Mad as Hell: The Making of Network and the Fateful Vision of the Angriest Man in Movies

by Dave Itzkoff

Starting fresh, he sketched out the premise of a fictional news anchor he variously called Holbein, Munro, Kronkhite, or Kronkheit (whether intentionally or accidentally, he did not use the more customary spelling), who has a “crack up on the air” in prime time, unexpectedly boosting the ratings of his show and creating expectations for more extreme behavior in future broadcasts. This could provoke his TV rivals to have to keep pace with his outrageousness or provide the framework for a story about his network being swallowed up by a sinister multinational corporation. “So far,” Chayefsky wrote, “Kronkheit hasn’t done anything but express outrage.” But: “What would happen if he started inventing news—The basic joke is that the networks are so powerful they can make true what isn’t true and never even existed—The networks are so powerful they make the ravings of the maniac Kronkheit true.”

  Still, Chayefsky felt that a basic “satirical clarity” was so far missing. “The only joke we have going for us,” he wrote,

  is the idea of ANGER—the American people are angry and want angry shows—they don’t want jolly, happy family type shows like Eye Witness News; they want angry shows—so they base their programming on ANGER … the American people seem to be hungering for happier days like the Depression, note The Waltons—Programming sets up depression shows with happy, starving families.

  Months later Chayefsky made his visits to NBC News and took private meetings with John Chancellor, the stentorian anchorman of NBC Nightly News, and CBS to meet his industry rival Walter Cronkite, the trusted anchor of CBS Evening News, either of whom might find himself, on any given weeknight, the victor in an ongoing race for ratings supremacy. In his notes from those meetings, Chayefsky recorded the clockwork precision of their schedules—hours set aside for reading, writing, reviewing, lunches, afternoon walks—the physical layout of their workplaces, and their vocabularies filled with industry argot.

  What it all added up to wasn’t clear. Yet as Chayefsky delved deeper into the basic operations of television news, exploring reports in trade publications and research papers from scholarly journals provided by his roster of industry contacts, a certain central tension began to emerge. Atop the TV news pyramid sat the networks’ national evening broadcasts, thirty minutes of serious, straightforward content presided over by serious, straightforward men. The early 1970s had provided a torrent of significant events that perfectly matched these programs’ maturing ability to deliver immediate, up-to-the-minute coverage: the Senate Watergate hearings, the downfall of the Nixon administration, the withdrawal from Vietnam, crisis upon crisis in the Middle East. Given the vital role that these news programs played in informing the American populace (and protecting, via their public service, the near-monopolistic status of the networks), they were not expected to be profitable and were managed by a hierarchy of executives wholly separate from those responsible for entertainment content.

  But national network news was not the only game in town. Each regional channel in the constellation of marketplaces where these networks operated had its own local newscast, leading into the national broadcasts and then returning for another half hour or hour at night. They had chirpy, cheerful, bantering coanchors and dynamic titles such as Action News and Eyewitness News; and in their vigorous competition with their local rivals, they were far from the “jolly, happy family type shows” that Chayefsky dismissed. Many of these news programs did not necessarily see it as their sacred obligation to dispassionately provide facts and knowledge to an uninformed audience. They were more like the Wild West, and some of them even reveled in this comparison.

  Among the materials that Chayefsky reviewed was the transcript of a 60 Minutes segment from March 10, 1974, titled “The Rating War.” For this report, a skeptical and unamused Mike Wallace visited with Channel 7 News Scene, the increasingly popular 11:00 P.M. news show of KGO-TV in San Francisco, hosted by a quartet of male anchors who dubbed themselves “The Four Horsemen” and who could be seen in a popular series of on-air advertisements that cast them as bronco-riding cowboys arriving in a lawless frontier town. Wallace reported that 55 percent of the stories on News Scene “fell into the tabloid category—items on fire, crime, sex, tear-jerkers, accidents and exorcism.” Other recent segments on the program had included a report on a Florida heiress who was hacked to death by a machete-wielding assailant on the porch of her St. Augustine home; an interview with the mother of a nudist; and the story of a severed penis that had been found in the rail yards of the East Bay. (“Male genital found on railroad track,” viewers were advised. “Stay tuned!”)

