The $64,000 Question, begun on CBS in June 1955 and sponsored by Revlon, preceded NBC’s Twenty-One, which was sponsored by Geritol, a mixture of vitamins, minerals, and alcohol that claimed to be an antidote for “tired blood.” The $64,000 Question was a more high-rolling version of the radio show known as The $64 Question. the week after-and on the cover of Life on October 26, 1959, when the scandal broke. Charlie was on the cover of Time (“Quiz Champ Van Doren”) on February 11, 1957-Leonard Bernstein was the magazine’s cover subject the week before and Martin Luther King, Jr. But it is true that the quiz shows- The $64,000 Question, The $64,000 Challenge, Dotto, Tic Tac Dough, Concentration, and Twenty-One above all-did seem, between 19, a dominating presence on American television and hence in American life. In Redford’s often cartoonish movie, people come thundering out of the subway, rushing home to watch Twenty-One, and even nuns are shown posted before their television set when it is on. Twenty-One, on which Charlie would win $129,000-very serious bread in those days-was seen on Monday nights on NBC, going up against I Love Lucy on CBS. Not many people under forty-five today can have much recollection of the excitement of the quiz shows of the 1950’s and the immense stir that followed the revelation that most of these shows had been fixed, the contestants having been picked for their telegenic qualities and supplied with the questions and answers in advance, and the contests themselves being staged for the maximum dramatic effect. Being a pariah in America is not only a full-time job but, apparently, one from which no retirement short of death can be expected. The appearance of the Redford movie, Quiz Show, would mean, among other things, once more against the firing-squad wall for Charlie, who is now nearing seventy: an opportunity for every moralizing wiseguy to fire off a few more rounds of the journalistic equivalent of rotten tomatoes at him. I worked with Charlie between 19 in Chicago, where he was in effect in exile, and found him, and his position as a national pariah, of keen interest.Ĭharles Van Doren has had to bear a heavy load as a symbol for much that was wrong with America in the 1950’s and, for those who like to push these things a bit further, for much more that would continue to go wrong later. Charlie, of course, is Charles Van Doren, the central if by no means major figure in those scandals. When I read that Robert Redford was about to release a movie about the 1950’s quiz-show scandals, my first thought was: poor Charlie, poor damned-possibly genuinely damned-Charlie.
0 kommentar(er)
