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

by Dave Itzkoff

  * * *

  At the end of a day’s shooting, as the arctic chill that had swept through the city was at last beginning to thaw, the camera operator Tom Priestley Jr. saw Chayefsky come bounding over to Lumet to pay him a compliment.

  “Sidney,” Chayefsky said, “how perspicacious of you to facilitate this scene.”

  Priestley, who had been taking a home vocabulary course and had only recently been introduced to the adjective perspicacious (“having great mental insight and vision”), could not resist injecting himself into the conversation. “I don’t know what happened,” he recalled. “I just said to Paddy and Sidney, ‘Perspicacious! What a great word!’ And Sidney looked at me, not expecting me to know this word, and he says to Paddy, ‘We better get out of here—the gorillas are getting educated.’”

  As swiftly as the flu virus that was winding its way through the Network cast and crew, a spirit of camaraderie was uniting them as they hurried from one Manhattan location to the next—a feeling that the film they were making was important and was going to matter somehow. There were, of course, the occasional blowups and breakdowns, usually emanating from one particular source. On the windy day of a lengthy exterior tracking shot that followed Holden and Dunaway along a stretch of Central Park West, Kay Chapin noted in her diary that “Faye was nervous about the scene and very short with wardrobe people. She flubs a lot and had a hard time getting through a long speech but looks terrific.” Conditions were considerably less glamorous behind the camera that day, where Chapin said she and her peers were “knee deep in dog shit along the park wall” with “lots of soot flying around.”

  There was also plenty of gallows humor and unexpected bonding over the considerable ground that needed to be covered over the next month. At the start of February the production moved into a vacant retail space on Forty-Fourth Street and Sixth Avenue, where sets had been constructed for the UBS newsroom (including its time- and space-warping spiral staircase, which originated in Toronto and terminated in New York) and the adjoining offices, packed with pulsating ticker-tape and Teletype machines, microfilm readers, carbon paper duplicators, refrigerator-size photocopiers, and all the latest technology a news-gathering organization could want. Filming there was scheduled for three days, but Lumet, moving at his usual clip, finished it in a day and a half, including the two-part tracking shot that the opening credits of Network would play over, where Beale and his UBS colleagues use their top-of-the-line tools (pencils, paper, and a steady supply of cigarettes and coffee) to map out the precise timing of the evening’s news broadcast.

  Lumet could be blindingly efficient but he could have his temper tantrums, too. During the office shoots, he was seen losing his patience and threatening to fire an actor who asked what a scene was about. (The besieged performer had just one line in the scene and had been provided only the page of the script with his portion of dialogue on it; Lumet’s contention, somewhat misdirected, was that all actors should receive complete scripts so they know exactly where they fit in.) But this was a rare lapse in the famously charming demeanor of the director, who more commonly addressed his actors and coworkers as “angel” or “pussycat” or “heart,” and deemed every take to be “ravishing” or “first-rate,” even when it was terrible.

  He had special nicknames for his director of photography, Owen Roizman, whom he addressed as “Oven,” and his first assistant director, Alan Hopkins, who became “Ay-lan.” They in turn learned to understand his special lexicon of pet expressions, in which “gnatz” (accompanied by a flicking of the fingers) meant to move the camera slightly in a certain direction and “woof” (with a downturned palm) meant to stop.

  At a night shoot on February 11, along Sixth Avenue and in a bar near Radio City Music Hall, Finch and Holden filmed the bittersweet Network prologue, where Schumacher tells Beale, the “grand old man of news,” that he has been fired, effective in two weeks, and after the two old friends get “properly pissed,” Beale begins to conjure up his plan to kill himself on the air. Speaking more to himself than to Beale, Schumacher offers a sarcastic-sounding response that is pure, unadulterated, and sincere Chayefsky: “Hell, why limit ourselves?… I love it. Suicides. Assassinations. Mad bombers. Mafia hit men. Automobile smash-ups. The Death Hour. Great Sunday night show for the whole family. We’ll wipe that fucking Disney right off the air.” Holden was gently and affectionately teased by the crew for his dialogue gaffes—he seemed either to have trouble remembering his lines or not to have studied them all that carefully—but somewhere along the way, he lost the further exhortations in this speech to “watch somebody get guillotined, hung, electrocuted, gassed” and to see “murder in the barbershop” and “human sacrifices in witches’ covens.”

