"Fifty million people watched, but no one saw a thing"

Adapted for the cinema by Paul Attanasio from the book ‘Remembering America: A Voice from the Sixties’ by Richard N. Goodwin.  Stars include John Turturro (as Herb Stempel), Ralph Fiennes (Charles Van Doren) and Paul Scofield (Van Doren Snr.).  Watch out also for film-maker Martin Scorsese in a cameo role, playing an executive of the show's sponsors 'Geritol'.

The film tells of a scandal that rocked the States in the late 1950s.  Both the makers & sponsors of the then leading TV quiz show, "Twenty-One", were accused of rigging the show by feeding contestants the answers to questions - to manipulate viewers' emotions and so boost ratings.

Interest is heightened as issues of class and race prejudice come to the fore when one of the show’s ‘stars’, a Jew, is superseded by a white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant from a privileged academic background – Ralph Fiennes as the real life Charles Van Doren (with 12 others Van Doren was arrested for perjury in 1960 after first testifying they'd not been given the answers).

This is an excellent film which earned Oscar nominations for its director, writer and Scofield (‘best supporting actor’).  It also garnered its writer Attanasio a BAFTA award.

1994: directed by Robert Redford, 132 minutes.

Further reading

Below are some links to other articles about the film and the issues it deals with.  Some of the pieces are complementary, others not so.  In the final analysis you should see the film and decide for yourself!

Why Quiz Show Is a Scandal

"The rigging of Twenty-One is juicy material, but Robert Redford's film opts for easy TV bashing"
By Richard Zoglin of 'TIME Domestic'
October 10, 1994 Volume 144, No. 15

Quiz Show succeeds with moral message 

By Craig K. Chang
Staff Reporter on Boston’s “The Tech”

Public Forgiveness of TV scandal
by Jeremy Lloyd (Time 1995)

The Million-Dollar Trivia Buff
David Neff