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

by Dave Itzkoff

  Chayefsky’s stage directions spelled out a clear vision for the scene, but they did not discourage Lumet from imagining an alternate presentation. As Gottfried recalled, “One day when we were talking about it, Sidney comes in with an idea. He thought it would be funnier, and perhaps even more effective, if, once the scene started with Peter, that people start shouting it in different areas. Like sitting in a taxi, they’d stick out their heads and shout, ‘I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.’ People coming from different places, coming from a taxi, coming from people walking in the street or something like that. I thought the original scene as Paddy wrote it would be far more powerful, and ultimately Sidney agreed. I know he did. That was basically changing the script, which certainly Paddy wouldn’t go in for.”

  Lumet’s simpler approach may have been born of expediency—a preemptive expectation that shooting a sequence like this in cash-strapped, resource-starved New York would be expensive and impractical. As his camera operator Fred Schuler later said, “In California, because they always had all the money in motion pictures available, everything was, ‘You want a crane? Sure, no problem, you got a crane. What else you want?’ In New York you had to fight for everything, because it was not instantly available; it had to be made or you had to make a compromise.”

  Once the commitment was made to Chayefsky’s version of the scene, it became “the biggest shooting of the picture,” according to director of photography Owen Roizman. The sequence required three nights of filming, from March 23 through 25, and more gear and equipment than had been used at any point in the New York production, including “fire trucks with water hoses to wet down the buildings, so that we could get a little sheen from the water dripping off the windowsills,” Roizman said, and “huge cherry pickers with lightning machines on them to light each building.… You could practically melt the generator with all the current that it draws.”

  In one respect, the declining fortunes of New York City were beneficial to the scene and the real estate it required: urban flight had opened up an entire block’s worth of vacant residential buildings in the West Fifties, some that were being prepared for demolition and others that were simply lying dormant, that could be easily populated with the angry acolytes of Howard Beale. These apartments, however, provided nothing more than the physical space in which the shouting extras were to stand and scream—beyond that, the production had to supply its own curtains, blinds, and other window treatments; its own interior decorations; and even its own power. “There was no electricity and no elevator,” Roizman said, “so the electrical crew had to carry lights and cable all the way up to the top floor and spread out and get in there and put up lights in the rooms. Then there were these huge lightning machines which we mounted either on a cherry picker or on a roof across the street. We would shoot a section and then jump to another area and maybe do two or three a night.”

  At 10:15 P.M. on Thursday, March 25, 1976, the final cries of the “mad as hell” chorus were heard, and the filming of Network was complete.

  * * *

  By sticking faithfully to Chayefsky’s script, working quickly, and delivering a minimum number of options for each scene, Lumet had made it easy for editor Alan Heim to assemble a rough cut of Network while the film was still being shot. The studios backing the movie had already been shown portions of it before principal photography was completed and were pleased with what they saw. On March 20, MGM’s Daniel Melnick wrote to Chayefsky:

  Dear Paddy,

  You are a man of your word and of your words. The picture looks great and we thank you for it.

  Love,

  Dan

  With much of this heavy lifting already out of the way, what remained for Heim to finish his cut were mostly odds and ends, such as excising most of the short but nonvital scenes that showed characters walking from one office to another in the UBS building. “I knew they were going to go immediately,” Heim said, “and we took pretty much all of them out if they didn’t further the story in some way. Paddy had wanted those in, and he never said a word about taking them out, once we took them out. We just sat there, we looked at it, and I think I said, ‘Why don’t we get rid of all the shots between stuff that’s happening? Between the important stuff.’ We got rid of that.”

  But at least one crucial decision was reached in the editing stage, a choice that, if it had been made otherwise, might have eliminated Beatrice Straight’s performance from the film almost entirely. As Chayefsky had originally called for in his screenplay, Louise Schumacher’s devastated dismantling of Max was supposed to come before the motel liaison between Max and Diana. But when Heim played the film for Chayefsky, Gottfried, and Lumet, the transition between these two sequences seemed wrong somehow; the consensus among his collaborators was that Louise’s diatribe was slowing things down and needed to be eliminated, but Heim said he made a last-ditch plea to preserve it by having the motel love scene come first.

