Does the movie just assume that the TV corporations were involved? Or were they really involved in real life? If the latter, did this fact come to light after the events portrayed in the movie? Because according to the movie's events, NBC and Geritol are never implicated.
shareThere was no direct hands-on interference by NBC or Geritol in the events of "Twenty-One" other than the fact that when "Twenty-One" first began and was being played honestly, the results were disastrous with contestants missing every question and games ending in constant 0-0 ties. Basically the pressure from NBC and the sponsor was "Don't let that happen again!" and so Dan Enright with Jack Barry's complicity decided to rig the show.
Rigging was being done by a lot of other game shows at that point by other companies, most notably "The $64,000 Question" but their rigging was a little different than what was done on the Barry-Enright shows "Twenty-One" and "Tic Tac Dough" where matches were scripted to the last detail and tie games sustained to build up jackpots and suspense week to week. On "$64,000 Question" they would have the contestants they liked go through a warm-up and ask them questions to figure out where their expertise was and then they would know what questions to ask that the contestant would know (or sometimes recycle a question they had asked previously in the warm-up).
Revlon, the sponsor of "Question" was more directly involved in this kind of thing. In fact, the Scorsese character is based on Charles Revson of Revlon, not anyone from Geritol. Redford was engaging in his own version of creative license (which can be said of a lot of aspects about this film, the most egregious being his making Richard Goodwin a big hero when he had next to nothing to do with the actual investigation) there by compressing the two sponsors of different rigged game shows.