Word: doren
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...production that has traveled from London's Almeida Theatre Company to Broadway. Fiennes, 32, is known primarily as a movie actor (he played the unforgettable chief villain -- in a world overrun by villainy -- of Schindler's List, and the fair-haired, clay-footed young scholar, Charles Van Doren, of Quiz Show), but his roots are in theater, and he handles Shakespeare's great role with a commanding blend of intelligence and ardor...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...game-show audiences were riveted to their sets during Charles Van Doren's 14-week reign on NBC's Twenty-One. The bookish champ became an unlikely national hero -- until it was revealed that he had been fed answers to the show's often obscure questions, a scandal dramatized in the new film Quiz Show. Could today's intellectuals handle actual questions asked of Van Doren? Without cheating? Time put these five to the test...