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

by Dave Itzkoff

  Into this volatile mix of professional rivalries, personal animus, and gender politics came Network, which had presciently placed a bold female character in the highest ranks of its fictional hierarchy and made sure hers was always the loudest voice in the room. (In the words of one feminist critic, Diana Christensen was the “Great American Bitch,” who had “moved out of the house and into the corporate structure” and who “embodies not only the fabled bloodlessness of TV executives but also the frightening impersonality of the medium itself.”) Already burdened with battling the prejudices being directed against her personally, Walters now found it her weary and unwanted responsibility to have to answer for the satirical and stereotypical portrait of a working woman that the movie put forth.

  “What troubled me,” she told the Washington Post soon after seeing the film, “is that it gives such an exaggerated picture of television news. Obviously it’s the result of Paddy Chayefsky’s bitterness toward what happened to him in television.… People will think they’re getting the inside story, and they’re not.”

  In the Christian Science Monitor, Walters said that Network was ultimately “very good” as “an entertainment,” and that “there is some truth in it—for instance, the holier-than-thou atmosphere that network news executives take at the same time that all they are worrying about is ratings.” But in its overall depiction of television news, Walters worried that it was misleading. “If people accept the film as reality,” she said, “it will be dreadful because it is an unfair, exaggerated portrayal.”

  Walters said later that Network “was not on the top of my list of things to worry about in those days.” The film imagined that in order for a woman to succeed in TV news, she said, “you had to be tough as nails. That’s changed—you don’t, any more than a man has to be tough as nails. But the leading woman had to be a bitch. And that was typecasting of a woman working.” The problem she faced at ABC was simpler and more insidious: “Not that I was considered tough as nails, but ‘You don’t belong. You’re not one of us.’” Whether she was hard or soft, stubborn or accommodating, there was no right way for a woman to present herself, she said, “not at that point.”

  * * *

  Richard Wald, the NBC News president who had given Chayefsky access to his department while he researched the Network screenplay, said his corporate superiors had a blunt reaction to the film: “They hated it. Oh my God. And I got flak later because I had allowed him free rein of the news division. The news division is a tiny part of the movie, but it was the only one they could really nail to me.” Wald himself took no offense at the film or how Chayefsky had used his access at NBC; he did not know the author personally and had only been acting on the recommendation of NBC’s entertainment division when he served as the author’s chaperone that past spring. “But,” he said, “I got a call from the entertainment department, and they knew him. Apparently they felt bitten by this thing. Not apparently—they felt bitten by this thing.”

  Wald did not see Chayefsky again after the scriptwriter’s preliminary visits to NBC, but the author had promised to send Wald a copy of the screenplay if he used his name in it, and he made good on this vow. “Ultimately,” Wald said, “I got two pages of a script, and I was all excited: William Holden is fired, he goes downstairs, and he says to his secretary, ‘Get me Dick Wald; he’ll know what to do.’ And oh boy, big deal.” When Wald and his wife were invited to an early screening of Network in New York, Wald said he was looking forward to his nominal film debut: “We dress up and we go to the New York premiere, and William Holden gets fired and we’re watching the movie and I’m waiting for my big moment. And nothing! Absolutely nothing.” Dismayed, Wald contacted Chayefsky after the screening to ask why he hadn’t been mentioned. “I sent him a note and I said, ‘Hey, where am I?’” he recalled. “And the answer came back: ‘Welcome to Hollywood. You’re on the cutting room floor.’ And that’s the last I ever had anything to do with Paddy Chayefsky.”

  * * *

  Chayefsky emerged in November to give his first interviews on Network, sounding somewhat chastened by the criticism the film had taken from the broadcasting industry, even as he pushed back against it. Speaking alongside Gottfried to the New York Post, Chayefsky said he was “upset to hell” that so many prominent television personalities thought the movie was attacking them. As Earl Wilson recounted the scene in his It Happened Last Night column, a “very innocent” Chayefsky declared Network to be “a fond, affectionate satire.” Then, “smiling mischievously,” he added: “I’m not the only one who thinks so.”

