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

by Dave Itzkoff

  At its end, Chayefsky lopped off a section in which Jensen lays out his vision for “a world of total orderliness, Mr. Beale, a planned and programmed world without war and famine, oppression and brutality, crime and disease, one massive, global tutelary corporation where all men can serve their specific functions, their necessities provided, their anxieties tranquilized.”

  From its midsection, Chayefsky cut a portion where Jensen observes that mankind may still get “hit with a tidal wave now and then, an earthquake, a tornado, and we still depend somewhat on natural snow for our ski weekends. But on the whole we control nature. We control everything.” But he left behind the very next line, in which Jensen gives his grand summation: “You have meddled with the inexorable”—no, make that primal—“forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won’t have it, is that clear?!”

  Another speech, this one designed for Beale—the moment that would transform him from a madman ranting at sixty million viewers to a true prophet of the modern day—contained some of the rawest, most unrelenting language Chayefsky would write, even as it was composed in a methodical and incident-free manner. A hint of it appeared on a handwritten note made for himself, on a mostly blank page bearing only these words: “I want you people to get mad—You don’t have to organize or vote for reformers—You just have to get mad—”

  A more fleshed-out version of the speech appeared in one of Chayefsky’s narrative treatments, with its most crucial expression still not fully formulated and pivoting on Beale’s metaphor that, though nobody could seem to explain what television ratings were, his viewers themselves were the ratings. To that, he added: “Open all your windows. Everybody. The whole family. Fathers, mothers, lovers, kids. Everybody. Stick your heads out. Now, I want you to yell. I want you to yell: ‘We’re not going to take it any more. We’re mad as hell, and we’re not going to take this any more.’ Yell that out into the streets.”

  A further refinement of the monologue dropped the too precise television jargon. Instead, Beale warns his viewers that he won’t let them retreat into anesthetized isolation and orders them to unleash their anger, not in the form of physical violence but through the expression of language.

  I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It’s a depression. Everybody’s out of work or scared of losing their job, the dollar buys a nickel’s worth, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter, punks are running wild in the streets, and there’s nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there’s no end to it. We know the air’s unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit and watch our teevees while some local newscaster tells us today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be. We all know things are bad. Worse than bad. They’re crazy. It’s like everything’s going crazy. So we don’t go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we live in gets smaller, and all we ask is, please, at least leave us alone in our own living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my teevee and my hair dryer and my steel-belted radials, and I won’t say anything, just leave us alone. Well, I’m not going to leave you alone. I want you to get mad.

  I don’t want you to protest. I don’t want you to riot. I don’t want you to write letters to your congressmen. Because I wouldn’t know what to tell you to write. I don’t know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the defense budget and the Russians and crime in the streets. All I know is first you’ve got to get mad. You’ve got to say, “I’m a human being, goddammit. My life has value.” So I want you to get up now. I want you to get out of your chairs and go to the window. Right now. I want you to go to the window, open it, and stick your head out and yell. I want you to yell, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this any more!”

  The truncated stage direction that now followed Beale’s speech only hinted at the power of the national reaction that his sermon was supposed to have generated. But in a narrative treatment, Chayefsky spelled out more emphatically his vision of what happened next.

  Thin voices penetrated the dank rumble of the city, shouting: “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it any more!” Then, suddenly it began to gather, the edges of sounds and voices, until it all surged out in an indistinguishable roar of rage like the thunder of a Nuremberg rally.

  * * *

  To the outside world, which believed that the once-prolific and fiercely outspoken Paddy Chayefsky had exhausted his energy and had nothing left to say, the screenwriter did not mind helping to perpetuate the illusion. A brief report published in the New York Times in January 1975 pointed out that he had not presented anything on the stage since The Latent Heterosexual and that his last new work of any kind was The Hospital, a film released in the bygone era of 1971. “Since that production,” the article said, “nothing.” Speaking from his office at 850 Seventh Avenue, Chayefsky mentioned that he was “in the middle” of a new screenplay, and when the Times reporter inquired if the project was, perhaps, a comedy, the screenwriter was poker-faced. “I always think of them as comedies,” he replied.