  The success of News Scene had decimated morale at KPIX, a more straitlaced competitor, but the general manager of KGO, a silver-haired industry veteran named Russ Coughlin, was unrepentant. “Isn’t fire, crime and sex news?” he said to Wallace. “When did that get out of the news business?… We could sit around and do pontifical kind of news day in and day out. We’d be back where we were in the old days, when we were trying to be very clever and profound about news, and died, and nobody watched it.”

  This sensibility wasn’t exclusive to evening and late-night newscasts. For his research, Chayefsky clipped an April 1974 New York Times profile of Chuck Scarborough, a young anchorman recently delivered to WNBC in New York from WNAC in the cutthroat Boston marketplace. As compelling as the article itself was an advertisement on its second page for an NBC daytime show called Not for Women Only, promoting an upcoming episode called “Cats, Dogs and Underdogs.” “What kinds of animals go with what kinds of people?” the ad read. “Should your pet have a pet? How can you test a dog’s IQ? Barbara Walters and a panel of animal psychologists and other specialists discuss everything from guppies to puppies.”

  In May 1974 Chayefsky and Gottfried flew to Georgia to meet Pat Polillo, a creator of the Action News format and a widely traveled news director who had previously worked in Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and at KGO in San Francisco before arriving at WAGA, a local Atlanta station. “You win because you have a competitive edge,” Polillo had told a convention of television executives earlier in the year. “Finding and developing that competitive edge in a market where the other stations are doing a good job in news is one hell of a fight.”

  As far as Gottfried could tell, all that this inquiry yielded were more sketches of newsroom floor plans and head counts of cameramen and assistant directors. “The Atlanta trip made it clear that there was nothing that exciting, as far as a movie was concerned, that we could find to do about a local station,” Gottfried said. “Not the kind of thing that would make a formidable movie, in any event. You’d probably end up with some kind of soap opera or something.”

  But in his personal notebooks Chayefsky was mapping the architecture of a structural behemoth he identified as THE NETWORK, whose internal configurations he had never closely contemplated, despite having earned his living from several of them. Each such entity had a corporate division (which, for narrative purposes, could provide a “theme relating to power + profits uber alles”), a programming division (“theme related to ratings”), a news division (“theme relating to ratings vs truth”), divisions for sales, sports, and so on.

  What he needed, Chayefsky realized, was a “basic incident that ties all these units together—around which the various definitive characters revolve and interplay on one another’s story.” His preference, he wrote, was that this incident “evolve out of NEWS”: “Thematically, we have to reconcile the concept of RATINGS UBER ALLES and whatever statement about power we can find.”

  Starting again with the incident of the television anchor who snaps on air, Chayefsky piled all the knowledge he had accumulated in his travels and research into a story that was ambitious to the point of oversaturation. There would be a young hotshot news producer who is brought in to boost a show’s sagging ratings (“What he did in Detroit was to tabloid the news, featuring sex, scandal and sports + slighting hard news”); resistance and consternation from the network that runs this show, which is on the verge of being bought out b
y an international corporation or maybe by “Arab oil sheiks”; conflict with the Federal Communications Commission, which turns out to be owned by the corporation or the sheikhs anyway. And then: “We are shooting for a third act,” Chayefsky wrote, “in which the NETWORK becomes so powerful it is an international power of itself and even declares war on some country.”

  Lest he lose sight of his characters, Chayefsky reminded himself: “The Basic story is the destruction of a buccaneering independent TV HOTSHOT by surrendering his identity, patriotism and self to the dehumanized multi-national conglomerate.” At the close of act 2, he wrote, would be “where HOTSHOT submits, is sold the inevitable necessity of multinational and sells his soul in exchange.” What he envisioned, in short, was nothing less than “FAUST + MEPHISTOPHELES today.”

  Even the author seemed to realize the preposterously high stakes he had set for himself. As he wrote in a separate set of notes, “Now, all this is Strangelove-y as hell, can we make it work?”