  Gottfried was quick to contradict his partner. “It’s not affectionate,” he said. “It says basically that TV tends to corrupt the people in it to get ratings.”

  Chayefsky, puffing on a small cigar, replied, “If we were in charge of a network, we wouldn’t be different.”

  “Then,” Gottfried observed, “we’d be equally corrupted.”

  Addressing an audience of high school and college students attending a preview screening of Network at the Sutton Theater, Chayefsky said that the film “was not written out of rancor.” “My rage isn’t against television,” he said. “It is a rage against the dehumanization of people.” Nor, he said, was the character of Diana Christensen, or Dunaway’s portrayal of her, a commentary on women in the business: “That part is me. She is a man.” The film, he said, was about Marshall McLuhan and “the illusion we sell as truth. It’s about how to protect ourselves. We have to avoid the bullshit.”

  But over several more minutes of sustained inquiry, Chayefsky gradually reverted to a familiar, cynical form, holding forth on the evils of foreign investments in the U.S. economy (“The Saudis have bought $200 million worth of AT&T stock. That’s what I mean by too much. There is so much information in the movie, you can get a headache”); the inferiority of TV news to its print counterpart (“You put a camera in front of a cop and suddenly the crook becomes a perpetrator—a newspaper reporter can just go over and ask what the fuck happened”); Gene Shalit of the Today Show (“The man is a professional clown”); and why he had generally given up watching television journalism in favor of Knicks games. Speculating on how Network was going to be received by critics, Chayefsky said, “We’re going to get murdered,” as Gottfried and an MGM publicity executive winced at the remarks.

  Chayefsky (who was described by Women’s Wear Daily as possessing “the look of a satyr who has retired from active duty”) sounded prematurely defeated, in one breath dismissing television as “an industry built on hysteria,” while complaining in the next that cinema was “not a writer’s medium.” “Most films are too tidy,” he said. “They’re predictable little packages.” Were it up to MGM, he said with some overdramatization, Network would have concluded at the moment Schumacher breaks up with Diana and returns to his wife—had he not stuck up for the version of the screenplay he had written: “That’s the picture, I told them.”

  In an interview with the New York Times, Chayefsky struck his most contrarian note, stating, “Television is democracy at its ugliest.”

  “The conception of Network is a farce,” he said, “but once the idea is there, it’s all real, every bit. I don’t attack; I just tell the truth. Television will do anything for a rating. Anything!”

  This article concluded by noting that Chayefsky and Gottfried had broken up their friendly poker games some time ago, as Gottfried now preferred to go to Vegas and Chayefsky preferred to stay home. Rather than waste his time on the contemporary TV programs he so clearly despised, Chayefsky said he had recently watched an old kinescope of “Catch My Boy on Sunday,” a teleplay he wrote for The Philco-Goodyear Television Playhouse in 1954, and decided that it had held up well in the years since it was broadcast.

  The day before Network’s official New York premiere, the principal members of its creative team gathered for a 10:00 A.M. press conference at Shepheard’s, the small downstairs nightclub of the Drake Hotel on Park Avenue, and everyone was in character: Sidney Lumet waxed
philosophical, asserting that the aim of the film “is to stretch realism past its limit, but never to violate the truth,” and repeated his familiar credo that while he, Chayefsky, and Gottfried all had their professional origins in television, “we never left it—it left us.” William Holden reminisced about having been a classmate of Jackie Robinson’s when the two attended Pasadena City College in the late 1930s. (“I would have failed biology class if it hadn’t been for Jackie Robinson. I sat and cribbed from his notes.”) Peter Finch, attending with his wife, Eletha, touted the new home he had recently purchased in Beverly Hills and hailed Network as “a cautionary tale about our lives today—we’re becoming computerized, deodorized, whiter-than-white lambs.” Faye Dunaway arrived an hour late and dismissed the notion that any feminist ideals had influenced her portrayal of a character that Lumet described as “a ruthless, remorseless killer.” “Lady Macbeth will do,” she replied through a smile.

