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

by Dave Itzkoff

  Dunaway would later say that her fundamental concern with the sequence was not its explicit sexuality, but the vigorous rush of verbiage it required her to deliver. “There is not a second of it when the dialogue stops,” she said. “The speed of it parallels the rhythm of their lovemaking.” Compared to the nearly silent scene she shared with Steve McQueen in The Thomas Crown Affair, where their characters seduce each other with gestures (and the provocative fondling of some chess pieces), the motel rendezvous in Network is driven almost entirely by her dialogue. “I could not afford to stumble on a single word; it would have killed the momentum of the scene,” Dunaway said. “It was the exact opposite of ‘sex as chess,’ five minutes of quiet seduction.”

  But this was not how Dunaway presented her apprehensions to Lumet and Gottfried. As the New York shoot commenced, starting with a few uncomplicated moments in the Beale and Schumacher apartments, Gottfried recalled, “She says to Sidney, ‘I’m not going to do that scene. I don’t have to do it.’”

  Dunaway was right in this respect: according to long-standing rules of the Screen Actors Guild, the participation of a performer in a nude scene required her agreement with the scene and her written consent. She could not be forced to appear naked on-screen. Furthermore, Dunaway was uncomfortable with the idea of acting out an orgasm, as the scene required. (She would also later say that it was Holden, not she, who “came very close to not doing the love scene”: “There were long talks about it. He had a strongly held belief that making love was a private thing that should not be exposed by film.”)

  The Network creative team was thoroughly baffled, as much by Dunaway’s refusal as by her sudden display of modesty: she had, after all, been seen wearing just as little or less in films such as Bonnie and Clyde and Chinatown. Lumet had tried to make the case to her that the nudity in the scene was not prurient or gratuitous, but necessary to convey its reality, and would be handled in a tasteful way. Where he failed, Chayefsky attempted to convince Dunaway that the sequence was comedic; it was funny—after all, he had written it—and it was necessary to establish Diana as a woman who derives her pleasure primarily from her professional success. (At the recommendation of MGM executive Daniel Melnick, Chayefsky had already deleted a scene in which Diana, on a visit to Los Angeles, surreptitiously slips into a gay bar and hires a bisexual “stud hustler” to service her in her hotel room. That sequence would have culminated in another sex act and, for Diana, “an unhappy climax”: “tears are streaming down her cheeks. She cries a short little GRUNT of consummation, sighs deeply, closes her eyes.” In his notes to Chayefsky, Melnick described it tersely but accurately as a “tough scene.”)

  Even so, Gottfried said, “She wouldn’t budge.” He, too, made a visit to Dunaway in her Network trailer, where he planned to reiterate the arguments that Lumet and Chayefsky had already laid out. Only this time, Gottfried said, “Her lawyer was there. And he said, ‘Look, she doesn’t want to do it.’”

  Presented with this startling ultimatum, Gottfried and his partners were forced to consider two equally unappealing courses of action: they could cut the motel sequence or they could cut Dunaway. “There’s no sense in kidding yourself,” Gottfried said. “We had already shot ten days of the movie, and that costs money, and she was in a lot of it. To threaten to fire her—which we were going to do; we were not going to put up with that—could be quite foolhardy. You could say, ‘Look, I’m firing you,’ and the studio’s saying, ‘Bullshit, you’re firing her—to hell with the scene.’”

  The only person left who might be able to talk Dunaway down from the ledge was her agent, Sue Mengers. And the only way Mengers would appreciate the gravity of the situation, Gottfried believed, was if she felt there was a genuine possibility that Dunaway would be dropped from the film if she did not perform the scene. “Sure, it’s a threat,” Gottfried said. “If you knew Paddy, that scene was going to be in the movie. Believe me, this was not a bluff.” Girding himself for battle, Gottfried first spoke with Frank E. Rosenfelt, the MGM president and chief executive, and received his blessing to tell Mengers that Dunaway’s role was on the line. (“If Sue calls you,” Gottfried told Rosenfelt, “back me up on it and say that the studio will go along with that. I was not going to call Sue Mengers and give her a line of crap.”) Then, if circumstances required, Gottfried said he also had the studio’s permission to fire Dunaway.

