Network airs Friday, March 4th at 8:00PM
If you want a portent of the future, sci-fi and satire show us the way.
Metropolis (1927) anticipated robots, Blade Runner (1982) digital billboards and Total Recall (1990) self-driving cars. Sidney Lumet’s Network (1976) presciently forecast in its marketing campaign that “television will never be the same.”
Network billed itself as “a perfectly outrageous motion picture,” and in 1976, when it was released, it certainly seemed that way. Imagine: A “manifest irresponsible man” exploited by his network and allowed to anchor the national news branded as the Mad Prophet of the Airwaves. Or a hard news broadcast given over to populist propagandizing. Or a true crime reality series that follows a band of terrorists committing crimes.
“It is just impossible to accept,” Time magazine film critic Richard Schickel wrote. “Simply couldn’t happen,” opined then CBS News President Richard S. Salant.
Forty-six years later, real-life has overtaken Network’s satiric apocalyptic vision. Can’t happen here? Anyone who watches cable news would probably consider Network quaint.
Network was nominated for 10 Academy Awards. It won four, including a posthumous Oscar for Peter Finch in his iconic role as Howard Beale, a veteran broadcaster forced to retire due to low ratings. A blithe announcement that he intends to commit suicide on next week’s broadcast (“That should give the public relations people a week to promote the show”) causes a maelstrom that entertainment programming executive Diane Christensen (Faye Dunaway in her Oscar-winning role) seeks to exploit to lift the struggling network out of the ratings cellar.
And then things really get crazy.
Paddy Chayefsky, a two-time Oscar-winner for his screenplays for Marty (1955) and The Hospital (1971), completed the hat trick with Network, which produced one of the most quoted lines in film history: “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore.” Theaters showing the film sold buttons trumpeting the catchphrase.
Chayefsky may not have been the last angry man, but he was one of the best. “His genius,” Dave Itzkoff wrote in his 2014 book, Mad as Hell: The Making of Network and the Fateful Vision of the Angriest Man in Movies, “was that when his characters spoke, they spoke with his aggravated, articulate voice, and yet they seemed to speak for everyone.”
Never more so than with Beale’s “Mad as hell” rant, in which Beale excoriates his viewers:
“We know things are bad – worse than bad. They’re crazy. It’s like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don’t go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is: ‘Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won’t say anything. Just leave us alone.’ Well, I’m not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get mad!... You’ve got to say: ‘I’m a human being, god-dammit! My life has value!’
Network is set in the world of television, which put Chayefsky on the map in 1950s, an era when TV drama was live. Along with Marty, he gained acclaim with such teleplays as The Bachelor Party and The Catered Affair. They were each adapted for the big screen. But even then, Chayefsky bit the hand that was feeding him. He told The New York Herald Tribune, “The industry has no pride and no culture. The movies, with all their crassness, can point to something they’ve done with pride during the year.”
The genesis of Network was a news story about a worldwide corporation wanting to buy ABC. Chayefsky envisioned that news would by necessity be bastardized to transform it into a profit center.
But in a 1976 appearance on Dinah Shore’s daytime talk show, Dinah!, Chayefsky said that Network’s presumed indictment on TV was only the tip of the iceberg. The film, he said, is about dehumanization. “It’s the world that’s gone nuts,” he said. “How do you preserve yourself in a world in which life doesn’t really mean much anymore?”
That is also the dilemma facing Max Schumacher, a news executive and long-time friend and colleague of Beale, portrayed in an Oscar-nominated performance by William Holden. He upends his marriage by entering into an ill-fated affair with the soulless Christensen. “I'm not sure she's capable of any real feelings,” he ruefully tells his wife. “She's television generation. She learned life from Bugs Bunny.”
In another of Network’s indelible performances, Beatrice Straight portrayed Schumacher’s wife. Her devastating less-than-six-minute scene in which she demands from her husband “respect and allegiance,” earned her the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Also making the most of his one scene in the film is Ned Beatty, who was recommended to Lumet by Robert Altman. Beatty earned an Oscar nomination as Arthur Jensen, the corporate head brought in to reign in Beale and give him the facts of life:
There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars… That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And you have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and you will atone!
As for Beale, Lumet considered Jimmy Stewart, Henry Fonda, Gene Hackman, Sterling Hayden and Robert Montgomery. Finch, a British actor, helped secure the part by studying tapes of American news anchors such as Walter Cronkite and losing his British accent for the role.
The casting gods further smiled on Network with the casting of Dunaway, who after some reticence, and a threat by her agent, the legendary Sue Mengers, that she would no longer represent Dunaway if she didn’t do the film. Dunawawy signed on, but not before a meeting with Lumet, who firmly told her not to look for any vulnerability in the character because she had none, and if Dunaway tried to sneak it in, the footage would wind up on the cutting room floor.
In 2000, the Library of Congress inducted Network into its National Film Registry as an “historically, culturally or aesthetically significant” American film. Five years later, Chayefsky’s script was voted by the Writers Guild of America, East among one of the top-ten screenplays of the 20th century.
Today, Network plays less as satire and more of a cautionary tale. Many of its satiric observations have indeed come to pass. Television remains an awesome force, but it now contends with social media, where everyone, it seems, is mad as hell. Chayefsky’s hyper-literate script could be speaking for that phenomenon as well, as when Beale issues this on-air warning:
Woe is us if it ever falls into the hands of the wrong people!
