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

by Dave Itzkoff

  “If he only needed one shot for the scene, that was it, and he walked away,” said his camera operator Fred Schuler. “‘Cut, print, move on.’ That was his slogan. And when he said, ‘Cut,’ he was most of the time in my shot before I turned off the camera.”

  “We used to joke about it,” said Roizman. “We’d say he would wear out a pair of sneakers in the course of a shoot.”

  Watching Lumet reconnect with his roots while he directed scenes that were, in essence, live television broadcasts—snapping his fingers and pointing at cameras as he cued the performances of actors on screens within screens and instructed a console operator to switch from one shot to the next—could be dazzling to behold. “He was, like, in a frenzy,” said his camera operator Tom Priestley Jr. “‘Give me Camera A, give me Camera B, go back to Camera A.’ At the end of those two minutes, he was soaking wet.” Kay Chapin, in her diary, described Lumet as prowling “like a caged tiger; pacing, moving into everything, never rests.… When he runs out of directorial things to do he’ll tell the grips how to move the crane, wet down Finch, or schedule all the actors for the next day. He has incredible energy and knows everything.”

  His rapidity had other advantages: if you were a member of his crew, you worked a consistent day, with lunch at noon or 1:00 P.M. (during which the director usually took a nap), and finished at a civil hour, generally 5:00 or 6:00 P.M. Additionally, Roizman said, “He wasn’t a fusspot when it came to technical things. They didn’t have to be perfect. He preferred them, I think, when they weren’t perfect, and he liked things to be just a little off, here and there.”

  However, Lumet’s certainty of his choices could be a source of frustration to his collaborators. “He knew exactly what he wanted to do all the time,” said Roizman. “To a fault, I think, because very often on that film, there was no room for spontaneity. There was no improvisation. It was all planned ahead of time, and that bothered me. I always like to figure things out at the time, based on what I’m seeing in front of me. You just didn’t have that luxury with Sidney. He knew exactly what he wanted, and there was no wavering from that, and it’s too bad.”

  Lumet was more graceful in wielding his power than Chayefsky, whose mandate to be present during filming often left him out of place, underfoot, or otherwise in the way. Chayefsky’s primary concern, more than seeing to it that Network was filmed imaginatively, or competently, or quickly, or on budget, was ensuring that all its dialogue was performed exactly as he had written it in the script. When it was not, he could be counted on to point out to his actors exactly where and how they had gone astray, often using Chapin, the script supervisor, as his emissary to dispense the corrections.

  And in order to best observe the actors’ work, Chayefsky felt it was necessary to situate himself as close as he could to their performances. As Schuler recalled, “Paddy had this keen sense to always be in the front of the key light”—that is, the principal light used to illuminate the object of a camera—“because that’s where the person was best lit.” Eventually, he said, “it became a joke. ‘Where’s Paddy? Oh, look for the key light.’” Chayefsky’s small but bearish presence did not show up in the frame or affect the composition of shots, but it could interfere with the flow of communication (and people) in front of and behind the camera. So, said Schuler, an alternate arrangement was worked out: “At one point, they put a light up, a little soft light, and they called it the Paddy light. That’s where his place would be.”

  This configuration did not prevent Chayefsky from turning around and offering instantaneous feedback to the director, but Lumet said he welcomed the input. For example, in a scene preceding Howard Beale’s “Mad as hell” speech, in which the rain-soaked anchor arrives at the UBS studio and announces to a security guard, “I have to make my witness,” there was disagreement over how the guard was to deliver his one-line reply: “Sure thing, Mr. Beale.”

  “In my heavy-handed way,” Lumet said, “I told the guard to take in Peter Finch’s disheveled state, then humor him as he said the line. Paddy was at my ear in a second. ‘This is TV,’ he whispered. ‘He shouldn’t even notice him.’ He was right, of course. The line got the laugh it deserved. It wouldn’t have been funny delivered my way.”

