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

by Dave Itzkoff

  Kael wrote that, for all of Network’s flaws, blame rested squarely on its author, for whom the film is “a ventriloquial harangue” that he spends thrashing around “in messianic God-love booziness, driving each scene to an emotional peak.”

  What happened to his once much-vaunted gift for the vernacular? Nothing exposes his claims to be defending the older values so much as the way he uses four-letter words for chortles. It’s so cheap you may never want to say **** again. Chayefsky doesn’t come right out and tell us why he thinks TV is so goyish, but it must have something to do with his notion that all feeling is Jewish.

  Elsewhere in that same issue, Michael J. Arlen, the magazine’s television critic, provided his own epitaph for the film. “As entertainment, it’s probably fair to say that Network is lively, slick, and highly professional, and combines the attention to background detail and the avoidance of interior complexity which more or less define the show-business ethos it was attempting to criticize,” he wrote. “As satire or as serious comment, the movie seemed oddly pious and heavy-handed. In other words, it was another typically overmounted, modishly topical, over obvious popular entertainment—good for a few laughs, and something to do after dinner.”

  * * *

  The polarizing responses to Network played right into the campaign devised for it by MGM and United Artists, which were busy producing thousands of buttons and bumper stickers that read, I’M MAD AS HELL AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE IT ANYMORE. The controversy surrounding the film merely suggested to audiences that it was something they needed to see for themselves and form an opinion about; and the harder it was attacked, the more bulletproof it became.

  Propelled by some of the reviews that described Network as a roman à clef, an idea had taken hold in the media that each character in the film was an analog for a real-world figure who had somehow wronged or offended Chayefsky, and the screenplay was his mocking revenge on him. An item in New York magazine straightforwardly declared that Max Schumacher was based on Edward R. Murrow; that the UBS executives played by William Prince and Wesley Addy were William S. Paley and Frank Stanton of CBS; and Laureen Hobbs was Angela Davis. There was wide consensus, too, that Diana Christensen was a gloss on NBC’s female vice president of daytime programming, Lin Bolen, who had spoken briefly by phone with Dunaway while she was preparing for the role. “’Tis said Lin axed some of Paddy’s pet TV projects,” the gossip columnist Liz Smith wrote. Had anyone sought to confirm these claims with the author, he would have handily dismissed them.

  As the year drew to a close, Time magazine published its own battlefield update from the ongoing skirmishes that continued to be waged around Network. Dubbing it “The Movie TV Hates and Loves,” the newsweekly reported that Lumet had recently been barred from a screening at NBC because of the film, while quoting an anonymous NBC vice president who said of the movie, “It’s a piece of crap. It had nothing to do with our business.” The article also cited supporters such as Norman Lear, who called it “a brilliant film,” and Gore Vidal, who said, “I’ve heard every line from that film in real life.”

  In a sidebar to the Time article, Chayefsky did not address his supporters or attack his detractors, but took aim directly at the medium of television. In a treatise that could have come right from his Network screenplay, he wrote, “I think the American people deserve some truth—at least as much truth as we can give them—instead of pure entertainment or pure addiction.”

  “Let’s at least show the country to ourselves for what it really is,” Chayefsky wrote.

  It includes more than pimps, hustlers, junkies, murderers and hit men. All family life is not as coarse and brutalized as it is presented to us on TV. There is a substantial thing called America with a very complicated, pluralistic society that is worth honest presentation.… Television coarsens all the complexities of human relationships, brutalizes them, makes them insensitive. The point about violence is not so much that it breeds violence—though that is probably true—but that it totally desensitizes viciousness, brutality, murder, death so that we no longer actively feel the pains of the victim or suffer for the mourners or feel their grief.… We have become desensitized to things that are usually part of the human condition. This is the basic problem of television. We’ve lost our sense of shock, our sense of humanity.