  “It didn’t play,” Heim said. “I remember saying to Paddy and Howard and Sidney, ‘Look, let me just take this scene. I’ll move it here. Take a look at it and see how it plays.’ And Sidney said, ‘No, it’s not going to work. We have to drop this’—the scene being the Beatrice Straight scene. And I didn’t want that scene taken out of the picture. I would have lain across the doorway and fought with my life to keep that scene in the picture.”

  A final ruling from MGM’s Melnick ensured that the editor would never have to make such a spirited display of his loyalty. “We showed the film to Dan Melnick; he flew in on a Friday,” Heim recalled. “Sunday night, I got a call from Howard Gottfried. And he sang my name. He said, ‘Aaaa-laaan.’ And if you’ve been a Jewish son, you know when somebody sings your name, some kind of confession or attack is coming. And he said, ‘Aaaa-laaan, you know, Danny’—that is, Dan Melnick—‘Danny came up with this great idea for the movie.’ And he then proceeded to feed me back the idea I had been asking him to do for two weeks. And I said, ‘You know, Howard, I’m going to do that.’ He said, ‘Do that, and when we come in, we’ll look at it.’”

  As much as Heim wanted to remind the producer that this was what he had been recommending all along, he knew it would be a violation of protocol. “You don’t do this as an editor,” Heim said. “You don’t say, ‘Listen, I’ve been after you to do that for a month. Why haven’t you done it?’ You just wait for it to happen or not. But in this case I said, ‘Howard, I’ve been telling you guys that this was a good idea, and you wouldn’t even look at it.’ And he said, ‘Boychik, does it matter where an idea came from, as long as it works?’ And I took that to be a lesson for the rest of my career. Because it doesn’t.”

  As he and Lumet wound down their work, Heim found himself in a wistful, appreciative mood. He had now worked with the director for twelve years of what was already a two-decade-long feature-filmmaking career and was in awe of his perseverance, despite a résumé on which not every movie was a bona fide hit. “He was a journeyman, but he was a brilliant journeyman,” Heim said of Lumet. “Like those baseball stars that played for thirty years, he made three films every two years when I started working for him. Nobody does that anymore. Nobody could do that. He had some down times, but if he had the right material, he’d do a great, great job.”

  Unsure of how audiences were going to receive the movie they had just completed, Heim summoned the courage to ask Lumet how he approached his own work. “I said, ‘You know, you’ve got an enormous career, more than anybody will ever do again,’” Heim recalled. “And I said, ‘How do you pick your projects?’”

  In response, Lumet extended a hand. “You do five movies,” the director said, sticking out his thumb, “one is going to be very good.… And one,” he said, extending his pinky, “is going to be bad.” He unfolded his three other fingers. “And the other ones are going to be average. The important thing is to keep working.”

  5

  A STORM OF HUMANITY

  For a few months it may have seemed th
at Network was a true collaboration, the result of a cast and crew, a director and a screenwriter, working in tandem, if not always in harmony. But once the film was shot, edited, and in the can, the actors, artisans, and crew members moved on to their next projects and their next paychecks. And when all the moviemaking apparatus was stripped away, there remained one man who would receive the praise and bear the blame for the film, who had fought from its inception to make sure the final product was his vision and that all who saw it knew it was his creation. As the opening-credit sequence for Network declared, after announcing the names of its lead performers, its own title, and the studios that made it, but before acknowledging its director, producer, or any other contributor, this was a film by Paddy Chayefsky.