  Two days of filming the gala meeting of the UBS network affiliates followed at the Grand Ballroom of the Plaza Hotel; then a day spent on Holden and Dunaway’s windswept walk along Central Park West; and then three days at the duplex apartment that was supposed to belong to Diana Christensen. The first of these days, on Friday, February 20, was devoted primarily to scenes of Dunaway in bed: one where she is attempting to watch Howard Beale’s press conference declaration that he can no longer be the “dispassionate pundit, reporting with seemly detachment the daily parade of lunacies that constitute the news,” all while a naked stud is “fondling, fingering, noodling and nuzzling Diana with the clear intention of mounting her”; the other depicted her in a postcoital moment with Schumacher, “lying naked on a maelstrom of sheets, both still puffing from what must have been an ebullient bout in the sack.”

  After a weekend’s break, shooting resumed at the apartment on Monday, February 23, where Dunaway and Holden filmed the scenes in which Schumacher brings his affair with Diana to a bitter conclusion. One day was needed for the prelude to the breakup, located primarily in Diana’s kitchen, where Schumacher makes his desperate “primal doubts” speech; and the following day, February 24, was used for the conclusive moment, set in Diana’s foyer, where a defiant Schumacher declares her to be “virulent madness” and, perhaps the greater insult, “television incarnate”: “All of life is reduced to the common rubble of banality. War, murder, death are all the same to you as bottles of beer. The daily business of life is a corrupt comedy.”

  The prelude scene was the one that had bothered Lumet in rehearsals, when he noticed that Holden would not make eye contact with Dunaway. Now the director’s careful scrutiny and note taking from that preparatory phase would pay off with a single instruction to the actor. “On the day we shot it,” Lumet recalled, “I said, ‘Bill, I want you to do just one thing. Latch on to her eyes and don’t ever look away from her.’ And this world of emotion came pouring out.” To Dunaway, Lumet said, “I gave her the same direction: ‘Don’t take your eyes away from him. But just try to understand what he’s talking about.’ She doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Just try to get it. And thank God the phone rings just in time.”

  Following from the instant that Schumacher angrily kicks over the pages of his unfinished memoir—his “dumb damn goddam book about the early days of television”—the scene ends on a series of close-ups, and each one is startling in how candidly it presents the film’s leading performers: Holden looking haggard and depleted, his wrinkles unconcealed and his tousled hair a mixture of dyed chestnut and authentic gray, while his hangdog eyes emit alternating currents of despair and rage; Dunaway, beneath her flawless face, immaculate grooming, and pursed red lips, exuding an almost childlike naïveté and a seemingly total lack of comprehension. Despite his preliminary warning to Dunaway not to play the character with any vulnerability, Lumet later said, “That’s as close a moment as she gets.”

  Dunaway, of course, knew exactly what she was doing in the scene, and would later describe Diana’s gaze of doe-eyed blankness as “the quintessential expression” of the character. What Diana confirmed in that instant, Dunaway said, is that she “isn’t connected as a woman, doesn’t feel like a woman. With just those few seconds o
n the screen, you knew that she was completely unable to love.”

  The impact of these performances may have been enough to distract from some technical errors in these scenes. As Alan Heim said of Lumet, “Sidney was not a great believer in doing an extra take for safety,” and this raised a possible problem as he reviewed footage of Holden. “Something happened in the focusing process,” Heim said, “and they focused on the stair rail behind him instead of on his face. And it’s a big close-up and he’s a little soft. I called in the morning when I saw it, and I said, ‘Sidney, maybe you want to look at it at lunchtime. You’re still on the set and it is a little soft.’ And he said, ‘Aw, come on. How bad is it?’ I said, ‘Ehhh, it’s pretty bad.’ And we went and we looked at it, and he threw his arm around my shoulder and he said, ‘Don’t worry about it, boychik.’ And that’s it.”

