On Television
FRANK, REUVEN
On Television 'QUIZ SHOW' FOLLIES BY REUVEN FRANK ERRORS BECOME immortal. An axiom of the publicity trade holds that once even small mistakes get into print, they enter permanent files and...
...This is not extenuation...
...The entire country felt the shock of betrayal...
...Normally a reticent man, reluctant to partake in customary movie buildup ballyhoo, he has gone everywhere for this one...
...The movie has the Ger-itol chairman calling President Kintner while Stempel is on the air...
...A number of people in television were already trying to change the system, to have the networks either acquire or produce their programs and afterward find the advertisers...
...The other was the escalating cost of television, so that no sponsor could afford a whole program...
...some in the audience will remember fragments of what actually happened...
...The movie's NBC president is Robert E. Kintner, who occupied the position conspicuously for years...
...Of Jewish anti-Semitism, Redford told the Voice, "I've observed that condition in my business for a long time...
...instead of exhibiting expert knowledge in some special category, contestants faced questions on any and all topics...
...But Twenty-One was first broadcast on September 12, 1956...
...Monday after Monday, he defeated his opponent and came back to take on the next one...
...It is a polemic against television—a perfectly valid thing to be?purporting to be something else...
...But they also reflect the mind-set of all those talented, well-intentioned Hollywood people who, having become wealthy to their own surprise, now must strike blows for whatever little guys they can find, root out villainy, do social good...
...The president of NBC is, as noted, depicted as directly complicit in the deception...
...These are facts...
...Beyond the organizational mistake, something else is wrong that may say even more about Redford's vaunted moral lesson...
...The quiz shows were advertiser packages, as Redford must surely have learned...
...Its cover page, promoting the goods inside, listed the interview as "TV's Betrayal of America.' Because Van Doren did it for money and destroyed his career, there have been repeated references to his Faustian bargain...
...Since the events described are only a third of a century old...
...I think it no less reprehensible to allow dishonesty to occur, as the networks did, than to be dishonest...
...Not only isn't this the way things worked at the time, the wrong guy is blamed...
...Hazel Bishop cosmetics...
...The reality is that in the mid-' 50s RevIon cosmetics was increasingly beset by a TV program produced and presented by its major rival...
...The only possible riposte was an even more successful program...
...what the movie seems to be seeking is Truth...
...Robert Redford, the director and co-producer of Quiz Show, has focused on the rise and fall of Twents-One's most famous contestant, Charles Van Doren...
...Herbert Stempel, a City College of New York graduate student, became the dominant contestant, a sort of Everyman with a New York speech pattern...
...There are numerous errors large and small in Quiz Show, which has been dissected more than any recent film except Forrest Gump...
...Quiz Show is not in the end a factual or even a fictionalized account of an event of the '50s...
...Facts interfere with clean story line...
...It is the film Secretary of State Warren M. Christopher was watching while Jimmy Carter was talking to the Haitian generals...
...Within weeks of the program's debut in September 1956...
...The advent of computers made it possible to scatter each advertiser's commercials among many programs to target the viewers it wanted to reach...
...Revlon took radio's $64 question and turned it into The $64,000 Question...
...Americans had grown to love and admire the artfully chosen winners...
...The success of This Is Your Life in attracting viewers was being matched by the sale of Hazel Bishop products...
...The programs evoked passion, identification, sublimation, because, in fact, they did not matter...
...He has given interviews to gossip columns and the Village Voice, appeared on tabloid TV?America's number one sex symbol exposes TV's worst scandal...
...Quiz programs had become an obsession...
...For instance, back in the '50s many major television network programs came as packages from advertisers and their agencies...
...Showing Geritol's chairman phoning the president of NBC to complain that Stempel was dragging down the ratings, and the president in turn calling the producer to tell him to take care of the situation, is libelous...
...Twenty-One never attained the stratospheric audience figures of The $64,000 Question, but it sold so much Geritol that warehouses ran out of stock, and the company had to switch some of its advertising to other products...
...The chairman would have called the producer directly, for the producer was Geritol's creature, not NBC's...
...The producers decided he was a bore, especially after he began to compete against Van Doren, the good-looking, Ivy League scion of an intellectual dynasty...
...Kintner did not join NBC until November 3, 1956...
...Launched in 1955, the show featured ordinary folk straining to answer mind-bending questions on subjects they seemed unlikely to know about: haute cuisine for a U.S...
