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

by Dave Itzkoff

  “I’m still there and I look at him,” Gottfried said. “I knew the guy well. I said, ‘You dumb son of a bitch.’ Paddy really was an easy guy, but it was coming from the wrong place.”

  When Gottfried completed his own solitary journey from the aborted meeting back to Chayefsky’s office, he found the author on the phone with Spanbock, asking that the United Artists deal for Network be dissolved.

  It was a bold but not totally self-destructive move on Chayefsky’s part. By this time, news of his volatile and exciting screenplay had reached other studios. Among them was Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which had once dominated the industry with a leonine might with epic films such as Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, and Ben-Hur, but which had not had much to roar about since 1960s-era hits such as The Dirty Dozen and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Under its head of production, Daniel Melnick, MGM in the 1970s released about five to ten films a year, finding modest success with Westworld, a science-fiction thriller, and That’s Entertainment, a feature-length compilation of vintage music and dance numbers celebrating the studio’s fiftieth anniversary. But awards and credibility had recently proved elusive.

  Melnick wanted to make Network, even if his corporate superiors did not. “They didn’t want to have anything to do with it,” he later recalled. “They were very scared, which was understandable. At that time MGM was working on a very reduced budget. To get their money back on a movie they had to sell the ancillary rights to television. And their network division said, ‘Forget this, it will never be shown on national TV.’” Warner Bros. was interested in Chayefsky’s screenplay as well, giving MGM the necessary encouragement to overcome its apprehension and pick up the project, if for no other reason than to keep it out of the hands of a competitor.

  For Chayefsky and Gottfried there was an additional incentive to choose MGM. At that time, the studio’s own distribution muscle was so atrophied that for significant releases it often sought support from United Artists. If United Artists joined in as a production partner now, it would be doing so in supplication, on Chayefsky and Gottfried’s terms. And Gottfried was certain that Arthur B. Krim, the studio’s chairman, would make the case to his colleagues that they did not want to lose out on the same movie twice. “I don’t know Arthur’s exact words,” Gottfried said later, “but he made it plain that UA would look like assholes.”

  On July 2, 1975, Variety reported that MGM and United Artists had made a deal to release Network as a coproduction. The announcement declared that the “television industry is the target” of the film, adding that “Few specifics are offered about Network but one is that it will be ‘a dramatic yet comedic view of the television medium.’” It would take more than a year for the movie to be made and released in theaters, at which time audiences could decide for themselves if that synopsis offered an adequate summary of what Chayefsky had wrought.

  3

  A GREAT DEAL OF BULLSHIT

  “This story is about Howard Beale.” The matter-of-fact observation was not only the first spoken phrase in Chayefsky’s screenplay for Network; it became a mission statement for the author and his producer, Howard Gottfried, as they began the brick-and-mortar work of making the movie. They had the support of two studios and a budget of about $4 million, and now they needed to find a director, hire actors, scout locations, and fill every post from cinematographer to editor to costume designer to key grip.

  But what they wanted most of all was an anchor. The actor playing Howard Beale would have to not only master large volumes of material and perform several intense monologues, but also substantially dictate the tone of the motion picture and establish a center of gravity around which its entire fictional world revolved. If they could have their way, they would cast this part first, and then move on to the remaining roles. But while cinema may be the art of bringing dreams to life, this particular fantasy would go unfulfilled.

  As Chayefsky and Gottfried negotiated their deal with MGM and United Artists, they held wide-ranging discussions with the studios about a suitable director for Network. One list of candidates compiled by Chayefsky noted nearly every working filmmaker of the day—not only his preferred candidate, Sidney Lumet, but also accomplished screen veterans such as Elia Kazan, John Huston, and George Roy Hill; members of the next generation’s New Establishment, including Francis Ford Coppola and Robert Altman; and foreign directors who had crossed over to the American marketplace, such as Roman Polanski and Marcel Ophüls. Another list seemed to emphasize Lumet, Bob Fosse, and Mike Nichols, whose personal telephone numbers were written next to their names, while adding Sydney Pollack and a relative newcomer named Martin Scorsese—whose name was sufficiently unfamiliar to Chayefsky that he misspelled it as “Scorcese.”

