Word: quiz
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CAPTION: Do you think quiz shows are rigged...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...