  The article mentioned that Chayefsky’s fifty-second birthday was just a few days away and that his son, Dan, was now nineteen, but there was no mention of his wife, Susan. Even his close friends and collaborators knew not to ask about her, and that such inquiries would produce half-mumbled responses, shrugs, or no answers at all. She was forty-eight now, and though she had been an often reliable presence by the author’s side at public events in the 1960s and a reluctant entertainer and sandwich maker at his late-night poker games, members of the Chayefskys’ social circle noticed that they had been seeing less and less of her over the years and that their interactions with her were mostly over the telephone.

  Gwen Verdon, the actress and wife of Bob Fosse, estimated that she saw Susan a total of five times in her life, and Ann Reinking, Fosse’s mistress, was surprised by Susan’s beauty on the rare opportunities she was allowed access to her. “She had the kind of skin that doesn’t need powder or makeup,” Reinking said. “She changed her hair color when I knew her. One time she was blond and the next time she was brunette.” She added, “My impression was that she had her own life, which from all appearances remained largely separate from Paddy’s.”

  Mary Lynn Gottfried, Howard’s wife, was newly married to her husband in 1973 when he and Chayefsky took what would be their final trip to Israel before work was halted on The Habakkuk Conspiracy. (As Mary Lynn would continue to joke thereafter, “I got the wedding; Paddy got the honeymoon.”) Before the intrepid filmmakers embarked on their journey, the Chayefskys and the Gottfrieds all excitedly piled into a car that delivered them to the airport, where everyone kissed and hugged good-bye and the wives watched from the ground to wave at the plane that carried their husbands off beyond the horizon. Susan, as Mary Lynn recalled, was bright, vivacious, engaged in events and conversations, and not looking forward to the long absence of her spouse and the late-night, long-distance phone calls from seven time zones away. This was to be one of the last times Mary Lynn would see Susan Chayefsky in public.

  Paddy Chayefsky could do nothing to cure Susan’s ailments and hardly much more to ease her suffering. But he tried to integrate her into his professional life as best he could, and cared for her opinion enough that he sought her input on the screenplay he had nearly completed. In broad cursive strokes that were looser and less regimented than her husband’s handwriting, Susan offered Paddy her comments, recorded on a memo pad that one might keep on a nightstand to jot down telephone messages. Whether she was directed by her husband’s instructions or her own personal preferences, Susan gravitated in her notes to the scenes that involved female characters, and commented frequently on the distress these sequences stirred up within her.

  After reading the argument between Max Schumacher and his wife, Louise, in which Max confesses that he has been conducting an affair with Diana Christensen while suspecting deep down that she is not “capable of an
y real feelings,” Susan wrote to Paddy that it was “not comforting in reading it.” Similarly, Susan wrote that she was “uncomfortable” with the series of caustic, businesslike remarks made by Diana throughout her overnight getaway with Schumacher, but “It pays off tho” when the two characters tumble into bed with each other. The scene, which Paddy later toned down, was “funny,” Susan wrote, but you “almost don’t want it that brutal.”

  A conversation between Diana and Laureen Hobbs, the leader of the revolutionary radicals, laden with swear words, TV-industry jargon, and references to left-wing political figures, was flagged by Susan for its “Very ‘in’ talk—think audience will not comprehend.” She added that this scene “should be cut substantially—viewers won’t understand it.” When Beale resurfaces in a following scene to decry the CCA’s clandestine takeover by a Saudi Arabian investment group, Susan observed, “you feel Howard is no longer in the picture. It is Diana + Max’s picture.” “By this pg,” she wrote, “we feel we know what Howard is going to say,” when what was needed was “a scene in which he ‘relates’ to other people.” Responding to the climactic moment in which Schumacher harshly dismisses Diana and leaves her for good, Susan wrote, “love speech but wished I could see her through his eyes, so that when he makes the speech I believe it more.”

