Now i know Ralph Fiennes was age 32 at the time and you could say there are that age teachers out there, but he seemed younger in the role and just generally speaking, he was a professor not just a teacher. Also 32 and still single doesnt make sense. So clearly they had him as some late 20s man in this film.
Im not saying his miscast. I enjoyed his performance. Just thinking about it right now though.
It was a true story. I can't think of a reason they would need to change any facts, actually the film is so good because it is so true to detail.
Van Doren had a Doctorate in 1955. He was a Professor of English at Columbia.
H was on the game show in 1957.
He was 31.
Looks like he married in 1957, after the quiz show.
I can't think of a better actor to play his part.
Look for photos of Van Doren.
I believe they said his position was instructor. That's far from Assoc. Prof.
Or Asst. Prof. And a long way from Full Prof. I'm going to watch it now. If I'm wrong then I stand corrected.
Google search reveals that he was an Assistant Professor at the time of the scandal. It can take years and years to achieve Full Professor status.
shareHe says to Enright at one point (I think it's when Enright asks him how much Columbia pays professors) that he isn't a professor yet.
Reality is the new fiction they say, truth is truer these days, truth is man-madeshare
I found the fact that even though he does tell them he's an instructor they refer to him as a Professor for the majority of the film and if I'm correct he even calls himself that at some point. I had to chuckle and answer "No he's an instructor". XD
shareIt is not uncommon to refer to someone who teaches college as "professor" (small "p"). It may not be their official title, but it's what they do. In the most basic concept of the word, to teach is to "profess", and one who professes is a professor. However, Van Doren says early in the movie that he's just an instructor, not a Professor (large "P").
Same as my father who was a copilot on an airline but his colleagues referred to him as captain.
shareMany things in the film were conflated in order to make the film a more comprehensible story. The epilogue where it states that Van Doren never taught again is completely false. He actually did continue teaching.
shareAnd the relationship between Goodwin and Van Doren was almost entirely fictionalized.
The use of a crawl at the end - the follow-up facts about both of them flashed on the screen - was controversial at the time, and provoked a good amount of comment from movie critics and historians. The gist of it was that such a documentary approach wasn't appropriate on a fictionalized account - that it was fraudulent in that context.
On the one hand, I love the movie. On the other, the contemporaneous PBS documentary The Quiz Show Scandal showed just how dramatic the story was on its own terms, with no embroidery, no "sweetening", and I'd like to have seen this approached the same way.
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Nothing to see here, move along.
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