. The Twenty-One debacle probably best diagnoses as an early warning symptom, rather than a cause of a complex waning in our mental rigor. Quiz Show concludes with Enright and his colleagues insisting to the subcommittee that they neither intended, nor accomplished any serious harm: We are like you, they say, we aren't major criminals. Everyone had fun, everyone made money and will again. Maybe the new shows just need to have easier answers. Anyway --"It's only TV."
In the years since the scandal, an ancient, perverse preference for entertainment over enlightenment, heightened exponentially by the pervasiveness and potency of contemporary media practise, has come to dull our sensibilities and degrade our capabilities. Contemplating the erosion of substance in so many venues -- education, politics, art -- one wonders if discourse at large does indeed bid fair to become "only TV".
But blaming television's minions for lobotomizing us by cynically seeking to pleasure the most with the least is a shade too tidy, as self-congratulatory as the Van Doren Connecticut cognoscenti. Rather than disavow responsibility while amusing ourselves to death, we would do better to heed the understated recognition embedded in Quiz Show's long subliminal fade over its credits -- on a delighted audience, grinning and clapping in sinister slow motion. Educational philosopher Neil Postman has warned: "In the Huxleyan prophecy, Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours..." (3)
NOTES
l. By intention or otherwise, the precise sequence of events in the film is not always clear. Nor is one always sure whether certain scenes constitute flashbacks. In fact, Stempel "lost" to Van Doren in December of l956. Van Doren subsequently reigned as champion on Twenty-One until March, l957. The Senate Oversight Subcommittee hearing began in l959.
2. "Prince Hal: I never thought
to hear you speak again.
Henry IV: Thy wish, Harry,
was father to that thought.
I stay too long, I weary thee.
Dost thou so hunger for my
empty chair
That thou must needs invest
thee with mine honors
Before thy hour be ripe?"
Henry IV, Part I, 9O-94, The
Complete Works of William Shakespeare, New York: Oxford University Press,
l949, p. 462.
3. Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves To Death. New York: Penguin, l985, p.l55.