"We're in show business."

Rating: 8/10 (13 February 2005)

I once had a college professor who spent an entire semester trying to convince us, the naive students, that everything on television was fake. The news, the weather, the traffic, it was all a show, for our entertainment, to make money for the TV stations. Perhaps his cynicism was rooted in the game show scandals of the late 1950s, most notably the ones involving the NBC show "21, Presented by Geritol," and is the subject of the Robert Redford directed movie, "Quiz Show." It's too bad this movie came out in 1994 and not 1999 when TV game shows were hot ("Who Wants To Be A Millionaire" ring a bell?), but still a good movie on its own, well worth a look. It is especially interesting if you have any fancy for the world of television, as the behind the scenes play that occurs is fascinating. John Turturro immerses himself in the role of Herb Stempel, a book-smart Queens native who is first supplied the answers to stay on the show "21," but is then asked to leave the show by incorrectly answering an easy question. After losing to Charles Van Doren (Ralph Fiennes), a well-to-do intellectual in a family of intellectuals, Stempel begins to talk to the government about his life on the show, and that peeks the interest of a low level congressional subcommittee investigator, Dick Goodwood, played by Northern Exposure's Rob Morrow with a great Boston accent. The internal strife of a Columbia teacher, first appearing on TV, which is still looked down upon by some smart people, and this was before "Fear Factor," then having to face the fact that cheating was involved. This movie looks good, has some great music from the time period, maybe it goes on a little too long in one scene where the Van Dorens are trying to prove how smart they are, and the ending was just there, I'm not really sure if we got anywhere by the end, but I still think it's a worthwhile movie, and you can see how decisions are made in show business, both in TV and the movies, and how we, the public, do not really know what is real, and what isn't. The reality TV explosion of the past few years comes under greater focus after watching Quiz Show. Are we still being duped? And what did Geritol really do?