  Desperate as these words sounded, Chayefsky had not yet given up entirely on his fellow man. Amid the furious back-and-forth over the release of Network, he had received an unexpected note of support from an ABC employee named Barbara Gallagher, the assistant to the president of the network’s entertainment division, who sent him an appreciative fan letter. “Wow! What a movie!” Gallagher wrote. “I was caught up in ‘Network’ … I can’t tell you what an impact it had on me. It’s a classic, + absolutely the best picture I’ve seen in years. Bravo!” Then, beneath her signature, she informed him: “P.S. I’m quitting my job…”

  Chayefsky gently mimicked Gallagher in his reply, writing, “Wow! What a note! You are terrific. You are also very sweet and kind to have taken the trouble to write me.”

  He added: “Don’t quit yet. On the whole, ABC has been very kind to me.”

  6

  PRIMAL FORCES AND PHANTASMAGORIA

  By the time 1976 drew to a close, American movie theaters had offered eager audiences countless forms of paranoia and despair to choose from. A cinematic calendar of futility, confrontation, and retribution had opened in the winter with the release of Taxi Driver and Travis Bickle’s vow that “someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.” By the spring, this message came clad in a more polished wardrobe, with All the President’s Men and its stylized, Redford-eyed treatment of the Washington Post’s investigations into Watergate; and it spent the summer dressed in the genre garb of Westerns such as The Outlaw Josey Wales and horror movies such as The Omen. The cycle reached its zenith in the fall, when screens were spattered with the blood and sweat of Marathon Man and Carrie, and the air was choked with the expended lead and urban decay of King Kong, Assault on Precinct 13, and The Enforcer, the latest trigger-pulling escapade of Clint Eastwood’s “Dirty Harry” Callahan. You want inspiration and uplift? Go watch Rocky Balboa beat up a side of beef.

  The “cheapjack cynicism” that Network satirized, Vincent Canby wrote in a New York Times essay proclaiming the arrival of the new “cynical cinema,” “is now almost the entire point of what virtually amounts to a whole new subcategory of contemporary suspense melodrama—the film that deals with a dread, unnamed and unnameable conspiracy that the film’s hero-victim goes through the picture like someone who has awakened to find himself in a public place without his pants. It’s a bad dream but it’s all true.”

  Network, which began its wide release in December, fit perfectly into this motion picture landscape of helplessness and mistrust. Attuned to a national mood that seemed to be turning increasingly hostile, the movie put forward a wide array of institutions and organizations to vilify, and a unique prescription to this plague of frustration. It said the answer to your problems wasn’t in government or in the media, in dogged newspaper reporters or rogue cops, but in you, the viewer. You didn’t need to raise a fist or draw a gun to subdue your enemies; you just had to get mad. The teachings of Network resounded not in bullet wounds or spent shell casings but in the loud and articulate language of its characters. The film was hardly bloodless, but with the exception of a couple of key scenes, at least it kept its vital fluids on the insides of its characters.

  Network was also a financial success, on its way to grossing more than $20 million in its original theatrical release and becoming one of the most lucrative movies of the year. Paddy Chayefsky’s film was a widely mentioned candidate for Academy Awards and other end-of-the-year honors, but securing its nominations and victories meant keeping the movie and its stars in the public eye, and that in turn meant more promotion.

  Barely one month after the movie’s premiere in New York, the number of key players who coul
d be counted on to support Network in the press had dwindled. Chayefsky himself would rise to service whenever he was called upon, but one never knew what he was going to say or whom he was going to offend. So, too, would William Holden, but his interviews yielded similarly mixed results: one reporter might catch him reminiscing about “nights when the networks came through with footage showing the tragedy of Danang, with the blood of civilians flowing in the streets,” while another observed him as he “rambles authoritatively,” ending on the “ever so slight a suggestion of a harrumph” that signals “he’s decided any possible answer he could provide is going to be more interesting than any question likely to be brought up.”

