They both cheated. Herb Stempel told the truth about it first, before Van Doren did, but that's because his phony winning streak ended first and Van Doren was given a high-paying job on The Today Show, the sort of gig Stempel had been promised but never received.
Directed by Robert Redford. I'm not really familiar with the movies he's directed except this and Ordinary People, but I've heard that films about WASPs like himself are sort of his thing. Everyone has an ethnicity. Some are less colorful than others, but we all have our problems. 
The film played with reality in the normal ways of a "recounting true events" motion picture: the time for the events to elapse was shrunk from three years to one, Herb Stemple's family was in on it (unlike the hiding seen in the film). I don't think it mentions the "Dotto" stand-in contestant who found a notebook of answers backstage while Marie Wynn spouted those same answers to the camera; that guy sent the FCC an affidavit claiming the incident in 1958; the scandal was on multiple shows and the story really was a collective one of NBC allowing fakery on "Twenty-One", "The Big Surprise", and "Dotto" (a former CBS daytime show, running at night in its new home.) It pretty much wrecked the lives of the repeat contestants and made any game show with any cash prizes suspect by the public for a decade. Jackie Gleason tried to do a panel show called "You're In the Picture" in 1961 and the first episode stunk so bad he did an "apology" episode the next week and the thing morphed into a talk show for eight episodes because he owed the network (CBS) the time. If it weren't for "Jeopardy!" in the mid-1960s, the concept might have died out on American television.
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