Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [215]
Redford engaged former Washington Post critic Paul Attanasio to write a new screenplay. Goodwin was a congressional investigator who had drawn the details of his book from public records. To this, Attanasio and Redford added characters from Redford’s New York television experiences, transforming MCA agents into CBS executives. “They were interchangeable. I’d met enough Ray Starks in my time to know. It was all a machine dictated by profit, and it was immoral. Maybe television was always like that. Maybe the voracity of it, the volume of airtime to fill, dictated it. But at the time of the Twenty One scandal, something sordid was unveiled. Bizarrely, people accepted it. Maybe the sinning was in the pact the viewers made with the program makers. The people wanted these shows, and they wanted heroes like Van Doren, and maybe they didn’t care that they were being lied to. My take on the project was as a reminder of our choice at that moment in national life to say, ‘Hey, this is what we did, this is the deal we made, and this is how we are. We accept venality; we are not too interested in honesty or decency, only in rhetoric.’ ”
As Redford prepared Quiz Show, he was drawn into a controversy. In 1987, the NEA had been castigated when it contributed $75,000 to the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, in whose gallery New York photographer Andres Serrano displayed his “Piss Christ,” a photograph of a crucifix in a jar of urine. The religious right’s complaints were nothing compared with the storm accompanying the following year’s retrospective at Washington’s Corcoran Gallery of Art of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe’s work, which featured 170 studies, mostly of flowers, with five explicit images that celebrated his gay lifestyle exhibited in a secondary, screened-off area. Despite the overwhelmingly positive reviews, the show was suddenly deemed improper and withdrawn. Senator Jesse Helms was the main objector, and he went on to propose a censorship amendment to the NEA’s charter. Subsequently, Congressman Philip Crane took up the fight, introducing bills in 1992 and 1993 to abolish the NEA that so incensed Wallace Stegner that he turned down the National Medal of Arts in protest of “political control.” Redford dove into the fray. “Like Wally, I found it impossible not to speak out. What we were witnessing was an attempt to restrict freedom of speech. The arts were always the forum for discovery. The problem with Helms and the do-gooders is they induce stagnancy. Cultural stagnancy reinforces prejudice and imbalance. The job of the arts is to challenge that.”
Redford debated where he could but he poured his rage most forcefully into Quiz Show, a film studded with invective but mounted with the most meticulous control. To play Charles Van Doren, Redford chose the British actor Ralph Fiennes; for Herbie Stempel, the avaricious contestant who blows the whistle, he cast John Turturro; for investigator Dick Goodwin he cast Rob Morrow; Barry Levinson and Martin Scorsese were cast, “mischievously,” says Levinson, as voices of reason. For the role of the poet Mark Van Doren, Charles’s father, Redford wanted Paul Scofield, who had retired from theater several years before. In the eyes of some, Redford was wryly toying with stereotypes in the storytelling and the casting. “It felt biased,” says Jeremy Larner. “In the script Stempel becomes the sweaty shylock, a miserable human being who betrays himself and everyone else for money and celebrity. It’s anti-Jewish.” Michael Ritchie strongly disagreed, believing that of all Redford’s movies, this was the one laden with