Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [216]
Filmed by cinematographer Michael Ballhaus, Quiz Show has the glazed beauty of a fifties commercial, where mechanical objects and furniture—the sparkling Chrysler 300 the Goodwin character covets, the art deco architecture—vie to outshine the performers, and everyone (except Stempel) is immaculately tailored and coiffed. There is, too, a breathless Steadicam pace to the drama that serves to replicate “live” television. This was a style markedly different from the slow-resolving rhythms of A River Runs Through It and bears witness to Redford’s range as a director.
Redford knew he had a good movie in the can long before the edit. Having resisted video playback on location until then, he now relied heavily on it to check performances on a day-by-day basis. “But my style of directing remained exactly the same: give the actors their space, try it your way, try it theirs.” Fiennes, Morrow and Turturro all went on record praising what Morrow expressed as the “joy of working with a generous director who knows what you’re doing because he’s done it himself.”
When the movie was released in September, it created a furor. Retired prosecuting attorney Joseph Stone, who, in real life, had led the Manhattan DA’s office investigation, objected. In his view, Redford was as venal as Twenty One’s producers, offering up “a trumped-up, scaled-down, pandering mishmash of half-truths, fabrication, distortion, omission and character assassination.” The fact that Stone had been the first man to expose the quiz show scandals but was not named in the film, said Stempel, may have upset the retired lawyer. But, insisted Stempel, “I am essentially the fuse that lit the dynamite. If I feel comfortable with the [honesty of the] movie, there’s no reason he shouldn’t.”
Redford’s only regret was that he couldn’t persuade the Van Doren family to cooperate with the movie. William Goldman in Premiere compared his former friend’s offering with the other Oscar contenders that year—Pulp Fiction, Forrest Gump, Four Weddings and a Funeral and The Shawshank Redemption—and damned Redford with faintest praise: “[It] did wonderfully with what it had. It’s what it didn’t have that bothered me.” The view, to some, had a self-canceling transparency.
Redford was nearing sixty, a little weary of the boardroom vying at Sundance, a little ill at ease in his domestic arrangement with Kathy O’Rear. More and more—ironically—he sought retreat from Utah itself and spent more time with his children in their various homes. With them, he says, he felt anchored and challenged in equal measure. To the tune of the title song from Jesus Christ Superstar, the kids had redrafted the lyric:
Double R Superstar,
Who in the hell do you think you are?
He found this amusing, not least because the incisive wit showed they knew what he knew: it was time to fundamentally reassess himself. Not long after Quiz Show he agreed to appear on Inside the Actors Studio. He told his audience of three hundred mostly film students (and also Paul Newman and Arthur Penn) that his greatest regret was not learning to play a musical instrument and that, while he would like a reunion movie with Newman or Streisand, he didn’t favor sequels. “I was thinking of this theory I developed,” says Redford. “It’s called taking responsibility for a talent. I came to accept that a large audience wanted to see me as this representational romantic character of some moral standing. I concluded there was a rightness in that.” Once, Jack Kroll of Newsweek wrote that he’d liked The Electric Horseman and admired the whole attractive, lovable heroic icon business. “Kroll ended his feature saying Jane and I were fine actors, and then he added, ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful to see what these two people could bring