  Chayefsky made one more attempt to plead his case that Network actually treated the television news business with respect: “There are many people in television, especially in the various news departments, that I consider incorruptible,” he said. “Many of these people are my friends and have been since the early days of television. I consider them decent, respectable, sensitive people. I’m not talking about these people in my film. I’m talking about the executives who run the industry, those decision makers who are part of a larger corporation. I’m talking about what happens to a network when it’s taken over, made into a cash-flow industry and becomes part of a larger corporation, which is exactly what is happening to networks in America right now.”

  In a similar spirit, he argued that Network was in fact a satirical send-up of what could someday be, not a criticism of things as they were. “The American tradition of journalism is objectivity,” Chayefsky said. “We have an editorial page. We have a comic page. There is nothing valuable about a journalist—or anybody for that matter—getting up and comicalizing the news. The news should not—must not—become part of the entertainment scheduling. To make a gag out of the news is disreputable and extremely destructive.”

  * * *

  The first major review of Network to see print was published in the New York Times on November 15, one day after the film’s premiere. It was a rave. Tweaking its sensationalized promotional campaign, Vincent Canby wrote that the film was, “as its ads proclaim, outrageous. It’s also brilliantly, cruelly funny, a topical American comedy that confirms Paddy Chayefsky’s position as a major new American satirist. Paddy Chayefsky? Major? New? A satirist? Exactly.”

  As astounded as he expected his audience to be that the observant dramatist and common-man champion of Marty had matured into the withering ironist of The Hospital and now Network, Canby wrote of Chayefsky, “His humor is not gentle or generous. It’s about as stern and apocalyptic as it’s possible to be without alienating the very audience for which it was intended.” But to dismiss the absurdities of Network as scenarios that could never happen was to miss the point: “These wickedly distorted views of the way television looks, sounds and, indeed, is, are the satirist’s cardiogram of the hidden heart, not just of television but also of the society that supports it and is, in turn, supported.” Praising the performances of Finch, Holden, and Dunaway (who was “touching and funny” as “a woman of psychopathic ambition and lack of feeling”), the supporting turns of Duvall and Beatty, and the direction of Lumet, Canby concluded, “As the crazy prophet within the film says of himself, Network is vivid and flashing. It’s connected into life.”

  In the Saturday Review, Judith Crist declared Network “a ruthless exploration of the ‘aesthetics’ and ‘art’ of television that goes beyond its present-day realities to forecast the brave new world of the medium’s tomorrow, let alone some innovations of this very season,” adding that “Chayefsky’s drama is rooted in the realities of life in those Sixth Avenue monoliths that house the networks, its near-roman à clef personalities identifiable to anyone familiar with the industry.” The Daily News gave it two thumbs-up as well, with film critic Rex Reed deeming Network “a blazing, blistering indictment of television by the brilliant probing mind of Paddy Chayefsky,” while television editor Kay Gardella wrote that it “sustains an artistic perception of network television that is both outrageously funny and, with a good stretch of the imagination, quite believable.”

  A few days later, Canby was back in the pages of the New York Times praising Network in a follow-up essay as “a satiric send-up of commercial television that contains only one decent, upstanding, honorable, moral fellow of recognizable strength in the cast of characters—that is, Chayefsky, who doesn’t appear on the screen at all but is the dominant presence in the film.”

  “Though Sidney Lumet has directed it as if we were there and it was happening now,” Canby wrote, “Network is not meant to be realistic, a movie-à-clef. It’s a roller coaster ride through Chayefsky’s fantasies as he imagines what television might do if given the opportunity.” This, he realized, was not going to be everyone’s cup of tea.