  By the end of the day, Gottfried’s message to Mengers and her subsequent discussion with Dunaway had defused the standoff and restored order to the Network set. The truce was codified in a February 2 letter from Gottfried to Dunaway.

  Dear Faye Dunaway:

  Sidney Lumet has informed me that you and he have thoroughly discussed the scenes between Diana and Max during which Diana and Max make love, and Diana has a sexual climax. He also tells me the scenes were rehearsed during the rehearsal period and you all agreed and consented to the way in which they were to be performed. Although Diana will have a sexual climax in the scene, the film will not show complete nudity and, in fact, there will be no exposure of the unclothed female breast below and including the nipple, or of any sexual organs, or their pubic area.

  Your signature at the end of this note, where instructed, will signify your concurrence with its contents.

  Very truly yours, Howard Gottfried

  Dunaway signed the letter as directed, formally acknowledging that she would perform the love scene. Then, beneath her signature, she added a further statement in sharp capital lettering: “IT IS MY UNDERSTANDING THAT PRIOR TO PHOTOGRAPHY SIDNEY LUMET WILL CONSULT WITH ME CONCERNING CAMERA ANGLES AND HE WILL GIVE REASONABLE CONSIDERATION TO MY VIEWPOINTS.”

  * * *

  By comparison, an emotional face-off between Max and Louise Schumacher was completed with relative ease, epitomizing Lumet’s brisk directorial pace on a typical day of filming Network. The scene in which Max candidly tells his wife he has been seeing Diana for nearly a month and cannot be sure when his infatuation with her will end, and Louise orders him to move out, ruefully warning him that he’s “in for some dreadful grief,” was shot in a single day, on Wednesday, February 4, at Apartment 9F of the Apthorp building at 390 West End Avenue.

  Scene 127, as it is called in the Network shooting script—Max and Louise argue as they move throughout the apartment, their feelings of love and scorn, and their positions of dominance and subjugation, fluctuating on a moment-to-moment basis—consists of a master shot, filmed in a continuous take, which was performed twice, and twelve coverage shots, filmed from various angles, most of which were performed about two to three times each. The exception is Shot 127E, which required a staggering nine takes, more than Lumet would allow for any other shot in the movie. The portion in question runs about thirty seconds and follows Louise as she crosses from the kitchen to the foyer, the foyer to the living room, and then back to the foyer, while delivering the “great winter passion” portion of her exchange, in which she rebukes Max while “striding around, weeping, like a caged lioness.”

  This isn’t just some convention weekend with your secretary, is it? Or some broad you picked up after three belts of booze. This is your great winter romance, isn’t it? Your last roar of passion before you sink into your emeritus years? Is that what’s left for me? Is that my share? She gets the great winter passion, and I get the dotage?

  The sheer copiousness of Chayefsky’s dialogue may have resulted in a take count that very nearly reached double digits, or the unnatural alliteration in these lines (“broad … belts … booze”) may have been Straight’s undoing. But whatever on-the-spot suggestions the screenwriter may have had for improving the scene, Lumet was not interested in hearing them. At one point, the director said, “Paddy started toward me with a comment.” Lumet, who was then at the tail end of his third marriage, halted Chayefsky: “I held up my hand and said, ‘Paddy, please. I know more about divorce than you do.’”

  Shot 127E had not yet finished stirring up all the trouble it would cause. That eveni
ng, as the editor, Alan Heim, was reviewing the footage shot earlier in the day, a curious line reading by Straight stuck in his ear. In every take of the scene, he heard her ask Holden about his “e-meh-REE-tus years.”

  “The word, of course, is emeritus,” Heim said, using the correct pronunciation. “And the first thing I did was look it up, because I used to keep a dictionary in my cutting room, just for occasions like this.” Heim was astounded that Chayefsky, so widely read and keenly attentive, could have missed the mistake: “I sort of blinked and I said to myself, ‘It’s emeritus.’ And I went and looked it up, and the only pronunciation for it is emeritus. So at dailies that evening, I said, ‘Paddy, do you know that’s the wrong pronunciation of the word emeritus?’ And he said, ‘Really? I never heard it pronounced before.’”