  There is no precise way to determine which of Susan’s suggestions were directly incorporated into the script, which ones may have influenced its author in more oblique ways, and which may simply have caused him to chuckle or stroke his beard. But when Paddy Chayefsky arrived at what he felt was a complete version of the screenplay, which he had by now named Network, he took a marker and wrote its title across the cover page in block capital letters. Beneath this, he added in pen a parenthetical dedication: “(The original version for my Suzy).”

  * * *

  Chayefsky’s first attempt at selling Network to Hollywood, in the summer of 1974, while the screenplay was still a work in progress, yielded a deal so quickly that he must have been suspicious. Following a discussion with David Begelman, the president of Columbia Pictures, Chayefsky received an offer on June 24, guaranteeing him $100,000 for the Network script—$50,000 on signing and $50,000 on delivery—and as much as $300,000 in total screenwriting fees if the film were produced. By July the deal was dead when Columbia balked at a profit-sharing proposal that would have given Chayefsky and Gottfried 50 percent of the film’s net proceeds. Suddenly a reconciliation with United Artists did not seem like such a bad option.

  When Chayefsky and Gottfried were not feuding with United Artists and when it was not crushing their hopes and squandering their efforts, their relationship with the studio could be fruitful. In the 1950s, United Artists had released both Marty, one of the few filmmaking experiences Chayefsky did not regard as a psyche-scarring trauma, and his less successful movie adaptation of The Bachelor Party. More recently it had released The Hospital, but it frustrated Chayefsky and Gottfried with its handling of the television rights for that film and by putting the brakes on The Habakkuk Conspiracy. Once the dispute over The Hospital was settled, however, United Artists emerged as a good fit for the sort of scathing social indictment that Network offered.

  By the end of 1974, the American motion picture industry was in the midst of a systemic transformation. Hollywood had not abandoned the bloated big-budget spectacles it had been turning out for the past twenty-five years, if films such as Airport and The Towering Inferno were anything to judge by. But a new species of cinema was arising, one that tapped into the tumultuous changes taking place in the country. These films were stylish and spoke with a cool, contemporary vocabulary; also, several of them made money. The financial success of features such as Easy Rider, a 1969 release that took in more than $40 million on a budget of $360,000, had shown that movies could be anti-establishment and pro box office.

  Profitability and prestige were not mutually exclusive, either. It was not uncommon to see movies such as Midnight Cowboy, MASH, The French Connection, and The Last Picture Show atop lists of the year’s high-grossing releases while also being nominated for—and winning—Academy Awards. Mike Medavoy, a veteran producer who was then the vice president of production at United Artists, would later summarize the prevailing philosophy of the day: “People thought about making good movies to make money.”

  United Artists had taken only partial advantage of this shift in values, during which time it was led by Arthur B. Krim, a former adviser to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, and by David V. Picker, a third-generation movie industry executive whose uncle Arnold M. Picker had revitalized the company alongside Krim in the 1950s. The studio’s eclectic offerings included Woody Allen comedies such as Bananas and Sleeper and the James Bond movie franchise; its highest-grossing release in 1971 had been Diamonds Are Forever, and its second-highest was The Hospital. The studio saw sweeping potential in the independent film adaptation of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which it had recently acquired, and its executives were not afraid to get their hands dirty in support of more esoteric offerings: Picker and Krim had fought with the studio’s parent company, the Transamerica Corporation, to allow United Artists to release X-rated features such as Midnight Cowboy and Last Tango in Paris.

  A deal offered by United Artists for the Network screenplay in the fall of 1974 gave Chayefsky highly favorable terms, similar to those he would have received at Columbia: he would be paid $300,000 in total, receiving $100,000 for the finished script, $150,000 on commencement of principal photography, and a final deferred payment of $50,000. While United Artists retained final approval on the film’s budget, director, and principal cast, the studio gave a substantial 42.5 percent of any net profits from the picture to Chayefsky’s Simcha Productions.

