How Films Adapted from Fact Are Developed

Goodwin was a Harvard law graduate, an attorney, counsel for the House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce in investigating the television quiz show scandals of the 1950s, speechwriter and advisor for Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, a university professor, a journalist, playwright, and author. He is credited with having suggested the famous White House dinner of Nobel Prize winners to Mrs. Kennedy, which is described in the recently published Dinner in Camelot by Joseph A. Esposito, and with coining ther term "Great Society" to describe Johnson's domestic programs. He described his work on the 1959 House quiz show scandals in his 1988 book Remembering America: A Voice from the Sixties. His account is anecdotal, with a special focus on the friendship he formed with Charles Van Doren, who ultimately testified before the committee that he had been given the answers in advance for his appearances on the tv quiz show "21." 

In 1994, Buena Vista Pictures produced Quiz Show, which was based on Goodwin's book, directed by Robert Redford, and written by Paul Attanasio. Actor Redford had won the Academy Award for directing in 1980 for Ordinary People. It was Attanasio's first screenplay, and he went on to create the television series Homicide: Life on the Street and Bull. I remember how in the mid-1980s he was the film critic for the Washington Post, my hometown newspaper. His shift to screenwriting wasn't a big surprise to me because in several of his reviews he took great pains to describe how he would have written the screenplay in the movie he was panning. Redford and Attanasio portrayed Goodwin as the lead investigator who obtained the answers about the quiz show scandals.

The problem was that most of the answers had been discovered by other people. The journalist Jack O'Brien wrote a series of articles about the scandal in 1958, and Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Joseph Stone investigated and convened two grand juries that prompted the House hearings. Stone described his investigation in a book he wrote with Tim Yohn, Prime Times and Misdemeanors: Investigating the 1950s TV Scandal--a DA's Account, which was published in 1992, two years after Goodwin's book and two years before the movie. It wasn't that Goodwin ignored Stone in his own book. He mentions him and describes meetings with him. But his account isn't presented as a documentary history of the scandals' investigation but, as his book''s title suggests, an account of what he experienced personally. Stone's book, whose title is a pun on the phrase "high crimes and misdemeanors" from the section of the U.S. Constitution on presidential impeachment, was such a history.

Stone's book was available for the filmmakers' use. But Redford's film from Attanasio's screenplay has Goodwin discover what O'Brien and Stone found out, something that Stone himself criticized after the movie was released. Rather than protraying a series of investigations, a single investigation and a lead investigator works better dramatically. Goodwin is the hero of the movie and provides the film's point of view. His friendship with Van Doren and the efforts to get him to testify are the film's focus. 

If film audiences don't learn of the efforts of O'Brien and Stone, that's not the filmmakers' problem.Their only job is to tell a good, dramatic story. That's what most filmmakers say. If the film is accurate but dull, people won't pay to see it.  And this position conflicts with that abstract thing called truth, even though the film is described as being based on a true story, and sometimes with the emotions of friends and family members of those portrayed, misportrayed, or ignored. The conflict appears to be constant.

Copyright 2018 by John T. Aquino