Quiz Show

Rating:
Summary: A thriller with brains, a drama with heart
Review: Robert Redford does it again in this much lauded film that is flawlessly executed with pathos and suspense, and, incidentally, one of the top picks of 1994. "Quiz Show" is the absorbing, engrossing story of tirumphs and downfalls (of both tv showbiz and personalities). The cast is quite remarkable--John Turturro is brilliant and sympathetically strikes a cord with us, Rob Morrow is nothing short of powerful, and Ralph Fiennes is stiffly and guiltily confused as one who has to live up to the incredible reputation of his father (played by Paul Scofield, who's absolutely terrific). There's some awesome directing that requires a second viewing (including where Fiennes is rubbing his sweaty cheeck with a cold bottle of milk, as if to cool his shame). The script is also extremely witty and literate; in other words, brilliant and remarkable. The cinematography is very effective and observant (the game show owners says to Ralph Fiennes, "It's okay, there's only the three of us," and the camera looks at Fiennes, towering over him ominously). "Quiz Show" is a masterpiece, a thriller with brains, a drama with heart. Don't miss this.

Rating:
Summary: The only film I watch again and again...
Review: Robert Redford's direction is superb, and screenwriter Paul Attanasio is at his best. Not only is it visually and emotionally engrossing, but the intellectual aspects are so well worked in you have to watch it multiple times to catch everything. The commentary made on the complacency and classism of the 1950's is dead on.

Rating:
Summary: Sure, Redford can act, but can he direct?
Review: The answer to that question, is a resounding "yes". The fact is that "Quiz Show" is, to my mind, one of the finest depictions of the television industry, 50's America, and morality (in a -somewhat- modern world) around. The stellar cast, led by Ralph Fiennes and Rob Morrow, turn in excellent performances - so much so that you wish each character could have more dialogue (the movie has a fairly substantial running time, but I have never felt it). The veritable Paul Scofield, a paragon of integrity, shines in his role as the patriarch and intellectual role model of the Van Doren family. The scenes between him and Fiennes are notable for how much is communicated without actually being said. Meanwhile, Rob Morrow (whose accent occasionally descends into farce) is excellent in his role as a tenacious investigator.
All in all, an excellent movie, and a testament to Redford's ability.

Rating:
Summary: Sure, Redford can act, but can he direct?
Review: The answer to that question, is a resounding "yes". The fact is that "Quiz Show" is, to my mind, one of the finest depictions of the television industry, 50's America, and morality (in a -somewhat- modern world) around. The stellar cast, led by Ralph Fiennes and Rob Morrow, turn in excellent performances - so much so that you wish each character could have more dialogue (the movie has a fairly substantial running time, but I have never felt it). The veritable Paul Scofield, a paragon of integrity, shines in his role as the patriarch and intellectual role model of the Van Doren family. The scenes between him and Fiennes are notable for how much is communicated without actually being said. Meanwhile, Rob Morrow (whose accent occasionally descends into farce) is excellent in his role as a tenacious investigator.
All in all, an excellent movie, and a testament to Redford's ability.

Rating:
Summary: Robert Redford's morality play about the quiz show scandal
Review: The first era of prime-time television programming was the Vaudeo Era, which was defined by shows like "The Texaco Star Theater" with Milton Berle, "Your Show of Shows" with Sid Caesar, and "I Love Lucy." However, during the Fifties television underwent monumental changes in terms of how shows were produced. There are two specific programs that represent the major changes. One is "Dragnet," which was the first successful series that was filmed in Hollywood and represented the shift away from live television broadcast from New York. The other is the CBS game show "Dotto," which was the first such show to be exposed as being rigged in 1958. It was not as successful as "The $64,000 Question," which was apparently run cleanly, or as infamous as "Twenty-One," which is the basis for the 1994 film "Quiz Show," but it was first. Because the quiz show scandal was driven by the greed of corporate sponsors, networks then began the practice of selling advertising time. No longer would a sponsor, such as Geritol, be able to decide what programs would go on the air.