  * * *

  Chayefsky approached his writing like any other trade; the most crucial requirement to completing a task was not ingenuity or talent, but the application of persistence over time. “If you can get in four good hours a day,” he said of his work, “you’re in terrific shape.” Each day, after stopping off for his morning Sanka, he would arrive by 9:30 or 9:45 at his eleventh-floor office, a converted efficiency apartment indifferently decorated with worn gray carpet and haphazardly furnished with a piano, a complete collection of National Geographic magazines from January 1965 onward, an L-shaped desk to support his Olympia manual typewriter, and a swivel chair with stuffing spilling out of a torn armrest. The view his workspace offered, through tattered, yellowing paper window shades, was of a tenement across the street where a man could be seen at all times of day standing in his underwear and washing his hands in a basin. While his neighbor attended to his tasks, Chayefsky turned to his own solitary labors.

  He wrote on whatever paper he could find, with whatever implement was available to him. Sometimes he expressed his ideas in complete and properly punctuated sentences. Other times they emerged in fragmentary bursts that ended on uncertain dashes. But whenever he had a thought or self-criticism, he reflexively committed it to paper, preferring unlined pages that were colored a canary yellow.

  Before Chayefsky commenced on a proper screenplay it was his practice to prepare detailed organizational outlines and write novelistic, narrative prose treatments. Then he would rewrite them, and rewrite them, practically from scratch, as if testing himself to see how much of the previous draft he could still remember. Frequently he would stop in mid-summary and, in his writing, speak aloud to himself as he took stock of the situation: “What have we got?” “Okay let’s follow that through.” “Let’s just push through the story and see just what our basic premise demands.” In these necessary pauses he would decide whether he was satisfied with what he had or whether it was time to clear the table.

  At the outset of his latest, nameless project, Chayefsky did not have characters so much as concepts. There was HOTSHOT, his “young (35) news producer” who is hired to bring his hit tabloid format to an ailing network newscast; KRONKITE, the fading anchorman whose on-set episode is broadcast across the nation due to a “fuggup”; and the NETWORK, on the verge of being or already bought out by an international conglomerate. Or maybe, Chayefsky speculated in capital letters, “BY THE END OF THE PICTURE, ALL THE NETWORKS WILL HAVE BEEN BOUGHT BY OTHER MULTINATIONALS.”

  Within a few weeks, Chayefsky had changed some of these parameters. His young HOTSHOT hero had metamorphosed into a fifty-year-old president of the network’s news division, “a tough, but righteous fellow” who, alongside iconic broadcasters such as Edward R. Murrow and Fred W. Friendly, had been “involved up to his neck with the breaking of Senator McCarthy’s reign of terror,” and who, despite a disintegrating home life—“His wife divorced him years ago, and his children have grown further and further away from him”—still regards himself “as a man with the highest traditions of journalism.” Soon this character would also have a name, Max Schumacher, a nod to the baseball pitcher Harold “Prince Hal” Schumacher, who in Chayefsky’s youth had won the World Series with the 1933 New York Giants.

  The “Krazy Kronkite” character also gained a name, Howard Beale—Howard as a tribute to Howard Gottfried and Beale for the mother-daughter duo of “Big Edie” and “Little Edie” Beale, the eccentric cousins of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis who had lately clashed with Long Island health inspectors over their garbage-ridden Grey Gardens estate. The fictional Beale now had a back story, too, as a man in his late fifties, “benign, magisterial, the archetypical network anchorman, but declining in stature and audience,” though still “an old friend and a man of genuine stature” in Max Schumacher’s eyes.

  A few supporting characters began to take shape as well: a hungry young corporate executive named Hackett, and a regional news director, maybe named Gianini or De Filipo, who would clash with Schumacher after previous successes at stations in Detroit, San Francisco, and Atlanta. (“His method of doing this is to adopt a tabloid attitude towards the news, sacrificing hard news, especially international and national news, for filmed stories on sex, scandal, nudity, sports, crippled children and dying animals and lots of religion.”)

  The film would begin on a typical day as Howard Beale comes in to prepare for the evening network news. But, Chayefsky wrote, “ten minutes into the news cast he flips out. He begins cussing his co-anchorman in Washington as being full of shit, throws a chair at one of the other newscasters, and generally carries on in a way startling, to say the least, for the benign, objective, pontifical dean of television anchormen.”

