Word: doren
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This much is clear: "The Quiz show" is superb. the film chronicles the rise and fall of Charles Van Doren, the disgraced game show champion whose projected image masked the fact that his victories were rigged...
...tawdry age, one can almost wax nostalgic about a time when Charles Van Doren could cause nationwide outrage. For a few months in 1956 and 1957 he became a celebrity by remaining champion for weeks on a television quiz program called Twenty-One. In the process he won $129,000 and 500 marriage proposals. But two years later he admitted to a congressional committee that he had been fed the answers by the show's producers. Compared with the participants in today's scandals, Van Doren seems more pathetic than notorious; compared with contemporary affronts to our sensibilities, his misdeeds...
Indeed, watching the film Quiz Show, a compressed and therefore somewhat distorted version of his story, you can't help but think that these days Van Doren would have entered a 12-step program for liars, negotiated a million- dollar deal for a confessional book and eventually gone into politics. It is one of the several virtues of this thoughtful and hugely entertaining movie that it encourages such reflections. Written with clean-cut force by Paul Attanasio and directed with panache by Robert Redford -- they know how to efficiently shape a character and point a scene -- Quiz Show neither nostalgizes...
This story actually begins with an edgy, brainy nerd named Herbert Stempel (wonderfully played by John Turturro), who was a steady winner on Twenty- One. The trouble was that white-bread America couldn't identify with him. Enter Van Doren (played a little too stiffly by Ralph Fiennes), trying to pick up a few dollars to supplement his instructor's pay at Columbia University. He was a godsend. Not just any old Wasp, but the scion of arguably the nation's most distinguished literary family. His father was Mark Van Doren, Pulitzer- prizewinning poet and scholar; his mother...
What capital could be made of Van Doren on lowbrow TV. And what capital he could make of it. For Charlie Van Doren was overwhelmed by his bloodlines, needed to succeed somewhere on his own. And this new medium, despised by his family and their friends, seemed perfect. He could become a hero by co-opting it for truth and light. The producers persuaded him to accept answers in advance by telling him how much good he was doing the cause of education with his presence. And the schmuck (to borrow a word from Herbie Stempel's lexicon) believed them...