However, Robert Redford's film is not really about the massive changes in the business of television that resulted from the quiz show scandals. The final word in this film is given to Dan Enright (David Paymer), the producer of "Twenty-One," who insists that because the show was entertainment and everybody made money, there was nothing wrong with giving contestants the answers and rigging the game. The point of this film is the human wreckage left behind by the scandal in terms of the two "Twenty-One" contestants at the center of the storm. Herbie Stempel (John Turturro) and Charles Van Doren (Ralph Fiennes) are polar opposites in terms of looks and religion but what they have in common is a vast knowledge of what can be called facts or trivia depending on your point of view. As Van Doren's father observes, if you are going to ask a question worth $64,000 it should be about the meaning of life.

Stempel is the reigning champion on "Twenty-One," but the show's sponsor (Martin Scorsese) has grown tired of Stempel's looks and grating personality. So the producers order him to take a dive and in a calculated move that backfires on them insist that Stempel blow an easy question on what film won the Oscar for best picture in 1955. Enright thinks that for 70 grand Stempel can be humiliated, but the producer grossly underestimates the importance of a reputation for being a smart guy has to someone like Stempel. The producers also think they have the perfect replacement for Stempel in Van Doren, the son of a famous American intellectual family. They offer to feed him the answers to ensure victory, but when Van Doren refuses they go ahead and find a slightly different way of producing the same results. Van Doren blinks, but takes the money, and sales for Geritol go up fifty percent.

Between these two is Dick Goodwin (Rob Morrow), a young lawyer who works for the Senate committee with oversight responsibilities on television. Goodwin is Jewish like Stempel but also Ivy League like Van Doren, and while he is pursuing the truth regarding how "Twenty-One" is run he is also attracted to the life lived by Van Doren, who exchanges Shakespeare quotations with his poet father Mark (Paul Schofield) over a family lunch. The great irony of the script by Paul Attanasion, based on Goodwin's book "Remembering America: A Voice from the Sixties," is that Stempel wants to get "Twenty-One" and Goodwin wants to get television, and while neither wants to do it with Van Doren, that becomes unavoidable. Not that any of these three men comes close to getting what they want out of this experience.

It is impossible not to consider "Quiz Show" to be a morality play, but as such it is a rather disheartening one since nobody gets what they deserve at the end of this one. But Redford sees the quiz show scandals as being a point in American history that ended a period of innocence. After this point Americans could not longer believe what they saw on television as being the truth and Redford, who did star in "All the President's Men," sees it as the first in a series of violations of the public trust that extend through Vietnam, Watergate and beyond. But the performances by Turturro and Finnes are so compelling that they keep this film grounded on the personal level, so that the larger social issues are lost in the personal wreckage of Stempel and Van Doren's lives. Enright claims that nobody lost with these quiz shows, but that is obviously not the case.

My only complaint about this film is that it really does not do a good job of capturing the excitement of such shows. Stempel and Van Doren played each other four times before Van Doren became the new champion. Van Doren also played Vivienne Nearing three times to a tie before losing (and had beaten her husband Victor earlier that year). I do not think we get a sense of the drama or the addictive nature of the game. Fortunately, it was only a few years after this film that game shows made it back to prime time with "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" With that show we could really appreciate what it was like for the country to be riveted by a game show. Ironically, "Twenty-One" was brought back, but it did not catch on.

Rating:
Summary: Robert Redford's morality play about the quiz show scandal
Review: The first era of prime-time television programming was the Vaudeo Era, which was defined by shows like "The Texaco Star Theater" with Milton Berle, "Your Show of Shows" with Sid Caesar, and "I Love Lucy." However, during the Fifties television underwent monumental changes in terms of how shows were produced. There are two specific programs that represent the major changes. One is "Dragnet," which was the first successful series that was filmed in Hollywood and represented the shift away from live television broadcast from New York. The other is the CBS game show "Dotto," which was the first such show to be exposed as being rigged in 1958. It was not as successful as "The $64,000 Question," which was apparently run cleanly, or as infamous as "Twenty-One," which is the basis for the 1994 film "Quiz Show," but it was first. Because the quiz show scandal was driven by the greed of corporate sponsors, networks then began the practice of selling advertising time. No longer would a sponsor, such as Geritol, be able to decide what programs would go on the air.

