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

by Dave Itzkoff

  Kathy Cronkite, a young actress who had appeared in the Billy Jack action movies, may not have auditioned at all for the role of Mary Ann Gifford, a Patty Hearst–like heiress who falls in with the radical group. The fact that she was the daughter of Walter Cronkite, the CBS news anchor and former host of Lumet’s You Are There series, may have assisted in this regard. “You have to wonder how much of that was Sidney’s and Dad’s old friendship, and throwing his daughter a bone,” she later said. She had no reason to believe, however, that she was being cast specifically because of who her father was, or for the ironic purpose of having a Cronkite family member in a movie that satirized the television news business. “Nobody’s going to risk a multimillion-dollar movie just because someone has a name that they like,” she said. “And maybe that’s naïve, but it’s what puts me to sleep at night.”

  * * *

  While its cast was being decided, the crew hired for Network was an intermingling of recruits brought in by Gottfried and by Lumet. The director chose his trusted editor Alan Heim, with whom he’d worked since The Pawnbroker, and his production designer Philip Rosenberg, who had already put in some pro bono hours on Network while a budget was hammered out. “I worked on nearly all the preproduction period without a deal,” Rosenberg said. “The expense of my fee is absolutely inconsequential to the making of a movie, and still the negotiation took until the week before we were ready to start principal photography. I worked on the picture anyway because I knew ultimately it would get together.”

  Owen Roizman, the director of photography who used his training from commercials to give New York City a tactile and claustrophobic presence in films such as The French Connection and The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (and who had similarly given Georgetown its haunting Gothic look in The Exorcist), was selected by Gottfried. Of his two cameramen, Roizman hired one, Tom Priestley Jr., who had worked with him on The French Connection and The Exorcist, while Lumet hired the other, Fred Schuler, whom he’d come to trust on Dog Day Afternoon.

  Despite the ad hoc assembly of this team, its membership shared the desire and the know-how to film outside of soundstages in practical, authentic settings. As Priestley recalled, “When I started in the business in 1961, basically the cinematographers were, for the most part, World War II vets. And it was a more burly, adventurous group that was accustomed to hard drinking and living and all those things.” But newer, lighter-weight technology was providing camera crews the ability to venture more easily into the outside world, and audiences were increasingly expecting to see authentic locations on their screens.

  “Television was demanding and the people were becoming more educated,” Priestley said. “The public didn’t want to see the old Bob Hope and Bing Crosby Road to Morocco kind of movies. They were all shot on a back lot, against a painted scenic piece or a backdrop. They wanted to see the real locations.”

  At the end of 1975, with rehearsals and filming for Network set to start in January of the new year, everything appeared to be in order. Only one small complication had arisen: Daniel Melnick, the MGM executive, was unexpectedly sent an invoice totaling $970.64 for a wig that Faye Dunaway had purchased for herself, in preparation for Network, and which she billed to the studio. Melnick, in turn, forwarded this expense to Gottfried, and with it the delicate diplomatic responsibility of explaining to Dunaway’s agents why he would not be paying the charge—first in a phone call and then in this carefully worded letter dated December 4:

  To reiterate the substance of our phone conversation, I urge you not to interpret the return of this bill as any lack of confidence on our part in Ms. Dunaway’s instinct as to what is right for her, nor as any lack of desire whatsoever, to accommodate her. The fact is however, that nobody from our production has had an opportunity to discuss the use of a wig for “NETWORK” with Ms. Dunaway or for that matter, any manner of her wardrobe, hair or makeup. On this basis alone my acceptance at this time, and or payment of the bill would be premature. Far more important however, is my belief that it would be destructive and an affront to the other creative people engaged for “NETWORK” for such a decision to be presented to them, without prior consultation, as a fait accompli.

  Gottfried added: “We are anxious for Ms. Dunaway to be comfortable and look her best at all times.” That, he thought, should put the matter to rest.