  One viable contender strongly opposed by Chayefsky was Hal Ashby, whose hit social satire Shampoo had opened in March 1975. In a draft of a letter that did not mention Ashby by name but whose subject was clear, Chayefsky wrote that the directing of Shampoo was “blunt and obvious,” made by a filmmaker who was weak “on scene and setting and shoots everything—even his crowd scenes—up tight on the actors throughout.” “He never pulls back and lets you see where the hell you are,” Chayefsky added. “With the exception of the beauty salon, which was blatant, none of the sets and locations had any comment or character in them.” Dispensing with any lingering uncertainty about whether he would let this person touch Network, Chayefsky wrote, “If you’re asking me if this director is the right one for a high-style film, filled with lengthy set-pieces and theatrical monologues, a film that is totally satiric and especially politically satiric … I’d have to say no I don’t think so.”

  The studios also made their preferences known. Before his relationship with Chayefsky could go completely sour, William Bernstein, the United Artists executive whose indelicate remarks about Howard Beale had sent the author storming out of his office, wrote to Chayefsky’s lawyer, Maurice Spanbock, suggesting “that any submissions be limited only to those directors whom we specifically discussed last week, i.e., Stanley Kubrick, Mike Nichols, Arthur Penn and Bob Fosse.”

  But in a letter to the actor Paul Newman dated May 21, Chayefsky wrote, “All other factors remaining constant, Sidney Lumet will probably direct this picture.” He continued: “As far as Sidney is concerned, you can have any part in this picture you want. From the selfish interest of the production, however, I’d like you to consider the part of Howard Beale. It’s the most difficult part to cast; you and a very small handful of other actors are the only ones I can think of with the range for this part. Anyway, please read this script and see if you have any interest in starring in it. Needless to say, I would consider it a privilege to have you star in anything I write.” He added his home and office numbers, but his entreaty to Newman was unsuccessful.

  Around this same time, Chayefsky and Gottfried had an audience with George C. Scott, the truculent star of The Hospital, who was preparing to play Willy Loman in a Broadway revival of Death of a Salesman that he was also directing. They delivered a copy of the Network screenplay to Scott in his dressing room at the Circle in the Square Theatre, hoping that he would be interested in playing Howard Beale.

  “We said, ‘Here it is. You name the part,’” Gottfried recalled. “Because at that point, we were just anxious to get him, and we’d figure out how to get him to play the role.” A few days later, Scott summoned the partners back to the theater.

  “He said in that voice of his, ‘Who’s playing Diana?’” Gottfried recounted. “And we said we haven’t cast it yet. And he says, ‘How about Trish?’”—the actress Trish Van Devere, Scott’s fourth wife, whom he had married in 1972, after his second divorce from Colleen Dewhurst.

  Van Devere had appeared in films such as Where’s Poppa? and One Is a Lonely Number, but neither Gottfried nor Chayefsky could envision her carrying the central female role in Network. “I spoke up,” Gottfried said, “because I didn’t want to put Paddy in any position. I said, ‘George, that’s impossible. I’m sur
e that the studio’s going to insist on a star.’ We had to give him some reason.” Nonetheless, said Gottfried, “He was devoted to her and wanted to get her a part. I said, ‘George, you know the business, it’s impossible, we can’t do this.’ And he said, ‘Then I’m not interested.’”

  In a letter dated June 8, Van Devere wrote directly to Chayefsky, praising him for having come a long way “from not one woman doctor in Hospital to the executive broad of all times heading your cast in Network!” She added, “George felt that role and I would be very good for one another—I seldom agree with George but in this case I tend to.”

  It took nearly two months for Chayefsky to respond to Van Devere; on July 31 he finally wrote to her, saying that his response had been slow because “I had nothing to tell you.” He went on to say that “the preliminary processes of casting have started; that is, a great deal of bullshit is going on between us and M.G.M. and United Artists. I will keep you informed on what’s happening.”