  Lumet was not particularly bothered by the error. “Sidney said, ‘Well, there’s a second pronunciation,’ which was always Sidney’s solution,” Heim recalled. “Sidney was the guy who could not be defeated by a crossword puzzle; he would write over things.” And if Chayefsky was a man of letters—if not a man of their correct pronunciation—so be it. “It struck me that he wrote the word as a poet would,” he said, “and when she said it, it just seemed perfectly normal to him. It’s not a common word.”

  The “emeritus” line became one of only a few pieces of dialogue in Network that had to be overdubbed before the film was released. At her rerecording session, Straight told Heim that she had never heard the word pronounced before, either.

  * * *

  At one point, the Arthur Jensen scene had a fine actor set to play the industry titan who rails against Howard Beale for having “meddled with the primal forces of nature” and a sterling location to serve as the “overwhelming cathedral” of a conference room that the character compares to Valhalla. Then it had neither. Roberts Blossom, who was originally cast for the role, had been cut loose in early January after Chayefsky and Lumet disagreed over his performance. And the New York Stock Exchange, which was at first amenable to allowing the scene to be filmed in the boardroom of its Wall Street headquarters, withdrew that permission after reviewing the relevant portion of the screenplay, in which Jensen declares there is “no America” and “no democracy” but “only IBM and ITT and AT&T and Dupont, Dow, Union Carbide and Exxon.”

  “Some PR guy that worked for the stock exchange heard the name Paddy Chayefsky and said, ‘You know, you better read this thing,’” recalled production designer Philip Rosenberg. “Before you knew it, a lot of pressure was put on the president of the Exchange, a lot of the corporations mentioned in that, they eventually asked for the script, and Mr. Jensen’s speech did not appeal to them.”

  Finding a new location for the scene, which was to be filmed on Tuesday, February 10, was inconvenient if ultimately serendipitous. Having been denied the New York Stock Exchange, the production was instead given access to the Beaux-Arts boardroom of the New York Public Library, and to the library’s majestic lobby, which would stand in as the entrance to CCA. Though the lobby would be instantly recognizable to New Yorkers, Rosenberg said, “Anybody outside of the city, in the rest of the country, wouldn’t exactly know where that is.” Finding an actor to perform the scene was slightly more down to the wire.

  During their time in Toronto, the Network cast and crew had overlapped with Robert Altman and his team, who were working on his Western-cum-showbiz satire Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson. (Among its leads was Paul Newman, whom Chayefsky had sought unsuccessfully for Network.) Chayefsky and Altman knew each other, and during their shoptalk Altman recommended to Chayefsky an actor he had worked with named Ned Beatty, a husky, hot-blooded Kentuckian who had just played the good-ol’-boy husband of Lily Tomlin’s gospel singer in Altman’s film Nashville. The endorsement was good enough for Chayefsky, who called the actor in for a meeting when Network returned to New York, barely a week before the Jensen scene was scheduled to go in front of the cameras.

  Whether or not Chayefsky remembered it, Beatty had previously performed in a 1968 revival of his play The Tenth Man, at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C. The comedy-drama, about the congregation of a Long Island synagogue attempting to exorcise a dybbuk from a possessed young woman, had provided Beatty with some of his earliest introductions to the customs of Judaism—he was delighted to learn to play the shofar for the role—as well as to the play’s gruff author. Beatty would later affectionately describe Chayefsky as “that little guy who smiled every three or four years or so.”

  Coming into his meeting with Chayefsky, Lumet, and Gottfried, Beatty was intimidated by the length of Jensen’s speech, but excited by the character and the film—and, like any good actor, hungry for work. Like Jensen, Beatty’s father had worked as a salesman, as had Beatty himself (who had briefly peddled floor sweepers and baby furniture in leaner times), and in that lineage he thought he saw a way to win himself the part.

