David Cunningham "Dave" Garroway (July 13, 1913 – July 21, 1982) was the founding host of NBC's Today from 1952 to 1961. His easygoing and relaxing style belied a battle with depression. Garroway has been honored for his contributions to radio and television with a star for each on the Hollywood Walk of Fame as well as the St. Louis Walk of Fame, the city where he spent part of his teenage years and early adulthood.
Born in Schenectady, New York, Garroway was 14 and had moved with his family 13 times before settling in St. Louis, Missouri, where he attended University City High School and Washington University in St. Louis, from which he earned a degree in abnormal psychology. Before going into broadcasting, Garroway worked as a Harvard University lab assistant, as a book salesman, and as a piston ring salesman. After not being able to successfully sell either, Garroway decided to try his hand in radio.
Garroway began his broadcasting career modestly. Starting at NBC as an page in 1938, he graduated 23rd in a class of 24 from NBC's school for announcers. Following graduation, he landed a job at Pittsburgh radio station KDKA in 1939. As a station reporter, he went about the region filing reports from a hot-air balloon, a U.S. Navy submarine in the Ohio River, and from deep inside a coal mine. His early reporting efforts earned Garroway a reputation for finding a good story, even if it took him to unusual places. The "Roving Announcer", as he was known, worked his way up to become the station's special events director, while still attending to his on-air work. After two years with KDKA, Garroway left for Chicago.
Barbara Jill Walters (born September 25, 1929) is an American broadcast journalist, author, and television personality. She has hosted morning television shows (Today and The View), the television news magazine (20/20), former co-anchor of the ABC World News, and current contributor to ABC News.
Walters was first known as a popular TV morning news anchor for over 10 years on NBC's Today, where she worked with Hugh Downs and later hosts Frank McGee and Jim Hartz. Walters later spent 25 years as co-host of ABC's news magazine 20/20. She was the first female co-anchor of network evening news, working with Harry Reasoner on the ABC Evening News, and continuing as a contributor to the network news division and its flagship program, ABC World News.
In 1996, Walters was ranked #34 on TV Guide's 50 Greatest TV Stars of All Time.
Walters was born in 1929 in Boston, the daughter of Dena (née Seletsky) and Louis "Lou" Walters (born Louis Warmwater). Her parents were both Jewish and descendants of refugees from the former Russian Empire, now Eastern Europe. Walters' paternal grandfather, Abraham Isaac, was from what is now Łódź, Poland, and first immigrated to England, changing his name first to Warmwater and later to Abraham Walters (the original family surname was Waremwasser). Walters' father was born there c. 1894, and moved to the United States with his family in 1900. In 1937, her father opened the New York version of the Latin Quarter; he also worked as a Broadway producer (he produced the Ziegfeld Follies of 1943). He also was the Entertainment Director for the Tropicana Resort and Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada, where he imported the "Folies Bergere" stage show from Paris to the resort's main showroom. Walters' brother, Burton, died in 1932 of pneumonia. Walters' elder sister, Jacqueline, was born mentally disabled and died of ovarian cancer in 1985. She has another half sister, Walda Walters Anderson, born to a different mother.[citation needed]
Fred Allen (born John Florence Sullivan, May 31, 1894 – March 17, 1956) was an American comedian whose absurdist, topically pointed radio show (1932–1949) made him one of the most popular and forward-looking humorists in the so-called classic era of American radio.
His best-remembered gag was his long-running mock feud with friend and fellow comedian Jack Benny, but it was only part of his appeal; radio historian John Dunning (in On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio) wrote that Allen was radio's most admired comedian and most frequently censored. A master ad libber, Allen often tangled with his network's executives (and often barbed them on the air over the battles), while developing routines the style and substance of which influenced contemporaries and futures among comic talents, including Groucho Marx, Stan Freberg, Henry Morgan and Johnny Carson, but his fans also included President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and novelists William Faulkner, John Steinbeck and Herman Wouk (who began his career writing for Allen).
Jerry Lewis (born March 16, 1926) is an American comedian, actor, singer, film producer, screenwriter and film director. He is best known for his slapstick humor in film, television, stage and radio. He was originally paired up with Dean Martin in 1946, forming the famed comedy team of Martin and Lewis.