  * * *

  For the next two weeks, from February 25 until March 11, the Network team would be encamped at 1350 Avenue of the Americas, a thirty-five-story complex at Fifty-Fifth Street that was the New York headquarters of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and that, in an act of convenience and expediency rather than satirical commentary, would now double as the offices of UBS. The empty upper floors of the tower, going unused by the studio that was coproducing Network, offered nothing but an overhead grid from which a drop ceiling could be hung, but to the production designer, Philip Rosenberg, the building’s many wide windows, with their sweeping views down the avenue and across the island of Manhattan, suggested the perfect steep perch from which Schumacher would tumble, and where corporate cronies such as Frank Hackett would build their nests.

  For Robert Duvall, who played Hackett, it was also the ideal vantage point from which to antagonize passersby on the streets below. As one person who worked on the film recalled, after the MGM office shoot began, “He opened up the window and screamed out the window, this very absurd primal scream out there.” And then, this person said, Duvall lowered his pants and thrust his bare buttocks through the window frame. “We’re on the twenty-second floor or whatever, and he’s like, ‘I mooned this guy down on Sixth Avenue.’ I went to Sidney and said, ‘You know, your actor’s going a little over the top in your camera room.’ I didn’t elaborate on it. I think that’s the way he got into character.”

  For Roizman, the location posed a unique lighting challenge: any scene shot during daylight hours had to be finished before the sun had visibly shifted, and any scene shot at night had to contend with the cumulative glow coming from every other window of every nearby office and apartment. “Remember that this was not a set and those were not backings, but actual Manhattan buildings with lights in the windows,” said Roizman, who found it all but impossible to illuminate these shots with traditional external lights. “Every time I would think of putting a light somewhere, I would look in the glass, and there it was. I couldn’t avoid my own lights.” Fortunately, the film’s gaffer, Norman Leigh, had been experimenting with “gimmick lights” he created by purchasing large quantities of aerosol deodorants, spraying their contents until the cans were empty, then cutting them open, painting them black, and attaching them to his lighting units so they wouldn’t be visible on-screen.

  For Gottfried, the MGM building was the site of an unusual query he received from Peter Finch. “When you have an office set,” the producer explained, “obviously you have a lot of extras: people at typewriters, people running around doing nothing. Some of the extras are black. And some of them are women.” This arithmetic, Gottfried said, added up to Finch’s bid for the following favor: “He said, ‘Don’t let me be near one of the black secretaries if my wife is around, because she will kill me. No, really.’”

  And for Chayefsky, this latest setting for his film came with new and unforeseen details to complain about—even the specifications for the set design of Schumacher’s office. “When he saw a big window being installed in the office,” Rosenberg recalled, “he came over and said, ‘In all my years in television, I never saw, ever, a news department [head] have a window in his office.’ Not to get into any kind of a battle with him, I would steer him to Sidney, who could convince him that he had staging involved, where the entire office had to be privy to what was going on in the office later on. And finally he was able to convince Paddy about it. I’m not sure I would have been able to, so it worked very well for me.”

  When a reporter from the Sunday News came to visit the Network set in early March, she was taken with the obsessive screenwriter, whom she described as “a bearded teddy bear of a man who sat in on each scene, quietly smoking a cigar.” Lumet had just wrapped the scene where Hackett boasts of his “big, fat, big-titted hit” and the attendant media coverage it has generated—even “an editorial in the holy goddam New York Times”—and informs Schumacher he is fired; the director, having told Dunaway that her reading was “divine,” had settled in for his lunchtime nap. Chayefsky, on the other hand, was by his own admission “a bundle of nerves.” “I’ll have to try to figure out something to get unhappy about, but I’m having trouble,” he told the reporter between puffs of his cigar. “I don’t trust it when things are going this well. I don’t have to do the lighting. All I have to do is watch, and I don’t even have to do that.”

  Finch, who had become the latest member of the ensemble to succumb to the flu and was presently having his facial reactions filmed while tucked into a bed that had been propped up on its side, vouched for Chayefsky between takes. “He has a very strict rhythm, like George Bernard Shaw, and you can never break that rhythm,” Finch said of the screenwriter. “He’s one of the few writers in film who has a rhythmic quality all his own.”