  I understand people simply not finding this sort of thing as funny as I do. It’s a bit masochistic, like sitting on the stern of the Titanic and giggling all the way until you finally slide under the water. But to be morally outraged by Chayefsky’s moral outrage, on the grounds that Chayefsky (1) offers no solutions, (2) finds no redeeming factors, or (3) sets himself up as judge and jury, seems to me to be missing the point of satire, which is to be as sweepingly stern as an Old Testament prophet, intelligently concerned and bitterly comic. Satirists have no obligation to be fair to the enemy, or especially accurate.… It would be reassuring if we could piously blame TV’s ills on a few isolated people. It might also be the same as blaming Patty Hearst for having had the poor form to allow herself to be kidnapped.

  By this point Network was in need of a few ardent defenders. Reviewing the film for New York magazine, John Simon wrote that Network “inherits the Glib Piety Award direct from the hands of The Front, the previous winner. When it comes to sanctimonious smugness and holier-than-thou sententiousness, the new laureate is even more deserving of the unsavory prize. Network, moreover, is a further lap in Paddy Chayefsky’s, the scenarist’s, fascinating race against decrepitude and impotence.… The onscreen result is worse than a three-ring circus, however: verbal and intellectual Grand Guignol.” While impressed by Lumet’s direction and the work of the acting ensemble (though Holden, “alas, has not aged well”), Simon concluded that “this crude film really panders to whatever is smug and pseudosophisticated in an audience of self-appointed insiders; their smart-alecky laughter was not an inspiriting thing to hear.”

  At the Nation, Robert Hatch asked rhetorically, “So this is a slashing comment on network television and therefore exceedingly bold? Not by a country mile. There is plenty wrong with television, plenty to satirize. But Network prudently misses the point, dishing up an outrageous razzle-dazzle stew that will ruffle no network feathers and delight a popular audience that enjoys being titillated by improbable threats.”

  And in the New York Post, a young film critic named Frank Rich dismissed Network as “a mess of a movie” that “is drastically out of control—dramatically, cinematically and intellectually—and it treats its audience with more contempt than any other serious American movie this year.” With some economy and restraint, Rich wrote, Chayefsky “might have had a classic 15-minute sketch for Saturday Night Live.” Instead:

  We begin to feel that Chayefsky is a cranky paranoid who’s overstacked his polemical deck, and we stop believing in his message. Since the script treats the mass public that watches TV as morons, too, Network at times seems to be saying that we deserve the TV we get—and that neutralizes the film’s point even further.… You begin to suspect that Chayefsky wrote Network not so much to attack TV as to attack a generation of American kids who frighten and baffle him.

  Overall, Rich said that Network “contains so much extraneous material that it’s hard to
believe Chayefsky ever wrote a second draft.” And he lambasted Dunaway’s performance (playing “the meanest woman to be seen in an American film since the Wicked Witch of the West”) as a living embodiment of the film’s flaws: “She’s so busy trying to outrage us that she doesn’t even notice that she’s drowning in her own bile.” But then again, he wrote, “In Network, everybody stinks—except Chayefsky.”

  Perhaps the most scathing response to the film came as a one-two punch published in the December 6 issue of the New Yorker. Pauline Kael, in a film review unpromisingly entitled “Hot Air,” wrote, “In Network, Paddy Chayefsky blitzes you with one idea after another. The ideas don’t go together, but who knows which of them he believes, anyway? He’s like a Village crazy bellowing at you: blacks are taking over, revolutionaries are taking over, women are taking over. He’s got the New York City hatreds, and ranting makes him feel alive.”

  Though the story of Howard Beale’s breakdown might contain “a fanciful, Frank Capra nuttiness that could be appealing,” and Finch’s “fuzzy mildness is likable,” Kael wrote that “Chayefsky is such a manic bard that I’m not sure if he ever decided whether Howard Beale’s epiphanies were the result of a nervous breakdown or were actually inspired by God.” And while Dunaway brings to her performance “a certain heaviness … that has made some people think her Garbo-esque,” her character ultimately isn’t “a woman with a drive to power, she’s just a dirty Mary Tyler Moore.”