  In further handwritten lists, Chayefsky cycled through the many esteemed actors he could imagine playing his carefully crafted Network characters. For Beale, his mad prophet of the airwaves, he envisioned Jimmy Stewart, Henry Fonda, Gene Hackman, Sterling Hayden, or Robert Montgomery; Max Schumacher, too, could be played by Fonda or Hackman, or by William Holden; and Diana Christensen seemed ideal for Candice Bergen, Faye Dunaway, Ellen Burstyn, or Natalie Wood. On another sheet of his telltale yellow paper he ranked his top choices for the three principal roles. For Beale, they were: 1. Hackman, 2. Fonda, 3. Hayden, 4. Stewart; for Diana: 1. Dunaway, 2. Bergen, 3. Burstyn; and for Schumacher: 1. Lee Marvin, 2. Fonda, 3. Holden, with Burt Lancaster and Walter Matthau listed, unnumbered, in reserve.

  These standings were arrived at after much crossing out and many revisions, and with the use of several crisscrossing arrows that suggested last-minute changes of heart. For Chayefsky they represented personal tastes rather than the actual attainability of the actors, and he could not invest himself too deeply in these preferences. He had worked in show business long enough to know that for every available role and responsibility, a dozen or more options must be floated, and that no one ever gets his first choice. But some crucial pieces soon began to fall into place.

  * * *

  The life of Sidney Lumet had advanced on a track that was often parallel to Chayefsky’s, intersecting only occasionally. Born in Philadelphia in 1924 to Russian-Jewish parents, Lumet was raised in the tenements of Manhattan’s Lower East Side and in Astoria, Queens. As a teenager he attended New York’s Professional Children’s School while acting in Broadway plays written by Maxwell Anderson and William Saroyan, and filled his personal notebooks with precocious guidance such as: “I advise all the children who want to go on the stage to try first to find a profession where the hours are more regular and the pay is better. The theatre is no place for sissies or people who can’t take it.” With his inner fire came feistiness; as Lumet would later observe, “As a Jew, I’m very judgmental. As a street Jew, doubly so.”

  After serving in World War II, Lumet resumed acting and then focused on directing as the rapid expansion of television created new opportunities and mobility. Before he was thirty years old he was working seven-day weeks, splitting his time between two CBS programs: Danger, on which he shared directorial duties with Yul Brynner and which had been the venue for Chayefsky’s first produced teleplay; and You Are There, a weekly series of historical reenactments hosted by Walter Cronkite. A 1953 feature in Life magazine showed the spry, five-foot-five-and-a-half-inch bespectacled director clad in a dress shirt and a skinny tie as he threw himself, quite literally, into morning rehearsals for a You Are There episode about the Battle of the Alamo, demonstrating for a Texan defender how to fall over a wall and die; and inspecting a hug between Nina Foch and Stephen Elliott during afternoon scene work for Danger. “In this rat race I ought to be having a nervous breakdown every week,” Lumet said in an accompanying interview. “But I feel just great.”

  In 1957, two years after Chayefsky’s successful leap from television to motion pictures, Lumet made his film-directing debut on a feature adaptation of 12 Angry Men, Reginald Rose’s sweltering jury room drama, which had first been presented on the CBS anthology series Westinghouse Studio One in a live production directed by Franklin J. Schaffner. For the movie, which was budgeted at $350,000 and boasted a star-studded, cinema-ready cast led by its producer Henry Fonda, Lumet made the unusual if pragmatic decision to film its many speeches out of sequence and instead shoot juror by juror, chair by chair, as he worked his way around the deliberation table. In advance, he sketched out all the necessary camera angles and lines of sight and decided the amount of sweat that should appear on each actor as conditions grew increasingly heated.

  “I spent nights puzzling the problem and my script became a maze of diagrams,” Lumet explained at the time. “We had arguments on the set as people tried to explain to me that I was crazy. But the diagrams came out right 396 times in 397 scenes. One we had to reshoot because I had the stockbroker looking the wrong way as he spoke to another actor.” Released by United Artists, as Marty was, 12 Angry Men was a commercial disappointment but a critical success, earning Lumet an Academy Award nomination for best director and propelling him toward a full-time filmmaking career.