  Finch was the focal point for nearly all two weeks of the Canadian shoot, and he was happy for the challenge and for the attention. Before Howard Beale came into his life, he had been thinking of his migration to Jamaica as decidedly one-way. “In his mind, he wanted to retire,” his daughter Diana Finch-Braley would later recall. “He was like, ‘I found what I wanted, I had a baby, I’m raising a family so I think I’m going to settle down.’”

  As had become his tradition when he traveled for his movies, Finch brought his wife, Eletha, and their young children, Christopher and Diana, with him on the road, and Eletha (with six-year-old Diana, whom he had nicknamed DiDinckles, in tow) became a familiar sight on the Network set. To some, Eletha’s presence called attention to the differences between her and her husband, while her absence brought out his weariness. “The physical transformation of Peter on the set was remarkable,” said production assistant Susan Landau. “He was Howard Beale. But slumped on a chair in the hotel lobby waiting for Eletha who was always late, he looked … well … he looked a lot older.”

  Others saw the role reinvigorating Finch, and offering him cause to wonder if there might be one more act left in a career he had been ready to accept as finished. He immersed himself in Beale’s words and found himself connecting with the character’s prophetic sense of conviction. “He was what you’d call a Method actor, without ever studying the Method,” Diana Finch-Braley said. “He was the kind of person who would get so into character that he didn’t know if it was real or not real.” He was spiritual but not religiously observant, with a worldview shaped by Christianity, Buddhism, Theosophy, and the kaleidoscope of belief systems he’d encountered on his journeys.

  But Finch believed that Howard Beale was doing something to his soul. One morning in their hotel room, he excitedly described to Eletha how, like his character, he, too, had been visited by a nebulous sacred presence. “I feel like I’ve had some kind of experience, I can’t explain it,” he told his wife. “Like Daniel and the burning bush.”

  Eletha, who had grown up in the church and studied her Bible more carefully, laughed and corrected her husband’s errors: it was Moses and the burning bush, Daniel in the lion’s den.

  The Toronto portion of the Network shoot would demand much of Finch’s body as well as his psyche. On the first day of filming, he was responsible for performing two of the character’s most challenging orations, including four videotaped takes of the “Mad as hell” speech, only three of which he was able to complete in their two-and-a-half-minute entirety. (According to the official shooting log, Take 3 was halted at the one-minute mark for an unspecified reason.) January 20, the second day of shooting, called for Finch to deliver Beale’s “Bullshit” speech—his on-air proclamation, during what is supposed to be his valedictory news broadcast, that he “just ran out of bullshit.” January 21 saw the filming of Beale’s introductory outburst, in which he tells his audience that he has been fired and plans to kill himself on next week’s show. On January 22, it was back to “Mad as hell”—not the videotaped feed that would show up fleetingly on TV screens in the living rooms and offices of other characters, but the filmed version that was his to carry alone.

  The completed “Mad as hell” sequence—from the moment the drenched and bewildered Beale, seated at his anchor’s desk and wearing a trench coat over his pajamas, begins to address the camera (“I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It’s a depression”) to the moment Max Schumacher’s daughter, Caroline, looks out a window of her family’s living room to hear all of New York City shouting its cacophonous chorus of anger and despair—contains thirty edits: nine different reaction shots of Diana growing in her elation, racing out of the control room and into an office to discover t
hat they are also shouting in Atlanta and Baton Rouge; three of Harry Hunter feeding broadcast data to Diana and instructing his director to keep his cameras on Beale; one of the director repeating Hunter’s orders; and various shots of the speech (as previously recorded on videotape) playing on the Schumachers’ home television while Max watches with his family in dismay.

  The rest of the scene, when it is not being covered or elongated by these cuts, is a seemingly continuous take from a crane-operated camera, pointed from above at Beale (“Everybody’s out of work, or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel’s worth, banks are going bust”), then slowly zooming and pushing in on the increasingly agitated broadcaster (“We sit watching our teevees while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be”), lowering its aim until it is almost even with his livid face and condemning blue eyes (“All I know is that first you’ve got to get mad. You’ve got to say, ‘I’m a human being, goddammit. My life has value’”). Then it follows Beale around the studio as he emerges from behind his desk, past a startled stagehand and his floor director, to implore his viewers that they must get as upset as he is: “I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it and stick your head out and yell: I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!”