However, Robert Redford's film is not really about the massive changes in the business of television that resulted from the quiz show scandals. The final word in this film is given to Dan Enright (David Paymer), the producer of "Twenty-One," who insists that because the show was entertainment and everybody made money, there was nothing wrong with giving contestants the answers and rigging the game. The point of this film is the human wreckage left behind by the scandal in terms of the two "Twenty-One" contestants at the center of the storm. Herbie Stempel (John Turturro) and Charles Van Doren (Ralph Fiennes) are polar opposites in terms of looks and religion but what they have in common is a vast knowledge of what can be called facts or trivia depending on your point of view. As Van Doren's father observes, if you are going to ask a question worth $64,000 it should be about the meaning of life.

Stempel is the reigning champion on "Twenty-One," but the show's sponsor (Martin Scorsese) has grown tired of Stempel's looks and grating personality. So the producers order him to take a dive and in a calculated move that backfires on them insist that Stempel blow an easy question on what film won the Oscar for best picture in 1955. Enright thinks that for 70 grand Stempel can be humiliated, but the producer grossly underestimates the importance of a reputation for being a smart guy has to someone like Stempel. The producers also think they have the perfect replacement for Stempel in Van Doren, the son of a famous American intellectual family. They offer to feed him the answers to ensure victory, but when Van Doren refuses they go ahead and find a slightly different way of producing the same results. Van Doren blinks, but takes the money, and sales for Geritol go up fifty percent.

Between these two is Dick Goodwin (Rob Morrow), a young lawyer who works for the Senate committee with oversight responsibilities on television. Goodwin is Jewish like Stempel but also Ivy League like Van Doren, and while he is pursuing the truth regarding how "Twenty-One" is run he is also attracted to the life lived by Van Doren, who exchanges Shakespeare quotations with his poet father Mark (Paul Schofield) over a family lunch. The great irony of the script by Paul Attanasion, based on Goodwin's book "Remembering America: A Voice from the Sixties," is that Stempel wants to get "Twenty-One" and Goodwin wants to get television, and while neither wants to do it with Van Doren, that becomes unavoidable. Not that any of these three men comes close to getting what they want out of this experience.

It is impossible not to consider "Quiz Show" to be a morality play, but as such it is a rather disheartening one since nobody gets what they deserve at the end of this one. But Redford sees the quiz show scandals as being a point in American history that ended a period of innocence. After this point Americans could not longer believe what they saw on television as being the truth and Redford, who did star in "All the President's Men," sees it as the first in a series of violations of the public trust that extend through Vietnam, Watergate and beyond. But the performances by Turturro and Finnes are so compelling that they keep this film grounded on the personal level, so that the larger social issues are lost in the personal wreckage of Stempel and Van Doren's lives. Enright claims that nobody lost with these quiz shows, but that is obviously not the case.

My only complaint about this film is that it really does not do a good job of capturing the excitement of such shows. Stempel and Van Doren played each other four times before Van Doren became the new champion. Van Doren also played Vivienne Nearing three times to a tie before losing (and had beaten her husband Victor earlier that year). I do not think we get a sense of the drama or the addictive nature of the game. Fortunately, it was only a few years after this film that game shows made it back to prime time with "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" With that show we could really appreciate what it was like for the country to be riveted by a game show. Ironically, "Twenty-One" was brought back, but it did not catch on.

Rating:
Summary: excellent
Review: the media is an amazing thing that i don't think we fully understand in society. here's a show that gripped a nation, yet was rigged, as seems to be Survivor today, but we forgave them because we loved what they showed. this movie looks well into the quiz shows of the 1950s, while trying to show that even though there was a big scandal, it continued on, even to this day. could have survivor been rigged? do we really care?

Rating:
Summary: Shocking then, tame now
Review: The most shocking American scandal of the late 1950s was the revelation that the top-rated game shows on television -- especially NBC's "Twenty One" -- were rigged to provide maximum drama and to keep ratings high. Today, events from boxing matches to political "town meetings" to wars are routinely scripted to...well, provide maximum drama (or propaganda) and to keep ratings high. The ruckus over fixing quiz shows seems positively quaint by comparison.

