It's time for November sweeps, which means one thing: Television execs want to make money off your time! Hooray! And what better way to celebrate the money-grubbing, callous-as-hell world of television than with one of the most damning films about the industry, Quiz Show? This week's Best Movie Ever? selection has everything: Mean TV execs, hot TV stars, annoying TV stars, Rob Morrow's mushmouthed New England accent, Martin Scorsese in an acting role, and enough '50s-style morals to drive the Drapers crazy. I also happen to love it, which means it qualifies to be Best Movie Ever. So there.
Quiz Show, the 1994 Best Picture nominee by director Robert Redford (who also helmed our beloved Ordinary People), takes a close look at the game show scandals of the 1950s when contestants like Herb Stempel (John Turturro) and Charles Van Doren (Ralph Fiennes) answered trivia questions for extraordinary sums of money. America was riveted, but they didn't quite know the catch: Producers Dan Enright (David Paymer) and Albert Freedman (Hank Azaria) provided contestants with the answers to these questions, and they also told every contestant when to take a dive, purposely miss a question, and leave the show. It was all in the name of sensational TV (which landed Van Doren his own Time cover) and ratings, and when investigator Richard Goodwin (Morrow) exposed the fraud, the quiz show industry and the sunny optimism of middle America took a not-so-telegenic hit.
Did I mention that one of the stars ranks among my favorite hotties ever? That's important too. Here are the five main reasons Quiz Show is killer. (And here's real tape of the rigged '50s battle between Stempel and Van Doren, in case you haven't seen it before.)
1. Quiz Show knows that the most terrifying people of all time are... television executives.
When I was in college, I was a semifinalist for a competitive reality show (not one that you remember), and I went in to interview with two of the show's producers on camera. I was lanky and twitchy and un-telegenic, so I figured I'd amp up my onscreen credibility with emotional confessionals and an apparent willingness to say anything. I wanted to own my desperation and make it fun. Turns out I couldn't even do that, because I could tell immediately that the producers wanted to manipulate me themselves. "When was the last time you cried?" one asked. "Really cried.""So, you're gay?" one of them said, coyly. "Was that... hard on your family?" Ha! I could sense them waiting for my breakdown, and I could also sense that I lost my chance to be on TV when I didn't give them one.
The point being: Television people know what they want, and they're often transparent and unscrupulous in getting it. Quiz Show presents NBC studio executives Dan Enright and Albert Friedman as chummy, humorless dictators who don't care about the integrity of Twenty-One, its contestants, or anything but remaining a loud success. They are chilling. They're the glowering, cynical antithesis to '50s optimism, and the fact they're so unabashedly amoral is in its own way more frightening than a slasher flick. At least Michael Myers wouldn't cajole us into participating in our own moral undoing, you know?
2. Ralph Fiennes is the rosiest little aristocrat, and I want to corner him in an isolation booth and make him squeal for 11 points.
I saw Skyfall this weekend, and I have a few observations: 1) Did you know that James Bond movies are all the same? Now they just have a lot more shadows. Christopher Nolan should've patented shadowiness when he had the chance. 2) They permanently added a twink in the role of Q! I didn't even know the James Bond movies needed a twink, let alone one in an H&M cardigan, but they did. 3) Thank God Ralph Fiennes is part of this franchise now. Fiennes has always been one of our finest and most winsome actors. We can all agree that the most devastating thing about Schindler's List is his bone structure.
Better yet, Fiennes is perfect in the role of Twenty-One's biggest winner, Charles Van Doren. No actor is better than Fiennes at conveying towering moral conflict. It's in his eyes, his eyebrows, his forehead, his quivering lip, and his snobbishly perfect, sexily nervous voice. He's a Shakespearean thespian, after all, and if you saw last year's little-seen Coriolanus, you'd know that he can channel a world of torturous internal dilemma into a series of monologues and wall-scorching stares. In Quiz Show, he plays the well-groomed scion in the literary Van Doren family, and when he's exposed as a cheating fraud, the name of his entire family is tainted. I'd be more sympathetic, except it is, um, SO HOT to watch Ralph Fiennes on the brink of moral collapse. The pain, the pain! It makes his red hair-flip redder. Literally. Note the difference between relaxed Van Doren and stressed Van Doren.
Not stressed
Stressed
I hope we're all fantasizing about ways to turn that hair into a flaming vermilion spiral from sexual stress alone.
3. Wow, people actually admired intelligence in the '50s.
Even though Twenty-One and its fellow quiz sensations Tic-Tac-Dough and The $64,000 Question were all (at some point) rigged, TV-viewing audiences really did love the supposed intelligence of the shows' contestants. It's fun to revisit that admiration in Quiz Show because the fact is, most TV in the '50s featured smart, cosmopolitan people. Case in point: Watch a single episode of What's My Line?, the legendary panel game featuring the elegantly verbose host John Daly, as well as newspaper columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, sage actress Arlene Francis, and Random House publisher Bennett Cerf as its regular guests. Yes, I said a Random House publisher. How awesome is that? The only modern TV star who can compare to these stars' marvelous elocution is Tim Gunn, and his panel show just failed. We need to help out Tim Gunn, guys. He's the only thing tethering us to the oratorical awesomeness of the past.
4. Twenty-One was an excellent game show!
Yes, it was rigged, but the drama of two contestants locked up in isolation booths answering questions for different point values is pretty great TV. Conversely, the flaw of Jeopardy! (which, admittedly, is my all-time favorite TV show) is that the contestants know each other's scores throughout the game. Ultimately, it's kind of lame that you can be in deep third place going into Final Jeopardy! and you can still win because you know that the two leading contestants have to bet a lot to survive against each other. Anyway, here's a clip of old Twenty-One. The rigging is obvious because the questions are effing impossible, but the drama is alive.
5. Paul Scofield reminds you how horrifying it is to disappoint your glorious elders.
The Oscar-winning Scofield plays Charles Van Doren's Pulitzer-winning professor father Mark Van Doren, and although his part is slight, the anguish and hurt on his WASP-y face when he realizes his son's deception is pretty unforgettable. And traumatizing. Because when your father is a stately bad-ass who recites Shakespeare at the dinner table, you're already worried that you're disappointing him by, y'know, not living up to that. Failing him in front of the nation is probably a little heart-stopping.
Though I didn't discuss them much here, John Turturro and Rob Morrow are also pretty fabulous, even if their roles amount to expository necessity, as opposed to the poetic grandeur of Fiennes' role. You dig this '94 gem? Should it have beaten the lame-ass Forrest Gump for Best Picture? Or are you going to go Pulp Fiction on me?