  Chayefsky may have been a stickler for the written word, but he was not able to prevent Finch from inserting an extra as into Beale’s repeated expression of maximum frustration (the screenplay simply read “I’m mad as hell”). No changes were possible to Shot F of Scene 99, as the master shot of the “Mad as hell” speech was delineated in the official filming record of Network, because Lumet attempted it only twice, and Finch completed it only once.

  Lumet had anticipated that the scene would be difficult for Finch, and he prepared by having an additional camera on set, already loaded with film and ready to go so that a second attempt at the speech could be filmed as soon as the first one was finished. (“No reloading,” the director explained. “No time lost between takes.”) But on Take 2, Finch halted himself one minute and ten seconds into his delivery, just as Beale was proclaiming that he didn’t want his audience members writing to their congressmen “because I wouldn’t know what to tell you to write.”

  “Between the length of the speech and the amount of emotion it took, he just ran out of gas,” Lumet said. “He stopped halfway through. He said, ‘Sidney, I can’t do any more.’” That was as much as the director was willing to ask of Finch, whose portion of the scene was assembled from the first half of Take 2 and the second half of Take 1.

  * * *

  Beginning on Friday, January 23, and for the week that followed, the production moved to the CFTO-TV soundstage that housed the new, Savonarola-style UBS Network News Hour. The set was built upon giant turntables that Lumet chose to have rotated by stagehands who would be seen on-screen—partly to let the audience in on the illusion of television, and partly because a winch to spin the stage mechanically was not available—and it was decorated with what appeared to be a stained-glass window but was in fact a painted piece of canvas that production designer Philip Rosenberg had sprayed with gelatin and carried underneath his arm on his plane ride to Canada.

  One morning during the week of January 26, a reporter for the Toronto Sun found Chayefsky in the CFTO-TV cafeteria. The screenwriter was poorly rested, having been awoken at 5:00 A.M. by his anxieties after a night of fitful sleep, and not much calmer as he tore into a plate of scrambled eggs and toast. When Kay Chapin, the script supervisor, sat next to him, he noticed her toasted cheese and tomato sandwich.

  “That looks better than what I’ve got,” Chayefsky said with ostensible purpose.

  “Want me to get you one?” Chapin offered.

  “No,” he replied.

  “I’ll get you one,” she said. “It’ll only take a minute.”

  “No,” he said, “I’ve got to go now anyway.”

  “Take mine,” she said. “I’ll get another.”

  “No,” he said, abandoning his breakfast altogether. “I’m not hungry. I didn’t sleep last night. Not at all.”

  On the Network set, Finch was running through the last substantial speech he would perform as Howard Beale, after the character’s philosophy is corrupted by his pro-corporate lecture from Arthur Jensen (“The time has come to say, is dehumanization such a bad word?”). A studio audience of hundreds of extras watched him pace the stage while Lumet observed, from on high, in a control room suspended two stories above the scene.

  The director’s voice rang out from a studio loudspeaker: “Peter, would it be convenient for you to start from ‘The world is mass-producing people the way we mass-produce our food’?”

  Finch silently waved to the booth and performed the scene again. “Is that what you wanted, Sidney?”

  The disembodied voice answered, “Peter my dear, we’re just waiting for the playback. Just relax.”

  A fidgety Chayefsky had also been watching the retake from down below and was stewing, not so quietly, over one of Lumet’s directorial choices. “There’s a gag line in this speech that Sidney loves,” he said, “and I’m afraid he loves it too much. It should be murmured, mumbled almost—not spoken. It’s a throwaway line, see, and it’s only funny when it’s done that way.” When the Toronto Sun reporter asked him what precisely Network was about, Chayefsky was evasive, except to say that “it’s all fabricated, all fiction. And it’s all true.”

