Why Quiz Show Is a Scandal

By Richard Zoglin

"We're not exactly hardened criminals here," says the TV producer testifying before Congress at the end of Quiz Show. "We're in show business." By this point in Robert Redford's critically acclaimed new movie, no one can miss the irony of that line. The people who conspired to rig the big-money quiz shows in the 1950s, according to the film, were criminals all right -- and not despite but because of the fact that they were in show business. These connivers didn't just feed a few answers to favored contestants to boost ratings. They destroyed a nation's innocence. (Yes, again.)

Bashing television has become the year's favorite sport among serious Hollywood filmmakers. Oliver Stone's hysterical Natural Born Killers posits a pair of serial killers who become national heroes after they are glamorized on a tabloid TV show. Stone is too fuzzy-headed a satirist to realize that he has got it precisely backward. Tabloid shows like A Current Affair and America's Most Wanted may be guilty of many things, but glorifying criminals is hardly one of them. With their sensationalistic re-creations of lurid crimes, tear- jerking interviews with bereaved family members and relentlessly alarmist tone, the tabloids have, more likely, helped foment the nation's law-and-order frenzy. If anybody deserves blame for romanticizing on-the-run killers like Stone's protagonists, Mickey and Mallory (or freeway fugitives like O.J. Simpson), it isn't TV but rather Hollywood films from Bonnie and Clyde to ... well, Natural Born Killers.

Quiz Show is more discreet in its indictment of television but no less insulting. Director Redford and screenwriter Paul Attanasio have converted a fascinating and complex episode in TV history into a simplistic morality play, with TV as the bad guy in virtually every scene. Jack Barry, host of Twenty- One, rehearses to himself before the show like some hammy dinner-theater thespian. When the quiz shows come on, Average Joes troop home to their TV set like sheep to the slaughter (with those same emblematic '50s-family-glued-to- th e-TV shots that Stone uses in Natural Born Killers). Every TV executive is a cartoon villain, from sleazy Twenty-One producer Dan Enright to the Mephistophelian head of Geritol, the show's sponsor, to the smug network chief who sounds like Don Corleone when he tries to get Charles Van Doren to deny that the shows were fixed: "Haven't we been good to you? Haven't we treated you as part of our family?"

The film has drawn fire for its historical inaccuracies -- and, indeed, events spanning nearly three years have been telescoped into a few weeks, while the role of investigator Richard Goodwin has been vastly exaggerated. But the real problem is the easy Hollywood cliches into which history has been transformed. The Van Doren clan is a caricature of effete Waspishness, Goodwin a garden-variety TV-movie crusader. Herb Stempel, who blew the whistle on the scandal, is reborn as perhaps the most offensively stereotyped Jew in modern American cinema. To gauge the injustice, one has to go back to the actual tapes of Van Doren and Stempel on Twenty-One. Van Doren's theatrical groping for answers today looks phony, while Stempel's stolid awkwardness is rather ingratiating. He may not have been classic TV material, but Herb was the better actor.

The film begs the most interesting question raised by the quiz-show scandals: Just what was so scandalous about them? Rigging them was deceptive, to be sure. But these were the early, Wild West days of TV, when the rules were still being written. Stars did commercials for products they never used; Edward R. Murrow pretended to "drop in" on celebrities in Person to Person. Manipulating quiz shows to affect the outcome was hardly new -- or surprising. Two years before Van Doren admitted his sins, Time ran a story that began, "Are the quiz shows rigged?" and went on to detail ways producers stacked the deck in favor of certain players, like posing questions in a contestant's strongest area of knowledge. Fooling the public is a venerable show-biz tradition; the quiz-show producers found out, to their dismay, just how much fooling the public was willing to accept.

For Redford and company, however, the scandal foreshadows just about every mess from Vietnam to Watergate. Near the end of the film, after the congressional hearings have exposed the rigging, an associate congratulates | Goodwin. "For what?" he scoffs, upset that the top TV execs have denied any role in the affair. "I thought we were going to get television. The truth is, television is going to get us." It's the film's most disingenuous line. The bigwigs may have escaped punishment, but the scandals rocked TV as nothing before or since: quiz shows vanished from the air, ethical standards were drastically tightened (CBS President Frank Stanton even proposed banning canned laughter), and the industry suffered a black eye that took decades to heal. "Get television" is exactly what Goodwin and his colleagues did. Quiz Show does too; it just doesn't have the grace to admit it.