  Sidney Lumet moved on to his next film, Equus, and Faye Dunaway was rarely much help to Network. Among the few appearances she deigned to make for the film’s release was a joint interview with Holden in the upscale pages of W magazine, accompanied by photographs of the costars on a carefree autumn walk through Central Park. In that article, Dunaway embraced her industry nickname, Runaway Dunaway, and noted that she had seen eight different psychoanalysts in the decade since Bonnie and Clyde was released. (“In each case I was looking for some compassion behind the professional detachment,” she said. “For the most part I found them wanting.”) With a smile on her face, she attempted to pass off Holden as the source of difficulty on their love scene (“Whenever we got into bed Bill couldn’t stop laughing,” she claimed), and he gladly took the fall. “I just feel there are certain things that require privacy,” Holden said. “We don’t just urinate on the streets.”

  Supporting players such as Ned Beatty and Beatrice Straight pitched in on publicity duties, too, with Straight telling the Sunday News that her work in the film was too brief to merit rewards or trophies. “If you blink, you miss it, but it is a lucky break,” she said. “It’s just a contrast in the film.” But more firepower was going to be needed from the bigger guns of Network, and Peter Finch was happy to supply the artillery.

  In the months after he finished shooting Network, Finch, now sixty, had recommitted himself to his craft and to the possibility of having an acting career in Hollywood. He gave up his self-imposed semi-exile in Jamaica and relocated with Eletha and their children to Los Angeles, where they lived in an apartment on West Hollywood’s Sunset Strip while renovations were made to a house he had purchased in Beverly Hills. The move, he said, was partly to escape political turmoil in the Caribbean and partly to enhance his career. “This is the place where all the deals are made,” he said of his new habitat. “When you get to be my age, producers are never sure what you’re going to look like. If you’re not here for them to see they may be afraid you’ve suddenly gone over the hill.” In that spirit, he had also cut out the copious drinking he was famous for when he still caroused with the likes of Errol Flynn and Trevor Howard. Since then, Finch said cheerfully, “Death has gotten one of us and our livers got the rest of us.”

  The work was starting to come steadily again: he was filming a lead role as Yitzhak Rabin in NBC’s TV film Raid on Entebbe, and he had been cast in Warren Beatty and Buck Henry’s film version of Heaven Can Wait. For the first time in several years, Finch hired a personal publicist to help manage the many requests he was receiving for interviews and personal appearances, and he wholeheartedly embraced the increased demands on his time—wanting as much to ensure that Network was seen as to make certain he was nominated alongside Holden as a leading actor and not relegated to the category of supporting actor. “We’re all so dreadfully egocentric in this business,” he told Women’s Wear Daily. “The nomination lets people know you’re there—for a moment at least.”

  Having been a long-shot Oscar nominee in 1972 for Sunday Bloody Sunday, Finch sought to ensure that this time he would go all the way. “Peter wanted to win that Oscar,” Finch’s personal publicist, Michael Maslansky, later said. “It was an obsession with him.” In the months following Network’s release, Maslansky estimated, “Peter must have done three hundred interviews with foreign and domestic media—radio, television, the works. Nobody, but nobody was missed. And there was no one Peter refused to talk to.”

  While his campaign was under way, it became Finch’s custom each morning to practice reciting an Academy Award acceptance speech he had been preparing, performing it to himself in his bathroom mirror or to Eletha as she brushed her teeth. As his daughter Diana would later recall, “He would turn to my mom and he would say, ‘If I should win, darling, this is a huge, huge honor. I want to thank my peers…’ Every actor, in their lifetime, whether you’re a starting actor or you’ve had a career for many, many years, you always have an Oscar speech, regardless of whether you win or not, you always have that. Because you never know.”

  Then Finch, who did not hold an American driver’s license and preferred to walk four or five miles a day, would stroll over to the Beverly Hills Hotel and its Polo Lounge, which had become the sort of haunt where he could show up without a cent in his pocket. “He always knew somebody—because he was Peter Finch—would buy him breakfast,” said his manager, Barry Krost. From whichever table he had affixed himself to, he would conduct his day’s press assignments, whether praising the underlying message of Network to the Christian Science Monitor (“The problems and the potential power of TV exist everywhere in the world”) while decrying its liberal use of four-letter words (“I’m a little sad we put so many in”); or musing to the Advocate about the many hours he and Chayefsky spent talking through the psychology of the Howard Beale character. “There had to be a suggestion that he was eminently sane underneath the madness and that he did, in fact, have a kind of revelation,” Finch said. “That’s a very thin edge to play.” He had lately been reflecting on his vagabond upbringing, the many people it had taken to raise him, and places where he had come of age, and he was thinking of writing a book about his experiences, which he planned to call Chutzpah. As Finch explained, “There is a lot of phantasmagoria in my life.”