  Six months later, Beale returns refreshed from his stay at a sanitarium, and when he is put back on the air, he loses it again.

  But this time, his flip is not an unruly, profanity-ridden flip out, but an angry outburst against some piece of news. Beale erupts out of his benign, objective, pontifical image and turns into a roaring editorializing Jeremiah. Let’s say, the news is about inflation, and Beale warns in prophetic rage of what will happen if we allow inflation to proceed uninhibited. In the course of his eruption, he will call Nixon full of shit for pretending the economics of the country are being taken care of because it’s a congressional election year and Nixon is lying to the country to keep his party electable. Something like that.

  The crucial twist here, wrote Chayefsky, “is instead of objective reporting, we put a raging prophet on the air, a prophet in the biblical sense, who will prophesy doom and disaster every day, who will roar out against the inequities, hypocrisies and absurdities of our times.” The problem, he realized, “is a man doing the raging prophet every day can get to be repetitive and dull and a pain in the ass, so the trick is to keep Beale straight but letting the audience know that you never know when and where he will erupt.”

  “Okay, let’s push on,” he wrote. “Maybe the incidents will clear themselves up.”

  While he cycled through possible endgame scenarios for the screenplay—the networks versus Nixon? the multinational corporations declare war on Chile?—Chayefsky decided to add a love interest for Schumacher, “a no bullshit girl who sees through all of Max’s high principled bullshit,” whom he would dislike at first but who would, in the long run, come to represent the virtuous path he needed to follow. He also devised an early scene in which Schumacher and Beale “get smashed” together as they contemplate their dispiriting professional futures, in which Schumacher jokingly suggests to Beale that he commit suicide on the air—after giving the network a week to promote the event—so that the anchor can depart with the best ratings he’s ever had. Beale, who is more depressed than Schumacher realizes, announces on the air the next day that, in one week’s time, he is going to commit suicide on his show.

  This scenario eerily paralleled a tragic real-life incident that occurred while Chayefsky worked on the screenplay. On the morning of July 15, 1974, viewer
s of WXLT-TV 40 in Sarasota, Florida, watched as Christine Chubbuck, the auburn-haired twenty-nine-year-old host of the morning show Suncoast Digest, appeared to be wrapping up a brief news report. Instead, Chubbuck looked into the camera and said, “In keeping with Channel 40’s policy of bringing you the latest in blood and guts and in living color, you are going to see another first—an attempted suicide.” She then drew a .38-caliber Smith and Wesson pistol from a shopping bag hidden behind her desk and shot herself behind the right ear. Chubbuck, who had a history of depression and had been discussing suicide with friends and coworkers in the preceding days, died later that night.

  Whether Chayefsky was aware of Chubbuck’s death at the time he was writing his screenplay is unclear. Months later, he wrote a line for Beale in which the anchor declares he will “blow my brains out right on the air, right in the middle of the seven o’clock news, like that girl in Florida,” then deleted it from the script. But a set of screenplay notes dated July 16, 1974—the day after the horrific broadcast, when news of Chubbuck’s suicide would have been widely known—makes no reference to her or the incident.

  In that same set of pages, however, Chayefsky determined that the rising hotshot and the romantic interest for Schumacher were to be the same person, a female programming executive he called Louise Dickerson, then Diana Dickerson, and finally Diana Christensen. (He did not discard the name Louise entirely, giving it instead to the faithful wife Schumacher abandons to pursue his affair.) In an early description of the character that would carry through in future drafts, Chayefsky said Diana was “tall, willowy and with the best ass ever seen on a Vice President in charge of Programming.” As she pursued her seduction of Schumacher, she would also try to capitalize on Beale’s unexpected success, bringing his show and the increasingly unstable newsman under the umbrella of her department. She “encourages Howard to get madder and madder and more and more prophetic,” Chayefsky wrote. “Howard doesn’t need the encouragement. He gets madder and madder and finally achieves a state of grace and beatitude.” In pencil, he added to this: “He is no longer a prophet; he has become a messiah.”