  4

  THE DAILY PARADE OF LUNACIES

  If the inhabitants of New York wanted to see a city in decline and on the verge of collapse at the dawn of 1976, they didn’t have to go to the movies or turn on their television sets; all they had to do was stick their heads out their windows. Monday, January 5, found the city in the throes of multiple competing manias. A Christmastime bombing at LaGuardia Airport in Queens had killed eleven people and injured seventy-five more, and remained unsolved, and fires raged in South Brooklyn, where a series of fuel-oil tanks had exploded. An austerity drive imposed upon the financially struggling metropolis, two months after it teetered on the brink of default, had stripped its streets of more than 4,200 police officers, and a newly proposed budget sought to cut nearly 1,000 more. Meanwhile, on the Upper West Side, Zabar’s had sold out its supply of a new home appliance called the Cuisinart—two hundred such devices and their gleaming, whirring blades at the discounted price of $135 each—in two days.

  It was against this backdrop that the cast members and key personnel of Network gathered at the Hotel Diplomat in Times Square to begin two weeks of rehearsals for the movie. Paddy Chayefsky, Sidney Lumet, and Faye Dunaway each arrived from their Manhattan apartments, and William Holden and Peter Finch from their rooms at the Pierre hotel, to assemble at the sixty-five-year-old Diplomat, a single-room-occupancy hotel on West Forty-Third Street that had previously served as an Elks lodge but was now better known as the home of the Le Jardin disco and as the site, in 1973, of the notorious cocaine bust that drove the radical agitator Abbie Hoffman into hiding. The ensemble had hoped to use the hotel’s ballroom for their inaugural read-through of the script, but they found the hall unheated and had to flee to a nearby room to begin their work.

  For some members of the Network crew, the most anticipated meeting of the day was the introduction of Holden and Finch, its one-time marquee idols, who had never previously worked together. Susan Landau, a production assistant, later observed, “Bill and Peter took to each other instantly. I have never seen such love and recognition like that between two people; such mutual respect. Both men had been there and back in their lives, you might say, and both had been away from films for a long time. They shared so much together. Anger, and respect for acting, and pride in acting.”

  The more crucial dynamic, however, was the one emerging between Lumet, who as the director would customarily have the final say on all decisions, and Chayefsky, who held this authority by contract. The very presence of the screenwriter at this stage of a film’s creation was highly unorthodox; Chayefsky knew this, and therefore demanded the access. He expected total control over events, and he expected things to go wrong. “I’m a pain in the ass and I know it,” he said after the film was completed. “I’m a worrier. I’m used to panic and hysteria in a production. It’s always there.”

  Lumet rallied his team on day one with his enthusiasm and an early instructional speech to the actors to keep their performances simple: they should emanate from “pure behavior” but should not be quite as naturalistic as his previous motion picture, Dog Day Afternoon, because the language of Chayefsky’s script was not naturalistic. After day two of rehearsals, the film’s script supervisor, Kay Chapin, recorded in her diary what she thought was the formation of a natural give-and-take relationship between writer and director. “Sidney knows specifically what he wants and is very adept at communicating his intentions to actors,” Chapin wrote. “Paddy almost always agrees but if he doesn’t he’s specific about his objections.… It looks like it’s a perfect combination all around: a terrific script; a director that totally understands the material; a writer who kn
ows that he understands it and actors that are perfectly cast and adore the script and director.… It’s the first time I’ve experienced this kind of intermeshing—a rare experience.”

  The company spent the next few days in the ballroom (where the heat had been restored), blocking out the physical action of their scenes in taped-off sections meant to represent the various locations of the movie: the UBS television studio and control room; the newsroom and offices; and the apartments of Diana Christensen and Max Schumacher. Lumet came armed with a notebook full of his hand-drawn diagrams for where he expected to place his cameras and how he expected each sequence to unfold, and he played all the parts not already assigned to his principal cast. His choreographed system left little to chance, yet it seemed to open the door to flexibility: if he came to a scene and could not remember his intended blocking, he told his actors, then it must have been bad.

  While Dunaway immersed herself in her heavily annotated copy of the script, and Chayefsky laid out for the actors the intricate hierarchies of UBS and CCA, and where they were situated within them, Lumet seemed to keep a certain distance from his performers. As he privately told his crew, he had given up his own acting career because he realized that an actor has to reveal himself, and he didn’t want to do that; nor did he want to get into the personal problems of anyone else in the cast.

