Did Jack Barry Know About The Rigging?
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Archived from the IMDb Discussion Forums — Quiz Show
jbartelone — 14 years ago(December 03, 2011 12:22 PM)
I heard that he had passed a polygraph saying that he did not. I know that Monty Hall subed for Jack in around the summer of 1956 for a few episodes. Did he know what was going on?
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Eric-62-2 — 11 years ago(February 16, 2015 12:50 PM)
First off, the Emily Dickinson moment in the film is pure fiction among many things in this film that are fiction (not the least of which was Redford turning a man who had next to NOTHING to do with the investigation, Richard Goodwin, into the hero for reasons that I am convinced are rooted entirely in politics). Barry didn't react to anything in the broadcast. But that said, he did admit his general knowledge of the rigging (though not all the minute details) in an interview on the Tomorrow program in the 1970s and again in an interview for the late 80s documentary "Television" (his interview was filmed before his death in 1984, four years before the documentary aired).
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smoko — 10 years ago(May 31, 2015 06:04 AM)
@Eric-62-2
First off, the Emily Dickinson moment in the film is pure fiction
Well, not
pure
fiction. According to "Television Fraud: The History and Implications of the Quiz Show Scandals" the Emily Dickinson moment did happen, but it was producer Albert Freedman (Hank Azaria) who was shocked, not Jack Barry:
https://books.google.com.au/books?id=mQFPP7kikegC&pg=PA76&lpg=PA76&dq="Snodgrass+shocked+freedman+by+answering"&source=bl&ots=pnarHgElpg&sig=AOXlrEbxTlcM903du0_zdlRyFwU&hl=en&sa=X&ei=_wFrVemIEeavmAW3n4LADg&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q="Snodgrass shocked freedman by answering"&f=false
So Jack Barry knew that the shows were fixed, but he didn't know that Snodgrass was refusing to take a dive at that moment.
It would be terrific to see the actual footage of that moment anyway.
You can read dueling testimonies about how Freedman reacted here:
http://archive.org/stream/investigationoft01unit/investigationoft01unit_djvu.txt
I said, "Why did you do it?" And he said, "Because I wanted to win." Which is a logical answer, you know. -
Eric-62-2 — 9 years ago(December 27, 2016 10:12 PM)
Well that actually was the case on other game shows of the 50s that were rigged. The first game show that was exposed for rigging was a daytime game show called "Dotto" and its host, Jack Narz, was not involved with the fixing that was going on. But unlike Jack Barry, who was the co-producer of the whole production team, Narz was just a hired gun and thus there was no reason for him to be involved in behind-the-scenes rigging. He emerged unscathed from the scandal and continued to host game shows into the late 70s (he was also the brother of another game show host legend, Tom Kennedy).