  Salesmanship, said Beatty, “was all about learning to close the deal. The three of them are sitting there, and I thought: Do I really have the cojones for this one? I could tell they didn’t want to make up their minds.” So the actor delivered a pitch of his own, one not to be found on any page of Chayefsky’s script.

  As Beatty recalled, “I said, ‘I know this is difficult. Everybody’s talking about this part, and they’re saying you’ve got to do a speech that’s three minutes long, for heaven’s sakes. I know there’s a lot of people that want to play this part, but look, I’ve got another offer, and it’s for more money. I’m going to walk out of here and I’m going to make a call to my agent. I’m going to say, “Hold on just a little while. I’ll let you know if I want to do that,” and when I come back through the door, I’ve got to know.’”

  The threat of the competing offer was a total flimflam. “I was lying like a snake,” Beatty said gleefully. “I think they liked the fact that I was at least trying to be sly. I was doing something that maybe might be in their lexicon.” When he returned to the room from his nonexistent conversation with his agent, he was told that the Network role was his.

  Beatty, who had missed the rehearsal process for the film, said he was given only a brief explanation by Lumet on how he wanted the scene to be played. “He said, ‘I’ve been an actor too,’” Beatty recalled. “‘And I know what you want to do: you want to do this whole speech from the top to the bottom, as just a piece and you know the piece, and I know you know the piece and you can do it that way. But I know exactly how I want to film it.’”

  Lumet wanted the scene broken up into smaller, more easily digestible pieces: Beale and Jensen’s entrance into the boardroom; various pans across its table and angles of increasing closeness on Jensen as he hails the coming of “that perfect world without war and famine, oppression and brutality—one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit”; and reaction shots from Beale as he watches aghast and asks, “Why me?” (“Because,” Jensen responds, “you’re on television, dummy.”)

  In his screenplay Chayefsky described with precision and specificity how the sequence should look on-screen. After inviting Beale into his office, Jensen was to push a button making “the voluminous drapes slowly fall, slicing away layers of light until the vast room is utterly dark.” Then: “The pinspots at each of the desks, including the one where Howard sits, pop on, lit by an unseen hand and creating a miniature Milky Way effect. A shaft of white LIGHT shoots out from the rear of the room, spotting Jensen at the podium, a sun in its own little galaxy.”

  But the severe restrictions imposed on the Network crew by the New York Public Library—which would allow no elaborate riggings or external lights to be brought into the room, other than the banker’s lamps and candelabra that were already there—made this almost impossible to realize. “You’d have to put smoke in the room, and backlight the smoke to give the rays of light,” said Owen Roizman, the director of photography. “And I couldn’t do any of those things. They wouldn’t allow
us to use smoke or anything like that.” To achieve the signature look of the scene, in which Jensen begins his speech in an apparent spotlight then disappears into darkness as he journeys around the table, Roizman said, “I basically begged to hang one light on a post at the far end of the table to light Beatty at the other end. It’s one of the only scenes where I wasn’t crazy about what I did with that. The light was okay, but I think I overexposed it just a little too much.”

  Amid the somber atmospherics and Beatty’s vaudevillian performance, Finch—who was called upon to do little more than sit in a chair and watch the theatrics—had to find ways to keep himself engaged between takes. Separating Finch from the only other performer on hand was the monolithic boardroom table, which became a stage for his animalistic antics. “At one time,” said Beatty, “I turned away from him for a second. And I turned back, and he’s standing on top of this table. He’s come out of his chair and he’s standing on top of the table. And he’s doing an ape. But very well.” Watching Finch strut and amble capably on all fours (and give the occasional satisfied shriek), Beatty suspected he had practiced this routine before. “He’s not just doing any ape,” Beatty said. “He’s doing his ape.”

  When shooting wrapped, Beatty, who had spent the day throwing himself into a taxing character and his histrionic orations, piled out of the boardroom and into an antechamber. There, he encountered Chayefsky and excitedly asked him how he thought the shoot had gone. There was a pause, Beatty said, and then “without moving a single muscle, anywhere on his body,” the author gave his answer: “It’s okay.”