...Structurally different than Revlon's, although identical in spirit and appeal, it was named Twenty-One, after the card game...
...Faust did it for more than money...
...It later emerged in the Congressional testimony that they had them tie for several games, then ordered Stempel to lose with an answer he knew was incorrect...
...instead of one lonely contestant in an "isolation booth," there were two competitors in separate booths...
...The movie itself is zippy, enjoyable entertainment, if you set aside the cloud of portentous talk surrounding it from the moment it was announced...
...Most prominent among them was Sylvester L. "Pat" Weaver of NBC, television's first big-name programmer, who launched formats like Your Show of Shows and Today, and made advertisers come to him...
...at the old crocks' screening I attended there was a gasp of recognition...
...The rest has been too widely reported to need repeating here...
...Stempel was a contestant starting October 17,1956 and lost to Van Doren on December 5,1956...
...Instead of progressing by stages to $64,000, contestants moved from one "plateau" to the next without limit...
...That leaves too little "docu" in this docudrama, barely more than in Twenty-One itself...
...Soon The $64,000 Question's audience was number one...
...and professorial public TV gab sessions...
...Redford's accusations are a far cry from, say, Oliver Stone's blaming the CIA for shooting John F. Kennedy...
...Nevertheless, this tale of television deception has become an instant box-office smash and received astounding publicity without sizzling sex, special effects or gratuitous violence...
...The quiz scandals were, indeed, one major reason for ending the practice that allowed advertisers to create programs and use the networks solely for air time...
...Of all the actors in Quiz Show, only the one playing Kintner is a look-alike...
...If memory serves, Dr...
...Other issues abound contrapuntally, including anti-Semitism, even Jewish anti-Semitism, since the producers who make the Jew Stempel bow before the wasp Van Doren are themselves obviously Jewish...
...With that runaway success on CBS, the head of the company that made Geritol tonic blessed NBC the next season, 1956-57, with its own quiz game...
...he was not when it occurred...
...WHEN HOLLYWOOD replicates reality, though, there can be a cavalier attitude about facts...
...Still, the ratings slipped...
...Network radio had worked that way, and since network television grew out of it, the system moved over...
...Some weeks over 90 per cent of the TV sets in New York were tuned in...
...He said they marked "the end of American innocence," letting others add that they laid the groundwork for Vietnam and Watergate...
...In short, he was, as the movie shows, president during the 1959 Congressional hearings, when his attempts at justifying the rigging were widely, and derisively, reported...
...The whole edifice came crashing down in 1959 when a Congressional hearing elicited charges, then confessions, that all quiz programs were to some degree rigged—usually in favor of the contes tant viewers would most likely embrace, to pump up ratings...
...Redford has made Quiz Show a cause...
...Pop analysts hailed the return of knowledge, the end of antiintellectualism...
...The others will accept the screen version as history—just as Charles Laughton is recalled by a whole generation when King Henry VIII of England is mentioned, or Raymond Massey flashes before many when the conversation turns to Abe Lincoln...
...Someone suggested a quiz show...
...Quiz programs became the rage...
...Kintner was not named president of NBC until 1958...
...The scandals represented "the ongoing struggle between ethics and capitalism," he kept repeating...
...One, Stop the Music, stole away so much of Fred Allen's Sunday night audience, it almost knocked him off the air...
...An axiom of the publicity trade holds that once even small mistakes get into print, they enter permanent files and years later are discovered by researchers who proclaim them as irrefutable truths...
...But I have seen no reference to how it misrepresents the way television networks functioned in the middle and late 1950s, although that is what made the scandal possible...
...It is merely to point out that many of the facts depicted in the movie are incorrect...
...Some of it took place before he joined NBC...
...Marine, grand opera for a humble shoemaker, prizefighting for a slight, blonde lady psychotherapist...
...Like sports, they provided an escape from what did...
...Having the offices of Twen-tv-One's production company in the NBC headquarters building at 30 Rockefeller Plaza is ridiculous...
...The Voice was happy to buy the line, describing the movie as "the conflict between established, if beleaguered, social values and an ascendant, supremely vulgar, popular culture...
...But it's a fun movie...
...And the phrase "$64 question" came from the top prize attainable on radio's Take It Or Leave It...
...Using simple questions and offering tiny prizes, quiz shows had been very popular on network radio in its heyday...
Vol. 77 • September 1994 • No. 9