  In the spring of 1976, with several months still to go before Network was released in theaters, the time had come to start pulling back the curtain on a movie whose true intentions were largely mysterious to the people who had helped make it and to the media that had begun to cover it, and to decide how it should be positioned in the public eye. And the angle that was seized upon in promoting Network was controversy. As a poster for the film prominently warned audiences, “Prepare yourself for a perfectly outrageous motion picture,” adding that “Television will never be the same again.” The poster’s design was the handiwork of Stephen Frankfurt, the former Young and Rubicam advertising executive who had created enduring marketing campaigns for Rosemary’s Baby (“Pray for Rosemary’s baby”) and Lay’s Potato Chips (“Betcha can’t eat just one”), and the stark and deceptively childlike opening title sequence of To Kill a Mockingbird. The central image of his Network campaign, evoking the rainstorm that rages as Howard Beale makes his “Mad as hell” speech, was a jagged bolt of lightning descending from a cloud and striking the letter W in the film’s title.

  Similarly ominous images were swirling in the imagination of Paddy Chayefsky, for whom Network had thus far been only a phenomenon observed at point-blank range—words in his mind and on a page, and scenes acted out for him where he sat—but who quickly seemed to grasp how this promotional strategy was going to reflect on the film and on him. As he wrote around this time to his friend Calder Willingham, the author and screenwriter, “I know I am in for a storm of humanity.”

  MGM and United Artists scheduled the release of Network in the final weeks of the year, seeking to capitalize on any political fervor that remained after the 1976 presidential election. The studios committed to a marketing campaign budgeted at nearly $3 million, almost as much as the cost of the film itself, and hired Howard Newman, a veteran New York publicist who had worked on films such as West Side Story, The Godfather, and The Exorcist, to assist with the promotion. One of the earliest dispatches to come from his office was a set of production notes dated April 12 that trumpeted “the provocative theme of Paddy Chayefsky’s NETWORK and the calibre of its collaborative creators,” which combined to make it “one of the most important films of the year,” and describing it as “a frightening story told in comedic terms.”

  Chayefsky’s name was always listed in these materials ahead of those of Sidney Lumet, Faye Dunaway, William Holden, Peter Finch, and Robert Duvall. If the ultimate goal of such a document or the campaign in which it was being deployed was at all ambiguous, the production notes made clear in their second paragraph that “virtually everyone connected with NETWORK has won the esteem of their peers by Academy nominations or awards,” including Chayefsky, who “carried away the coveted little golden statuette for his screenplay Marty in 1955 and The Hospital in 1971.”

  This compilation of personal biographies, cast and crew rosters, and character summaries would be distributed to any reporter, critic, feature writer, or broadcaster with an inclination to say anything about Network, and it was not shy about indulging in histrionics. Dunaway’s character of Diana Christensen, it said, “should lay to rest the prevailing cliche that ‘good roles aren’t written for women anymore,’” breathlessly adding that Diana was “undoubtedly the strongest role written for an actress since Tennessee Williams created Blanche DuBois.” Its description of anchorman Howard Beale compared the character to Walter Cronkite, John Chancellor, and Eric Sevareid, while declaring that Finch “emanates the very aura of dignified authority, articulate, well-educated, completely informed on everything from the inner politics of the Arab Emirate to kitty litter. Even the agonies of his disintegration are overlaid with respectful admiration for a giant brought down by an unkind destiny.”

  These words, of course, were not Chayefsky’s, and where the author offered his feedback on the Network publicity materials, his comments were limited to remarks such as “Note: I never won an Emmy” and “!!! NOTE—DO NOT EVER refer to this film NETWORK as a ‘black’ comedy!!! I can’t think of anything less likely to induce people to see it.” But where he felt fully invested in matters that were even tangentially related to the presentation of the movie, Chayefsky remained fiercely protective of his intellectual property.

  Among the ancillary projects prepared to coincide with the release of Network was a paperback novelization of the movie, written by Burton Wohl, the screenwriter of films such as Rio Lobo, and published by the Pocket Books imprint of Simon and Schuster. But in a letter offering his thanks for the assignment, Wohl did not endear himself to Chayefsky. Addressing his words to “Dear Mr. Chayevsky [sic],” Wohl wrote that he found Network to be “an intelligent, literate and highly dramatic script.” Nonetheless, he added, “I hope you’ll indulge my need to change a bit of your dialogue from time to time, dialogue which I found uniformly excellent but which, for the purposes of the novel, is sometimes insufficient. I haven’t embroidered much, only now and then … most of the stuff is yours and it worked beautifully.”