  In fact, Lumet was observing his players carefully. In particular, he identified an “emotional reticence” in Holden—something he noticed during Holden and Dunaway’s rehearsal of Schumacher’s “male menopause” speech, where Diana is distracted by telephone calls and the declining fortunes of The Howard Beale Show, while he is pleading for her to love him, “primal doubts and all.” Lumet saw the scene as Schumacher’s confession that he and Diana “came from very different worlds, that he was achingly vulnerable to her and therefore needed her help and support.” But when Holden performed the scene with Dunaway, “he looked everywhere but directly into her eyes. He looked at her eyebrows, her hair, her lips, but not her eyes.” For the time being, Lumet said, “I didn’t say anything.”

  On Saturday, January 10, it was time for a field trip. At dawn, Lumet and his crew embarked for suburban Nyack, New York, about thirty miles north of the city, to produce the very first footage for Network: the black-and-white amateur film of a bank robbery conducted by the kidnapped heiress turned leftist radical Mary Ann Gifford, which would become the kernel of Diana’s pitch for a new reality-based TV series called The Mao Tse Tung Hour. Outside a Main Street bank, Lumet staged the scene in about twenty minutes, stationing his camera behind a large rubber tree that partially obscured the action. Shooting began at 9:35 A.M., as Kathy Cronkite and Arthur Burghardt burst into the building wielding prop weapons and shouting swear words and slogans that would go unheard on the silent reel.

  Cronkite, a relative newcomer to film acting and not much bigger than the gun she was firing, remembered being startled by the power of her firearm. “I shot it,” she said, “and it scared the hell out of me. I did not expect it to be as big and as loud and have as much of a recoil—even though it was a fake. I just went, ‘Uhhhhhh.’ And then I thought, ‘Man, I really screwed that up.’ And they went, ‘Oh, that was great!’ I kept some of those little fake plastic bullet things.” Lumet filmed a few more takes and wrapped for the day at 10:00 A.M.

  The second week of rehearsals resumed at the Hotel Diplomat the following Tuesday, and the final rehearsal day, Friday, January 16, focused partly on Beatrice Straight and her wrenching confrontation with Holden, in which Louise Schumacher sorrowfully interrogates her husband about his “great winter romance.” “She gave a printable performance,” Kay Chapin observed, “tears and all, a marvelous actress.” But Chapin also noticed a brewing disagreement between Chayefsky and Lumet over the work of Roberts Blossom, the gaunt and goggle-eyed character actor playing the thunderous CCA executive Arthur Jensen. Where the screenplay seemed to call for a confident pitchman who could sway Howard Beale to his doctrine of an “interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars,” Chapin noted that the author and his director “don’t seem to be in perfect agreement on that role”:

  Paddy wants it less theatrical, more like a Rotarian, Mr. Congenial, whereas Sidney appears to like Blossom’s performance that is very theatrical. Sidney toned him down a bit, otherwise it would be like two maniacs together which throws the intent of the speech out the window. Blossom came back later with a rework of the speech and everyone seemed to like it.

  Before the company was dismissed, Finch regaled some listeners with a story from his early days in the London theater. While playing a scene with Dame Edith Evans, Finch said he found himself overcome by a cough and unable to speak; his clever costar created a distraction with a coffee cup, got the audience to laugh, and underneath the murmur said to him, sotto voce, “All right, love: have a good cough now.” The tale was hopefully some consolation to Roberts Blossom, who, unknown to most of the staff, was about to be quietly let go from the cast.

