Quiz Show
All team (166)
Short description
Quiz Show is a drama set in the United States in the late 1950s, centred on the television quiz programme Twenty-One. Herbert Stempel becomes a popular champion on the show, but when the producers bring in Charles Van Doren, a Columbia University English instructor from a distinguished intellectual family, Stempel loses his place and publicly claims the competition is fixed. A young lawyer, Richard Goodwin, investigates the allegations and works to establish what really happened behind the scenes of the broadcast.
Robert Redford directed the film, his third feature after Ordinary People and A River Runs Through It. Paul Attanasio wrote the screenplay, and Redford produced with Michael Nozik and Michael Jacobs. John Turturro plays Stempel, Rob Morrow plays Goodwin, Ralph Fiennes plays Van Doren and Paul Scofield plays Mark Van Doren, with David Paymer and Hank Azaria among a credited cast of 103 and a crew of 166. The production cost 31 million US dollars and returned 25 million worldwide, so it did not recover its budget at the box office.
Audience response has been solid rather than enthusiastic: on IMDb it holds 7.5 out of 10 from around 78,000 votes, and on TMDB 7.2 out of 10 from roughly a thousand votes. A film critics' rating of 8.6 out of 10 from 116 reviews places it noticeably higher with reviewers than with the wider public.
What's left behind the scenes
- Before filming began, the lead actor, Ralph Fiennes, expressed a desire to speak with the real Charles Van Doren in order to accurately convey his accent. However, there was no certainty that Van Doren would agree to such a conversation. Then, Fiennes and a member of the crew drove to the province where Van Doren lived and found him sitting in a chair outside his house. Fiennes pretended to be lost and asked Van Doren to show him the way.
- The correct answer to the question, which film won the “Oscar” for Best Picture in 1955, is known to Herbert Stempel (played by John Turturro). Nevertheless, he gives an incorrect answer, naming Elia Kazan's (1909-2003) 1954 crime drama “On the Waterfront,” where the main character deliberately loses a boxing match he could have won.
- Charles Van Doren (1926-2019), 17 participants of the TV quiz show, and the producer confessed to lying to the grand jury in New York. They were all sentenced to probation. The district attorney estimated that out of 150 people who testified before the grand jury, 100 were lying under oath.
- The film does not state that anyone went to jail or suffered any punishment for “cheating” on the TV quiz shows. However, it is known that individuals were tried for obstructing justice and perjury. The scandal led to significant changes in the rules of TV quiz shows. Many quiz shows were canceled, and the genre itself almost became a thing of the past.
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