  * * *

  On the last day of the year, Sidney Lumet shared an anecdote with the New York Times about Paddy Chayefsky and the screenwriter’s trusted companions Herb Gardner and Bob Fosse. As Lumet told the story, Chayefsky (whom Lumet described as a “Jewish Shaw” who’s “always funny but he’s always serious”) and Gardner had gone to the hospital to visit Fosse, who was slated to have heart surgery the next day. Fearing the worst, Fosse had drawn up a will that he asked his friends to witness, and Gardner signed it right away. Chayefsky, however, explained that he never signed anything without reading it and reviewed the document slowly, in silence, page by page. Upon reaching the end, he angrily looked up and said to Fosse, “You didn’t leave anything for me in it.”

  “Bob was pretty upset,” Lumet said, “and he began to explain that he had to take care of his family, didn’t have that much money, and so on.”

  The possibility that death might soon claim someone so close to him did not inhibit Chayefsky’s morbid sense of humor. He threw the will at Fosse in his hospital bed and said, “Damn you, live.”

  Fosse did as he was instructed, and as 1977 commenced, the prospects for Network seemed to brighten considerably. On January 4 the New York Film Critics Circle named Chayefsky the author of the year’s best screenplay. The Los Angeles Film Critics Association also chose Network as best screenplay and cited Lumet as best director, and the film tied with Rocky for best picture. When nominations for the Golden Globes were announced, Network found itself vying for five major awards: best dramatic film; best director, for Lumet; best screenplay, for Chayefsky; best actress in a drama, for Faye Dunaway; and, in the category of best actor in a drama, Peter Finch.

  With new wind in his sails, Finch was booked to appear on The Tonight Show on January 13, returning to Johnny Carson’s couch after an absence of nearly a decade. If the fact that Finch was scheduled as the first guest of the night—ahead of George Carlin, Joanie Sommers, and Ruth Gordon—was not sufficient indication of the esteem Carson had for the actor and his performa
nce in Network, the host lavished him with praise almost from the moment he sat down next to Carson’s desk. “Paddy Chayefsky, when he gets his dander up on something, he really goes at it,” Carson said with equal parts glee and envy. “It’s really an outrageous, crazy look at the corporate structure of the networks without naming the networks—and they offended pretty much all the networks, I guess.”

  Finch, dressed in a gray suit that could have come right from Howard Beale’s wardrobe and speaking naturally in his London-by-way-of-Sydney accent, proudly defended the film’s satirical sensibility. He observed that what Chayefsky was really attacking was “the diminishing liberty in our individual lives. And every one of us feel, even subconsciously, that computers and bureaucracy and numbers are encroaching on our lives. And my character rails against it suddenly, and says, ‘Beware, look out, what’s happening to us?’”

  Carson was particularly taken with Finch’s performance of the “Mad as hell” monologue, misquoting its crucial line as “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to put up with this anymore,” but declaring with confidence that it was “going to become a standard, probably, from motion pictures.”

  “There are certain lines from motion pictures that you always remember,” Carson told him. “That’s the one.”

  “Well, I’m—I’m very lucky, I suppose,” Finch started to answer, “because people go around quoting it. And if an actor’s associated with one of those lines, it gives you a lot of—”

  Before he could finish the thought, Carson interrupted: “And everybody feels like that once in a while,” he said. “They say, ‘I don’t want to put up with it anymore.’”

  A pair of clips from Network were shown, including a portion of the “Mad as hell” scene, after which Carson and Finch led the Tonight Show audience in an exuberant (and, this time, correctly quoted) chorus of “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore.”