"Van Doren" and "Redford." - what is wrong with director Robert Redford's film 'Quiz Show' about Columbia Univ professor Charles Van Doren and the TV game show scandal of the 1950s

"HOW," I asked Charles Van Doren, "could you possibly have named all the Aleutian Islands?" We were at lunch in the Columbia Facuty Club on Morningside Drive. That might not actually have been the question, but at least the type of question. A typical Charles answer was: "When I was a child, one of my hobbies was geography [or astronomy, or genealogy], and I have a good memory." Well, maybe so.

The point to bear in mind is that in Charles's Columbia environment--students and colleagues alike--Charles's quiz-show fame on Twenty-One was not very important. It is exactly here that I think the roots of Charles's tragicomedy lie, and not in the wholly suppositious notion of "parricide" advanced by the Robert redford movie Quiz Show

His students and colleagues respected Charles as an excellent young English professor, and his colleagues liked him. He and I were both specializing in eighteenth-century literature, thugh he was senior to me. Charles was writing a good book on the poet William Cowper. So, as I say, from a Columbia perspective the quiz show was not important. Knowing the names of the Aleutian Islands was not important. Such things were a stunt--essentially disconnected and trivial information. Out there, under the dark skies of the Republic, millions of people might think that Charles was an intellectual and an "egghead." We regarded him as a very able professor who had a peculiar gift, and we thought it rather fun that he had broken the bank at Monte Carlo.

What was important at Columbia was chiseled on the frieze of Butler Library: Plato, Aristotle, Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Voltaire, Milton. A key Columbia ideal was "critical intelligence," and the ability to master intellectual connections. Charles scored very well on both counts. What mattered was Columbia and its faculty. Imagine the English Department where Charles and I were junior members: Mark Van Doren taught alongside Lionel Trilling, F. W. Dupee, Joseph Wood Krutch, Quentin Anderson, Richard Chase. That was a world. That was important.

Robert Redford's opinion, which he heightened in the script submitted to him, was that Charles sought out the crooked world of TV and the quiz show because he sought revenge of some sort on his father's Olympian status. This strikes me as completely gratuitous. I saw no evidence of hostility between them, but rather an easy and thorough friendliness.

Of course Mark Van Doren was a towering presence. But Mr. Redford depicts his students as regarding him with polite boredom. Where Mr. Redford got such a notion remains a puzzle. A young Robert Redford might have thus regarded him, but not his actual Columbia students. (It is amusing that Mr. Redford's 1956 "Columbia" is co-ed. This allows him to show young women hopping up and down and "Charles" as a sex symbol, an Egghead Elvis, which is nonsensical.)

The real students thought of Mark Van Doren as an electrifying if understated classroom professor. He used no notes. He would open a book and begin dealing with a particular passage. His mode was conversational. Often, he would single out an individual student and draw him into the conversation. He sometimes stayed with such a student through much of the hour, drawing out thoughts the student himself had not dreamed he had.

Mr. Redford's version of him is genteel and somewhat febrile. Oh, no. The last time I saw the real Van Doren was during the spring of 1963, when he was close to retirement. I sat in my office in Hamilton Hall. Enjoying the spring warmth, a pigeon flew to my window sill, then jumped into my office and strolled on my carpet. Mark appeared at the door, in his floppy felt hat, and regarded the bird. "St. Francis," he said, and smiled. That was the closest I am likely ever to get to sainthood. As one watches Mr. Redford's movie, the gap between the real Mark Van Doren and the "Mark Van Doren" of the movie becomes a chasm.

Watching "Mark Van Doren" in Quiz Show, I began to see that Mr. Redford himself, unlike the Columbia students of the time, quite possibly thinks the real Mark Van Doren was ... boring, that the real Columbia was snobbish and boring. I began to see that the real Robert Redford actually belongs to the ersatz world of Twenty-One.

The nausea increases. Just as Mark becomes "Mark" and Columbia becomes "Columbia," so Charles Van Doren becomes "Charles." The process of distortion and falsification becomes so insistent that the two producers, Robert Redford of Quiz Show and Dan Enright, the producer of Twenty-One, begin to come into focus as a single producer, and the thought arises that maybe Mr. Redford knows that this is so. Both Robert Redford and Dan Enright--"Redford" and "Enright"?--smile knowingly and plead "artistic license." I note here that testimony to the movie's deceptions have begun to pour in beyond anything I can provide myself. Thus the daughter-in-law of Edward Kletter, director of advertising for the maker of Geritol (sponsor of Twenty-One), has stated publicly that he did not in any way resemble the character played in the movie by Martin Scorcese, and did not know about the fraud: "I do not want the Robert Redford movie to become the 'textbook' on this period. I don't want the granddaughters of Edward Kletter to be ashamed of their grandfather."