  Holden, when he was not poring over the latest issue of Popular Mechanics, compared the making of Network to his time on the 1954 MGM ensemble drama Executive Suite—he meant this as a favorable parallel—and suggested that Chayefsky was a willing if wily collaborator when it came to changes in the screenplay. “I asked Paddy’s permission and he said that it was all right,” Holden claimed. “Four weeks later you suddenly find out your changes are no good. And you go to him again, and tell him you want to go back to the original script and he says, ‘I was waiting for you.’”

  Chayefsky’s counterresponse to the reporter politely implied that Holden’s account had simply been a bit of well-intentioned public relations. “All the rewrites were done in advance,” he said. “There’s enough hysteria-making in films without that.”

  “If there’s anything worse than a bullying director,” Chayefsky acknowledged, “it’s a defensive writer. A writer should be available to make improvements all the time.” And yet he had to admit that things on this picture were generally going right; for all the stress he placed upon himself, trying to prepare for every possible mistake or complication, perhaps the greater anxiety was realizing that he wasn’t truly needed here. “A couple of the scenes in the film play better than they were written,” he said. “In the end that is what’s up there—it’s the actor and the audience and the actor has to feel comfortable. We have a helluva cast—a beautiful company.”

  * * *

  Chayefsky had never spent time among the radical groups that flourished in the 1960s and ’70s and, for all he knew, had now staked out a permanent place in the national political discourse. There was no discernible difference, as far as he was concerned, between an organization such as Students for a Democratic Society and a group such as the Symbionese Liberation Army. Whatever their stated goals, all that interested these groups was the destabilization of the country, the sowing of discord, and the spreading of violence. Whereas the SLA had been operating from safe houses dotted across the San Francisco Bay Area, he set the command center of his fictitious Ecumenical Liberation Army in the sleepy suburb of Encino and, in his acerbic stage directions, described it as a “shambles of cartons, crates, scraps of food and litter”; in its dining room, “tattered sleeping bags and newspapers cover the floor, and the walls are bare except for various militant posters of the likes of Mao an
d Marlon Brando.”

  Lumet did not go even as far as the West Coast; on Monday, March 15, for the second time in nearly two months, he brought the Network shoot to Rockland County, New York. There, on about seventy acres of apple orchards and vegetable gardens in the northern hamlet of Congers, his production designer, Philip Rosenberg, had found the Dr. Davies Farm, the site of a 140-year-old farmhouse that, in 1891, became the home of Arthur B. Davies and his wife, Dr. Lucy Virginia Meriwether Davies. He was the president of the Association of American Painters and Sculptors, which organized the controversial 1913 Armory Show that introduced America to avant-garde modern art; she was one of the nation’s first female doctors, a relative of the explorer Meriwether Lewis, and a cousin of Mildred and Patty Hill, the composers of “Happy Birthday to You.” Now their estate would provide the unlikely home for an opportunistic gang that fought the “increasingly desperate, imperialist ruling clique” and “the entire apparatus of the bourgeois-democratic state.”

  The farmhouse shoot was among the rare production days that did not involve Holden, Dunaway, Finch, or any of the other principal members of the cast, and instead focused on the business negotiations between the Ecumenicals and various representatives of ICM and the William Morris Agency. Prior to filming, Chayefsky had substantially reduced the role of a character named Heywood, described in drafts of the Network screenplay as “an old union lawyer, given to peroration,” and who, on behalf of the Ecumenicals, was supposed to have told Diana, “Well, we’re not going to sell out, baby! You can take your fascist teevee and shove it right up your paramilitary ass!” (In his notes on the script, Daniel Melnick of MGM wrote simply, “This scene should come out,” and it did.) That left only a handful of supporting players, including Kathy Cronkite, who was playing the group’s resident heiress, Mary Ann Gifford (“a fire-eating militant with a bandolier of cartridges across her torn shirt”); Marlene Warfield as Laureen Hobbs, a fictionalized version of radicals such as Angela Davis; and Arthur Burghardt as the Great Ahmed Kahn, Chayefsky’s big, brooding gloss on latter-day revolutionaries such as the SLA’s Field Marshal Cinque—and who, the script said, is first seen wearing “a hussar’s shako and the crescent moon of the Midianites hangs around his neck.”