  * * *

  “With Sidney, you never traveled very far away from New York City,” said Lumet’s production designer, Philip Rosenberg. But in the case of Network, the director found it necessary to cross international borders to produce the portions of the film that were set within a working television studio and that depicted the oracular on-camera speechifying of Howard Beale. Prior to shooting, Lumet had arranged for Rosenberg to receive a tour of CBS operations in New York from his friend Walter Cronkite and to get a crash course in television news production. But it was instead decided that the television sequences would be filmed at the CFTO-TV facility in Toronto, for several reasons. In New York, it was simply not practical or affordable to build a working replica of a television control room and studio, and the existing spaces offered to the production did not allow for the needed interplay between the control room and the stage. Union rules, which would have required the paid presence of members from both the television and motion picture guilds during studio filming, created further financial complications.

  There was also a growing sense among the Network crew that the American television industry wanted nothing to do with the movie and would make no effort to assist in its creation. “Because of the volatile nature of the screenplay, we couldn’t get cooperation from any of the networks,” said Owen Roizman, the film’s director of photography. “We couldn’t get anything in New York; nobody would cooperate. They didn’t want that coming out, even if it was true. Especially because it was true.”

  Rather than risk any further estrangement, MGM and United Artists executives stated in a January 9 memo that Chayefsky and Gottfried had “placed an embargo on the showing of NETWORK scripts to all media contacts—whether they be visiting the set for interview purposes or requesting it for background/information on the picture. In addition, under no circumstances are we to reveal the ending of the picture in any publicity material, or in discussions with the media.” The benign explanation provided in the memo was that “we all strongly feel that to do so would dissipate the element of surprise which Chayefsky strived so hard to achieve.”

  The Toronto studio offered several benefits, including an ample soundstage that would provide the setting for the expanded UBS Network News Hour, its live audience, and cohosts such as Miss Mata Hari and Sybil the Soothsayer. Less conveniently, the upper portion of a spiral staircase visible in its TV control room required that its lower portion be replicated on the Network newsroom set—which was being built in New York—to avoid continuity errors. “It took a lot of work for the script girl and Sidney to remember when they were in Canada and when they were in New York,” Rosenberg said.

  All Network talent and personnel were put up at the Hotel Toronto on University Avenue, where a little intermingling between nobility and commoners was not out of the question. On the evening of January 18, the night before filming began, Roizman headed down to the hotel restaurant, expecting to eat by himself.

  “It was pr
etty empty,” he recalled. “I was one of the only ones there. And I sat down and put my order in. And just then, Paddy and Bill Holden came walking by. And they said, ‘Who are you eating with?’ I said, ‘Nobody. I’m alone.’ They said, ‘No, you’re not. Come on, you’re going to sit with us.’ And I said, ‘That’s okay. You don’t have to do that.’ And they said, ‘No, we want to,’ and they picked up my place settings and took it to their table and said, ‘You’re eating with us.’”

  “Two big icons,” Roizman said, “and they treated me like royalty.”

  * * *

  Principal photography for Network began on Monday, January 19, with a call time of 7:30 A.M. and cameras rolling at 9:45 on the first take of its first scene: executive producer Harry Hunter on the phone in the UBS News control room, assuring an unseen Max Schumacher that he believes Howard Beale is fine. The day’s aggressive schedule called for portions of six different scenes to be produced, but only two, depicting Harry Hunter and Diana Christensen in the control room, were shot on film. The remainder, recorded on videotape, were two sequences involving Beale’s fill-in anchor, Jack Snowden, played by Stanley Grover, and two that focused on Beale himself: a monologue known as “Last night I was awakened,” in which he describes a revelatory conversation with “a shrill, sibilant, faceless voice,” and the speech he would be seen delivering on the television sets and studio monitors in Scene 99, which was simply called “Mad as hell.”

  Lumet, in preproduction conversations with Roizman, had determined that he wanted the visual look of Network to proceed in three distinct phases. “The first phase,” said Roizman, “should be ‘naturalistic,’ the second ‘realistic,’ and the third ‘commercial.’” (As Lumet himself put it, “The movie was about corruption. So we corrupted the camera.”) And as in rehearsals, the director arrived for each day of filming with a notebook in which, for every scene, he had already determined where his cameras would be placed and how his actors would move in front of them. Within his industry, Lumet was legendary for his speed and had a fairly earned reputation for shooting as few takes as he felt were necessary before moving on to the next camera angle or the next scene.