In addition to the duo's popular nightclub work, they starred in a successful series of comedy films for Paramount Pictures. Lewis is also known for his charity fund-raising telethons and position as national chairman for the Muscular Dystrophy Association (MDA).
Lewis has won several awards for lifetime achievements from The American Comedy Awards, The Golden Camera, Los Angeles Film Critics Association, and The Venice Film Festival, and he has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
In 2005, he received the Governors Award of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Board of Governors, which is the highest Emmy Award presented. On February 22, 2009, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded Lewis the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award.
Bob Ray is an independent American filmmaker based out of Austin, Texas.
In 1994 Ray founded the production company CrashCam Films. CrashCam Films' first productions were narrative Super 8 mm films and music videos. Bob Ray's in-camera-edited Super 8 short “Sweet Sweetroll’s BaadAsssss Spin” found its way onto indie producer John Pierson’s show Split/Screen on the Independent Film Channel and Bravo (television network).
Ray made his feature film debut with the rock ‘n’ roll stoner cult film Rock Opera. Ray wrote and directed Rock Opera with very limited resources. The film has accumulated several rave reviews and a 2003 High Times Magazine nomination for a Stony Film Award.
Ray has produced and directed several music videos, including a video for the Grammy nominated song “Fried Chicken and Coffee” by Nashville Pussy, and videos for songs by The Riverboat Gamblers, U.S.S. Friendship, Dambaby (featuring Sam McCandless of Cold), The Phantom Creeps and more.
Continuing his close affiliation with the music community, Ray has worked with The Polyphonic Spree, The Black Eyed Peas, Eels, Jerry Cantrell, Blur, Supergrass, The Rapture, Junior Brown, Jurassic Five, Puffy, Modest Mouse, Pete Yorn, Clinic, Starsailor, Don Walser, The Shins, Ozo Matli, Stephen Malkmus, Hank Williams III, X-Ecutioners, …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead and many others.
Plot
An idealistic young lawyer working for a Congressional subcommittee in the late 1950s discovers that TV quiz shows are being fixed. His investigation focuses on two contestants on the show "Twenty-One": Herbert Stempel, a brash working-class Jew from Queens, and Charles Van Doren, the patrician scion of one of America's leading literary families. Based on a true story.
Keywords: 1950s, advertising, anti-semitism, based-on-book, based-on-true-story, chocolate-cake, class-differences, columbia-university, congressional-committee, congressional-testimony
Fifty million people watched, but no one saw a thing.
Dick Goodwin: I asked myself, "why would he do this, he knows I'll come after him?" Then it occurred to me. He knows I'll come after him.
Toby Stempel: My mother wants to know why you only went for eight on the movies.::Herbie Stemple: Because my real expertise is pain-in-the-ass in-laws, all right?
[to a reporter outside the committee hearing]::Herbie Stemple: You know what the problem with you bums is? You never leave a guy alone unless you're leaving him alone.
Jack Barry: [prepping for the show] My light okay? My nose doesn't look big?::Stage worker: You look great Jack.::Jack Barry: Last week I looked like a sun dial.
Congressman Derounian: I'm happy that you've made the statement. But I cannot agree with most of my colleagues. See, I don't think an adult of your intelligence should be commended for simply, at long last, telling the truth.
Herbie Stemple: I love my wife, but it's like living with a plague of locusts.
Mark Van Doren: What these books have conclusively proven is that the diffence between men and women is exactly 38 pages.::Man 1: Can I quote you, Mark?::Mark Van Doren: Not before I quote me.::Dorothy Van Doren: His own quotes are his greatest pleasure.::Man 2: Did you hear the market dropped 30 points today. There's a rumor Eisenhower died.::Dorothy Van Doren: How could they tell?::Mark Van Doren: Oh, please. Don't get Dorothy started on politics. There'll be a raid.
Herbie Stemple: You know why they call them Indians? Because Columbus thought he was in India. They're "Indians" because some white guy got lost.
Mark Van Doren: Cheating on a quiz show? That's sort of like plagiarizing a comic strip.
Herbie Stemple: Come and see Herbie Stempel get thrown to the Columbia lions! Watch Charles Van Doren eat his first kosher meal in his life.