Robert Redford Directed This Oscar-Nominated True Story About a Rigged Game Show

In the 1950s, audiences glued to their still-nascent television sets were shocked to learn that one of their favorite game shows, Twenty-One, had been rigging results by providing answers to the winners. Although the ensuing Congressional investigation was wide-ranging, the national focus centered on Charles Van Doren, the dashing son of a prominent literary family who became an overnight celebrity when the producers of Twenty-One conspired to keep him on air as their star contestant. In 1994, Robert Redford dramatized this scandal in his Oscar-nominated film Quiz Show, using a real life incident to examine how America’s obsession with fame and fortune destroys all those who chase it.

What Is Robert Redford’s ‘Quiz Show’ About?

The year is 1958, and egghead Herb Stempel (John Turturro) is the reigning champion of NBC’s question and answer game show Twenty-One. Yet the show’s sponsor, medical supplement Geritol (headed by Martin Scorsese as executive Martin Rittenhome, a fictionalized version of Matthew Rosenhaus) doesn’t think Stempel, a nerd with bad teeth, is telegenic enough, and wants producers Dan Enright (David Paymer) and Albert Freedman (Hank Azaria) to replace him with someone who will boost ratings. They find their perfect candidate in Charles Van Doren (Ralph Fiennes), a Columbia University lecturer and son of poet Mark Van Doren (Paul Scofield). Enright convinces Stempel to take a dive, making vague promises about a future in television, then contrives a record-breaking winning streak for Van Doren. Yet Congressional lawyer Richard Goodwin (Rob Morrow) smells something fishy and starts sniffing around.

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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.

How Much of Robert Redford’s ‘Quiz Show’ Really Happened?

Born in 1936, Redford was alive for both the invention of television and the quiz show scandals. “If I had to trace what I experienced in my career, my lifetime, when I watched and felt a loss of something at particular junctions, I honestly think it can be tied to the beginnings of the quiz shows,” Redford said at the time of the film’s release according to The Chicago Tribune. “The country still had a belief system then and believed in institutions and leaders to a degree we don’t anymore.” Although Redford and screenwriter Paul Attanasiotook many historical liberties in dramatizing this story (including inflating Goodwin’s role from an information gatherer to the main investigator, making Freedman equally culpable to Enright in rigging the game, and focusing the story exclusively on Twenty-One as opposed to a broader problem with game shows on TV and in radio), the heart of the film’s assertions remains true: something was fundamentally broken by the scandal that has never been fully repaired.

As Quiz Show opens, questions for an upcoming episode of Twenty-One are being delivered from a bank vault to NBC studios. As host Jack Barry (Christopher McDonald) assures the audience, the contestants will be hearing these questions for the first time live on air, locked away in a soundproof box so that the other player can’t hear their answers. Yet all of this is just for show: there isn’t any aspect of Twenty-One that isn’t carefully choreographed. Contestants are told which questions to get right and which to get wrong (in another bit of the facts being altered for dramatic purposes, Stempel is made to lose the game by incorrectly guessing that On the Waterfront was the Best Picture Oscar winner of 1955, not Marty, since it would be dramatic for such a smart person to miss such an easy question), and are even coached on how to vamp before giving their answers (at one point, the fan in the booth is turned off to make Stempel sweat). The producers even go so far as to ensure that a WASP champion will unseat a Jewish one and win for twice as many weeks, as Van Doren did with Stempel.

While this might make for good television, it does nothing to increase public trust in the newfound medium of television. Viewers were rightfully upset at Van Doren, a privileged member of the upper crust living in the shadow of his famous father, for misleading them about his knowledge. It’s even more devastating considering Van Doren — who Enright and Freedman first discovered auditioning for the less competitive game show Tic-Tac-Dough — might have been smart enough to win Twenty-One on his own. Yet much like Faust selling his soul to Mephistopheles, he agrees to let the producers feed him the answers, enchanted by the overnight success television can provide.

‘Quiz Show’ Examines America’s Fascination With Fortune and Glamour

Van Doren wasn’t the only person corrupted by television’s allure. Stempel is discovered to be as big a fraud as his competitor, admitting to getting answers in advance and agreeing to throw the game in the hopes of securing his own panel show (in the film, Stempel’s wife, Toby, is unaware of her husband’s cheating, which wasn’t the case in real life). When testifying in the congressional investigation into the game show rigging, he turns into a showboat, reveling in the chance to once again command the national spotlight. Much like Van Doren, Stempel recognizes television’s ability to make a celebrity out of an ordinary person, and he’s nearly destroyed when his fifteen minutes are up.

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 ends his winning streak and NBC is desperate to keep him on the air. 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.

At the end of Quiz Show, Van Doren does testify, and is fired from NBC and forced to resign from Columbia University (in a 2008 essay published in The New Yorker, Van Doren, who would go on to work for the Encyclopedia Britannica, refutes the movie’s claims that he never taught again after the scandal). It’s the first time he’s been made to face consequences for his actions, and even then there are members of congress who want to applaud such a nice-looking young man for doing the right thing. But as Goodwin observes, Van Doren was just a sacrificial lamb. At the end of the film, there is no accountability for the executives at NBC or Geritol, nor for Enright, who would have subsequent success in television creating the game show The Joker’s Wild through the production company he formed with Barry. Much like Van Doren’s winning streak, punishment for everyone responsible was purely for the cameras. What could be more fitting for a scandal that was made by and for television?

Quiz Show is available to watch on Prime Video in the U.S.

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