*** QUIZ SHOW
(A must-see) Directed by Robert Redford Written by Paul Attanasio With Rob Morrow, Ralph Fiennes, John Turturro, David Paymer, Christopher McDonald, Elizabeth Wilson, and Paul Scofield.
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In a way, the best thing that can be said about Quiz Show is that it’s a good Hollywood-liberal 50s movie, a movie in which a noble man bears the burden of a complex ambivalence about his mission–exposing the quiz show frauds, especially difficult in the case of Van Doren–an ambivalence everyone in the audience can be expected to share. Goodwin, a man who stands in the middle, is Jewish–as are the less appealing Herb Stempel, an obsessive working-class quiz show winner who exposes Van Doren as a fraud, and the cynical producer Dan Enright, who helps to perpetuate the fraud. But Goodwin, a well-groomed graduate of Harvard Law School (which he attended on a scholarship) who appreciates the “finer” things of life, is more in Van Doren’s social orbit than Stempel’s. If Quiz Show were truly Brechtian, it might have started with Van Doren in that Chrysler showroom, introducing not only a cynical complicity with but some irony about this falsely anointed national hero. Instead it sides with the congressional investigator who regretfully helps to bring him down.
Whatever Redford’s qualms about falsely anointing heroes, certain aspects of Goodwin’s role in the proceedings are exaggerated, distorted, and romanticized. The most complete account I know of, though it’s far from the best known, is Prime-Time and Misdemeanors: Investigating the 1950s T.V. Quiz Scandal (1992), coauthored by Tim Yohn and former assistant district attorney Joseph Stone–a key figure in uncovering the scandal, whom Goodwin himself called “diligent, experienced, [and] incorruptible.” Significantly, Goodwin doesn’t even appear in the book’s chronicle of events until its final third, and Stone tactfully implies more than once that Goodwin had plenty of ambition and star-struck aspirations of his own. The movie neither mentions nor depicts Stone, who recently called it a “tawdry hoax” because of its simplifications and abridgements. (Two more popular and condensed accounts of the scandal–more readable but less informative–are the third chapter of Goodwin’s 1988 Remembering America: A Voice From the Sixties, the only source Quiz Show credits, and the 43rd chapter of David Halberstam’s 1993 The Fifties.)
Still, Quiz Show’s subject is rich with implications, and Redford’s efforts to depict its contours accurately are so vigorous that I find this movie a lot more compelling than any of his other directorial efforts. As a watershed in American media history, standing somewhere between the McCarthy purges (when public confessions were deemed a social necessity) and Watergate (when they weren’t), the scandals arguably put an end to live TV programming. Paradoxically they began like Watergate, with a series of press leaks, and ended like the McCarthy hearings, with a Whittaker Chambers-style confession from Van Doren. (There were also salient differences from the McCarthy period: Chambers’s confession of his former communist activities catapulted him into fame, while Van Doren’s was followed by his disappearance from public life.)
In short, the quiz show story is no Hamlet, though this movie tries to make it one, with Goodwin and Van Doren both standing in for the uncertain hero. And though TV and Hollywood habitually partake of the same corruptions and deceptions, Quiz Show follows the expedient 50s tactic of using Hollywood machinery to attack the small screen. The process is riveting to watch and fascinating to think about, though the dubious star system that keeps both in place is left unchallenged.