But it did happen, and provides the basis for Robert Redford's excellent "Quiz Show." The movie centers around three characters: Herb Stempel (John Turturro), a Jewish Everyman from Queens who rules "Twenty One" for seven weeks until he is ordered to deliberately flub an easy question as his appeal has "plateaued;" Charles Van Doren (Ralph Fiennes), a poetry teacher at Columbia who is seduced by the lure of money and fame into being the show's new favorite son; and Richard Goodwin (Rob Morrow), a Congressional investigator who digs deeper into the muck.

Turturro provides a tragic figure as a man who can't accept that he has been tossed aside like a used dishrag. Fiennes provides another sort of tragic figure as a man who is pathetically eager to embrace his newfound fame, even if he did come by it dishonestly. David Paymer and Hank Azaria, as the show's anything-for-ratings producers, almost (but not quite) make the deception sound like a harmless embellishment as they tempt Van Doren into throwing away his ethical standards. All are terrific. Morrow, however, just isn't very convincing, especially not with an exaggerated and clearly fake Boston accent, and he ends up undermining whatever scenes in which he appears.

For his part, Redford claims to have recognized that Van Doren was acting a part when the show was originally on the air, and that it was thus faked. True or not, it gave him the inspiration to make a movie about the time when TV lost its innocence, and the way we look at the idiot box has never quite been the same.

Rating:
Summary: Slick America Exposed
Review: The movie starts out with one of the main characters poised in a 1957 brand new Chysler as a car salesman schmoozes the man into believing things that he really wants to believe, but taken out of context, are simply untrue. This scene completely and surprisingly sets up the brilliance of the following two hours of cinema, called "Quiz Show".

America's fascination with the sale of happiness is told through the lens of the infamous 1950's "Twenty One" quiz show scandal. It tells the tale of one Herb Stempel, an ex-GI who's intelligent if not terribly charismatic. His smarts got him to stay on the show, but soon you see the machinations of money hungry corporations calling the shots behind the screens. Herb needs to go because his mug isn't pretty.

Enter Charles Van Doren, family family and good looks to boot, who becomes the new darling of Twenty One. But first, he needs to beat out Herb hiimself, who takes a fall in hopes of preserving any hopes of an imaginary television career. Stempel's fifteen minutes are up, and he spends the rest of the movie trying in vain to get them back, or at least ensure no one else does.

The movie moves on with the investgation of Dick Goodwin, driven by passion for justice and a quest to find the truth. He chases that lucrative beast throughout the movie in hopes of pinning it down. The brilliance of Van Doren manuvers him around it constantly, while the anger of Stempel is almost too raw to be believable.

What could have been a mere retelling of the scandal, which in and of itself is an interesting story. But this film aims higher, much, much higher, and the results are simply impressive. We in America want happiness, and we are willing to purchase it for any price. The fact that Van Doren was fed answers to his questions simply didn't matter; the public loved him, the sponsors loved him, and all were happy to buy into that illusion. The illusion of happiness, so wonderfully ridiculed almost in the final credits as the audience is shown rollicking and screaming at the results of a television show.

All performances in this movie are grand, from John Turturro's manic Stempel to Ralph Fiennes slick Van Doren, even Scorese as the slimy sponsor. Under Redford's smooth, stylistic direction, this film is a tribute to the late fifties as much as it is an expose.

This is one of those films that should be on more people's top ten lists. It instructs without being preachy, and fully showcases the strength that cinema can carry. A great movie, overall.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Character Study
Review: This film is an excellent character study. Patricularly of the two leads, Herb Stempel and Charles Van Doren. The Stempel character would have ordinarily gained the sympathy of the film's audience for his rejection due to his lack of good looks and star power in favor of the pampered pretty-boy Charles Van Doren, but Stempel comes across here as so obnoxious and annoying that you could see why he was unceremonoiusly dumped. The fact that he willingly goes along with the game show fraud all along kills any empathy for and you end up wanting to tell this whiner to shut ... up! Van Doren is a bit more toxic, in that he covers his deceitful nature with polish and charm. The man could rob a bank while making the cops smile, so it's a very satisfying moment when he gets his just desserts.