  Once the journalist left the studio, conditions were clear to film the climactic sequence that Chayefsky and Gottfried were determined that the media not learn about in advance: Beale’s assassination by the Ecumenical Liberation Army.

  Arthur Burghardt, who played the militant group’s leader, the Great Ahmed Kahn, was one of two actors in the studio audience directed to rise up on cue and pretend to shoot Beale dead with prop machine guns loaded with blanks. One impediment to his successful completion of the task, Burghardt later recalled, was the gun itself. “The blanks were spewing out cotton,” he said. “Some of that was on fire, and I was afraid that I would hit somebody with that. We got people to move aside a little bit, so that no one’s hair would be caught on fire.”

  The other obstacle was Burghardt’s realization that, as usual, Eletha and Diana Finch were on set, and he hurried to tell Peter about the oversight. “He was about ready to get killed,” Burghardt said. “And I told him, ‘Peter, you know Eletha’s up there and the baby’s up there.’” Once informed, Finch was just as determined to make sure his wife and daughter did not see him violently murdered: “She’s what? Eletha! Eletha! Take her out! No, no, no, no, you can’t see this!”

  Then the Great Ahmed Kahn pulled his trigger, and Howard Beale became “the first known instance of a man being killed because he had lousy ratings.” “Everybody in the place—everybody in the studio, everybody in the cast, everybody in the crew—that evening was very sad,” said Burghardt. “There was a sadness. As they dollied up to look at his wounds and to fade to black, we were just all dumbfounded. I was. I went and drank myself to sleep that night. I didn’t think that the American people would understand what we were really saying.”

  * * *

  At the start of February, Network resumed production in New York. Despite the many hours of effort expended and reels of film recorded in Toronto, it was not certain that all the members of its cast would continue on this itinerary. Nearly every actor, at some point or another, had choked on a mouthful of Chayefsky’s magniloquent, pleonastic dialogue, but Dunaway seemed to be struggling with it more than most.

  “If you look at the movie closely, you’ll see that Faye fumbles a few places,” said its editor, Alan Heim. “Those were hard speeches. But she worked. I mean, she worked.”

  Her dedication was almost not quite enough to satisfy Lumet, who began to consider firing her from the movie.

  “A
t one point,” said Heim, “Sidney came to me, early on in the shooting in New York, by the time we got there, and said he was thinking of replacing Faye. And I said, ‘Why would you do that? She’s so good.’ And he said, ‘Well, she’s having trouble with the words.’ I said, ‘Who would you replace her with at this point?’”

  Lumet named a specific actress, though Heim declined to say whom the director had in mind.

  Heim, who had started to review the raw footage from the Toronto shoot, defended Dunaway: “I said, ‘No, no, you can’t do that—the energy that this woman is bringing to the part.’ Sidney agreed with me on that. And the next thing I knew, she was not replaced.” Almost immediately, Dunaway would make her allies regret this show of support.

  Though the rehearsals for Network appeared to have gone smoothly for her, she was growing uneasy about a sequence with William Holden in which Diana enumerates to Schumacher the details of a federal investigation facing The Mao Tse Tung Hour (“Hackett told the FBI to fuck off. We’re standing on the First Amendment, freedom of the press, and the right to protect our sources”) and how she plans to use media coverage to the show’s benefit (“I said, ‘Walter, let the government sue us! We’ll take them to the Supreme Court! We’ll be front page for months!’”).

  Also, while Diana is providing this continuous one-way commentary, she and Max are enjoying a candlelit dinner at an Italian restaurant; undressing each other in a Long Island motel room; engaging in sexual foreplay; and, as Chayefsky’s stage directions describe the scene, “groping, grasping, gasping and fondling” each other into “a fever of sexual hunger,” until “Diana mounts Max” and “the screen is filled with the voluptuous writhings of love” as “Diana cries out with increasing exultancy.” Then, finally: “She screams in consummation, sighs a long, deliciously shuddering sigh, and sinks softly down into Max’s embrace. For a moment, she rests her head on Max’s chest, eyes closed in feline contentment.”