Herbert Stempel’s struggle with Charles Van Doren is far more complicated than it seemed to Twenty-One’s viewers in the fall of 1956. Stempel wasn’t the poor Brooklyn boy surviving on his wits and merits alone, and his federal champions weren’t pursuing truth and justice but self-vindication. But neither was Van Doren the stuffy WASP that Stempel disliked and audiences adored. And crucially, contrary to appearances, neither was Van Doren truly the person in power. As Goodwin recognized, the congressional hearings absolved (or ignored) corporate powers-that-be and focused on attacking the apparently privileged WASP.
… The Ethics of a Movie on the Quiz Show Scandal.
Perhaps it doesn’t matter that Redford creates whole scenes from whole cloth, drastically alters the sequence of events, forever transforms my father and his associates into malign caricatures, offensive and unrecognizable. The man who, as a deputy district attorney, really investigated “Twenty-One” has told the New York Times that this film is a “tawdry hoax” and that much of its portrayal of Dan Enright--bribing the court to suppress evidence, tricking a contestant into rigging--is wholly fictitious. Yet apparently, as a media-certified public moralist, Redford qualifies for an unrestricted dramatic license.
When the movie came out, I saw a trailer of Robert Redford describing the scandal as the end of American innocence. This did not improve my opinion of his intelligence, though in fairness it may have just reflected his opinion of our intelligence.
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