  The studios nonetheless retained private reservations about what kind of movie Network would turn out to be. An internal MGM memo cited “an off-the-record speculation” from the manager of the Hollywood Code Office at the National Association of Broadcasters, expressing concern that Network’s depiction of the television industry raised “serious doubts about the property’s acceptability to U.S. networks for exhibition on television.” Also problematic in this regard was its use of words such as Chrissakes, fucking, shit, son of a bitch, and cocksmanship. And when Chayefsky delivered a finished draft of the screenplay in May 1975, Marcia Nasatir, the head of script development at United Artists, wrote in a memo that it was “very funny” and “very pertinent,” but she worried that it offered “no hero” and “no hope.” If The Hospital presented the portrait of “a committed man,” Nasatir wrote, Network “is all madness and bullshit philosophy. Accurate picture of TV and U.S.A. life but Chayefsky is too much of a do-gooding humanist to write a totally successful black comedy.”

  A few subsequent discussions about the project would soon discredit such a generous assessment of its creator. That spring, Mike Medavoy met with Chayefsky and Gottfried over lunch to talk about possible directors for Network and was surprised that they had enthusiastic designs on Sidney Lumet, the onetime wunderkind of television who was now the revered director of feature films such as Serpico and Murder on the Orient Express.

  As Medavoy recalled the conversation, “I turned to both of them and I said, ‘Are you serious? Sidney Lumet? To do a funny movie? When was the last funny movie you saw from Sidney Lumet?’” Reminding Chayefsky and Gottfried of the agonizing scene from Lumet’s movie The Pawnbroker in which Rod Steiger penetrates his own hand with a nail, Medavoy told them, “That ain’t funny.” At which point, Medavoy said, Chayefsky “took his matzo ball soup and it went, a little bit, flying. And I looked at Paddy and I said, ‘You know what? If you feel that strongly, he’s probably a really good director for this.’ And that ended the conversation and it was time to leave. It’s one of those moments that is indelible in my mind, because I can’t remember ever having anybody turn a plate of soup on me.”

  Chayefsky’s resentment of the studio personnel, whose interference
with Network, he felt, could only diminish the final product, grew, with one frustrating interaction after another. Summarizing a May 15 meeting with the United Artists executive Dan Rissner, Chayefsky recounted in a letter to his lawyer, Maurice Spanbock, some of the studio’s suggestions for revising the script, including:

  1. That Diana seduce Howard Beale for some not too clear reasons.

  2. That Howard Beale and Max turn up at the affiliate convention and kick up some kind of comic ruckus.

  3. That the characters of Althea and the Great Aga Khan [the domestic terrorists who would become Laureen Hobbs and the Great Ahmed Kahn] be merged into one character.

  “All these suggestions are so amateurish and counter-productive they are hardly worth commenting on,” Chayefsky wrote, “but I maintained my temper.”

  A few days later, Chayefsky and Gottfried were summoned to the studio’s offices in New York to see William Bernstein, the head of its business affairs department. The meeting began in a friendly manner, with Bernstein complimenting Chayefsky on the Network screenplay. There was, of course, a qualification coming.

  “He says, ‘Listen, guys, it’s a great script, but there’s something about it that bothers me,’” Gottfried recalled Bernstein saying. “This is what he opens our meeting about. So I said, ‘What about it bothers you?’ So he looks at us, particularly Paddy, and he says, ‘There’s something about Howard Beale that I don’t think works.’ So, Paddy looks him in the eye. He says, ‘Let me get this straight: There’s something about Howard Beale that bothers you?’ He said, ‘That’s it.’” Without speaking a single word more, Chayefsky stood up and exited the meeting, leaving Gottfried behind with Bernstein.