  As he graduated from romantic trifles such as Stage Struck and That Kind of Woman to more assured and ambitious features such as Long Day’s Journey into Night and The Pawnbroker, Lumet lived as passionately as he worked. The director made front-page news in the summer of 1963 when, the day after his second wife, Gloria Vanderbilt, got a quickie divorce from him in Juárez, Mexico, firefighters were dispatched to his Manhattan apartment to revive him from an apparent overdose of sleeping pills. (Lumet later joked that what he’d indulged in that day “was only seven vodkas, a Miltown and idiocy.”) That November he married Gail Jones, a journalist and author who was the daughter of Lena Horne, though the couple would spend another month publicly denying that they’d wed before finally admitting to their nuptials in December.

  In a lengthy Life magazine feature on the making of The Group, Lumet’s 1966 adaptation of the Mary McCarthy novel, Pauline Kael described the director as being “cheap, fast and reliable,” but also lacking in intellectual curiosity. Kael, who had been given extensive access to the production of the film, wrote that Lumet was “everybody’s second choice, the driving little guy who talked himself into jobs and then finished them before the producers even got to know him.”

  But by the mid-1970s, Lumet had solidified a cinematic reputation for his quintessential depictions of claustrophobic urban angst and New York City in all its grimy, garbage-strewn glory. As he would later explain, he had shunned Hollywood to avoid the intrusion of studio bureaucrats, and discovered that living and working in New York offered further benefits. “I found that I was getting something back,” Lumet said. “For example: I think I’m a better director because I saw Jerry Robbins’s ballet last night. Why leave that? The city is always changing and always remains the same, and that’s what I hope about myself.” In movies such as Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon he was also developing a less mannered and more naturalistic, vérité approach to filmmaking, which appealed to Chayefsky and Gottfried as they narrowed the field for a director for Network. So, too, did his experience in television—as well as a certain resentment he carried with him after leaving the medium. Lumet was fond of saying, “I never left television; it left me.”

  Yet despite Chayefsky’s interest and the many times Lumet was mentioned as the presumptive director of Network, a delay preceded his officially signing on. “It had a somewhat tortured beginning,” said Philip Rosenberg of the project. Lumet’s longtime production designer, Rosenberg would serve in that same capacity on Network. Though Lumet had mentioned the project to him several months before work began on it, Rosenberg said, “There were some very tense waiting periods for it to actually start up, and Sidney seemed to be quite nervous about something.
I wasn’t privy to what the difficulties were, but it was several weeks where Sidney was doing nothing but worrying and staying in his house and stripping the windows to pass the time while he was waiting for something to get settled.”

  Lumet may simply have been waiting for the resolution of financial matters or other points relating to his Network deal. (His production company, Amjen Entertainment, would ultimately receive 12.5 percent of the film’s net profits.) Or he may have been contemplating just how much autonomy he was willing to concede on the film, knowing that he would not have final approval over the finished cut of the movie and that his wishes would have to be subordinate to Chayefsky’s. “Paddy is a tough writer and creator,” Rosenberg said. “He feels justifiably possessive of the entire work. So for a director to work for him is—I don’t know if anybody else could have directed this picture without it becoming a debacle.”

  Other longtime colleagues said that Lumet was not overly concerned with final-cut approval. “Most of the directors who worked in New York basically did what they wanted,” said Alan Heim, who edited Network and numerous other Lumet features. “A good director—you make a good movie, nobody’s really going to meddle too much.”

  For all the qualities he shared with Chayefsky, Lumet began to pick up on differences in their attitudes and approaches to their work once he formally came on board Network that summer. Lumet was known for his on-set charm and spirit of camaraderie, but he said of Chayefsky, “His cynicism was partly a pose, but a healthy dose of paranoia was also in his character.” More precisely, Lumet described the writer as “litigious”: “His answer to conflicts very often was, ‘Can I sue?’”

  The arrival of Lumet meant that Chayefsky’s initial ideas for casting Network would have to be tempered with his director’s proposals, and the two men did not always see eye to eye. Recalling one brainstorming session with Chayefsky, Lumet said, “I suggested Vanessa Redgrave. He said he didn’t want her. I said, ‘She’s the best actress in the English-speaking world!’ He said, ‘She’s a PLO supporter.’ I said, ‘Paddy, that’s blacklisting!’ He said, ‘Not when a Jew does it to a Gentile.’” But they found common ground elsewhere, and with it the first major star of their film.