  Taking no chances, Chayefsky laid out a series of strict guidelines in a letter to Pocket Books editor Agnes Birnbaum, and which he expected to be obeyed completely. To begin with, he said:

  The adaptor must remain entirely outside the telling of the story, invisible and as inaudible as possible. That means, the adaptor (storyteller, author, novelizer, whatever) must never introduce his own comments, insights, impressions, opinions. He simply tells the story, adding only what is desperately necessary to let the audience see and hear what is happening. The storyteller in our instance is simply that, and no more—a storyteller; and his attitude is that of a man telling a story that might seem occasionally hard to believe but did in fact actually happen.

  In his further, increasingly rigid decrees, Chayefsky added that the author should never say “what the characters are thinking, remembering, reflecting upon, speculating about, mentally associating with or subconsciously imagining,” but simply “what the characters say and do”; that this writer’s prose style is to be “spare, lean and economical” and should avoid similes and metaphors. (“If somebody’s hair is green, you have to say it is green, but you do not have to say it is as green as grass. Green hair is a sufficiently startling image in itself.”) Finally, Chayefsky suggested, “The adaptor should not try to be funny. Writers who try to be funny are not funny. On the other hand, he shouldn’t try to be sad either. He shouldn’t try to be anything except the teller of the story.”

  When the edited pages of the Network novelization were delivered to him, Chayefsky was unmistakably disappointed with the results and ruthless in his notes back to the publisher. Across its very first page, he left untouched only its opening sentence—“This story is about Howard Beale, network news anchorman on UBS-TV”—and slashed away entire paragraphs that described the character as “dignified without being pompous, serious without being solemn, humorous without being silly” and a lengthy discourse about the difference between being a “hero” and being “heroic.” In the right-hand margin, a perplexed Chayefsky wrote, “What’s this shit got to do with anything?”

  In another edit, Chayefsky struck out a passage that said Beale had been giving “more and more of himself to booze and casual cooze until his prostate grew to the size a
nd texture of a hummingbird’s nest and his audience rating dropped to 8.” (His note on this particular embellishment was “rubbish.”) His additional comments on the manuscript included “shit and not funny”; “how to butcher a joke”; “neither of these men is a dirty old goat, which is what we’ve got here”; “are these banal interpolations being presented as necessary novelistic improvements?”; “what is this shit?”; “no comment”; and “not everybody spends every waking moment thinking about getting fucked.”

  When the Network novel was published, its author was given as Sam Hedrin, a pseudonym that evoked the word Sanhedrin, the title given to the council of judges that governed ancient Israel and that, among other duties, passed judgment on Jesus before turning him over to Pontius Pilate.

  * * *

  The July 29 edition of Women’s Wear Daily recorded the enthusiastic reaction to a sneak preview of Network, held at the Regent Theatre in the well-to-do Westwood neighborhood of Los Angeles and attended by such VIPs as Dustin Hoffman, David Geffen, and his girlfriend Marlo Thomas. The screening, it said, was “frequently interrupted by sustained bursts of applause,” with the most spirited approval coming after “Bill Holden’s impassioned speech to Faye Dunaway about the prurient nature of TV itself.” “On the way out,” the article said, “Hoffman was slapping MGM’s Dan Melnick on the back, and Geffen was cheering, ‘It’s dynamite.’”

  But a full-color press circular sent out by the studios a few weeks later emphasized a different strain of reactions that Network was starting to elicit. This promotional material focused less on the positive passions the film was stirring up and more on the ways in which it seemed to be indicting the television industry, the corporations that controlled the American media conglomerates, and the men who sat atop those corporations. Opening on the lightning bolt image from the movie poster and the assurance that “the excitement builds for a perfectly outrageous motion picture,” the circular reprinted portions of two recent news articles, the first one also from Women’s Wear Daily, but not as welcoming as that publication’s earlier report on the film.