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

by Dave Itzkoff

  Chayefsky, dressed in square-framed glasses, a tuxedo he wore like a cloak, and a drooping bow tie, started his speech with a nod to Mailer’s off-color anecdote: “In the name of all us perverts,” he said as he received his trophy. In an earlier draft of the remarks he planned to make, should the occasion befall him, Chayefsky was going to confess his dislike of “modest acceptance speeches in which the acceptor thanks a host of other people for his own achievement” and then go on to give such a speech, one that thanked Lumet, Gottfried, Roizman, and Heim by name, and the film’s “practically flawless cast,” and conclude with an apology “for this—believe me—uncharacteristic display of sincerity.”

  Instead, Chayefsky deviated from this plan, and the man who wrote some of the most incensed and rancorous dialogue ever recited on a movie screen shared what was, for him, a tender and difficult sentiment. “I don’t as a rule—in fact, I don’t ever before remember making public acknowledgment of private and very personal feelings,” Chayefsky said, “but I think it’s time that I acknowledge two people whom I can never really thank properly or enough. I would like to thank my wife, Sue, and my son, Dan, for their indestructible support and enthusiasm, for their ideas, their discussions, their stimulation, and for their very presence. My gratitude and my love. Thank you.”

  Dunaway made her own attempt at graciousness when, a short while later, she received the Oscar for best actress that nearly everyone anticipated she would win. “Well,” Dunaway said, “I didn’t expect this to happen quite yet, but I do thank you very much and I’m very grateful.” Between audible and excited breaths, she continued: “I would like especially to thank Sidney Lumet, Paddy Chayefsky, Howard Gottfried, Danny Melnick, and the great generosity of a rare group of actors—company of actors—in particular William Holden, Robert Duvall, and Peter Finch.” She concluded with a special thank-you to her “friends in the back room,” Susan Germaine, who had been her hair stylist on Network, and her makeup artist, Lee Harman.

  The backdrop behind presenter Liv Ullmann dimmed to a dark blue as she announced the five nominees for best actor, observing that such a performer may be measured by “his willingness not to conceal himself, but to show himself in all his humanity, and to expose both the light and the darker sides of his nature, openly and truly.” The live audience seemed to applaud just a shade more enthusiastically for Peter Finch than for the other nominees. William Holden, shown on a split screen just beneath a photograph of his deceased costar, could be seen sighing in relief as Ullmann opened her envelope and read Finch’s name. Over a triumphant orchestra fanfare, an announcer stated, “Accepting the award for the late Peter Finch, Mr. Paddy Chayefsky.”

  Chayefsky rushed out from the stage-left wing and kissed Ullmann’s extended hand as he approached the Oscar already waiting on the lectern, preparing to give what most expected would be the formal acceptance speech for Finch’s award. But he delivered a different set of remarks, his voice growing more resolute as his true intentions became clear. “For some obscure reason I’m up here accepting an award for Peter Finch, or Finchy, as everybody who knew him called him,” Chayefsky said. “There’s no reason for me to be here—there’s only one person who should be up here accepting this award, and that’s the person who Finch wanted up here accepting his award: Mrs. Peter Finch. Are you in the house, Eletha? Come up and get your award.”

  It took a few moments for the cameras to find Eletha Finch, making her way through the rows of applauding industry peers with Krost lending her a guiding hand. (“She was panic-struck,” Krost would later recall. “I saw her to the end of the row, just to help her get onstage.”) Clutching her fur coat to her dress with one hand and, with the other, struggling mightily to hold on to her purse and corsage, Eletha Finch received a kiss from Chayefsky and another from Ullmann. With tentative steps, she approached the microphones and attempted to recite to the 250 million people watching the ceremony around the world a version of the speech she had heard her husband give so many times before.

  “I want to say thanks to members of the Academy,” she said amid tears, her trembling voice a mixture of her gentle Caribbean lilt and her late spouse’s regal enunciation. “And my husband, I wish he was here tonight, to be with us all. But since he isn’t here, I’ll always cherish this for him. And before he died he said to me, ‘Darling, if I win I want to say thanks to my fellow actors who have given me encouragement over the years.’ And thanks to Paddy Chayefsky, who have given him the part. And thanks to Barry, who have tell us to come from Jamaica, to come and do this part. And he says, ‘Most of all, thanks to you, darling, for sending the right vibes the right way.’ And thanks, the members of the Academy Award. Thank you all.” With her husband’s Oscar in hand and Ullmann’s arm around her shoulder, Eletha Finch exited the stage.

  * * *

  Neither the title of Network nor the names of any other artists involved with the film were announced as winners for any more Academy Awards that evening. Lumet, vying for best director honors for the third time in his career, would be denied a victory yet again; this time the prize would go to John G. Avildsen, the director of Rocky, who prevailed over contenders Lumet, Alan J. Pakula, Ingmar Bergman, and Lina Wertmüller, the first woman to be nominated in the category. At the conclusion of the ceremony, which ran nearly four hours, Rocky fulfilled its own underdog, out-of-nowhere prophecy by claiming the Oscar for best picture, its feel-good spirit prevailing over less sunny and more psychologically complicated rivals such as Network, Taxi Driver, and All the President’s Men.

  A cascade of similarly challenging emotions washed over the Network crew. The film had won four Oscars in total, tying All the President’s Men for the most of any motion picture that night. But one of their comrades had paid the ultimate price for his award, and still other top prizes had eluded the production. Now, even as they celebrated their hard-earned victories, there was a palpable sense that their work together was truly over and that nothing bound them together anymore. Heim and Roizman, who had been unlucky nominees but nominees nonetheless, arrived at the Governors Ball, the star-studded post-Oscars banquet, to find that they had been situated nowhere near their more illustrious Network colleagues.

  “We were sitting with a bunch of executives—accountants, really—from MGM,” Heim said. “And we were sitting with these people, and Owen and I were the only ones buying extra wine for the table. And we were so far away.” It was a slight that Heim would chalk up “to Howard Gottfried’s cheapness.” At a later hour, Heim saw Avildsen, the newly decorated director of Rocky, with his Academy Award in tow, and could not help but think of Lumet. “He was not going to let that go for anybody,” Heim said of Avildsen. “And I felt terrible for Sidney. I felt Sidney really deserved it.”

  Dunaway spent most of her night with the photographer Terry O’Neill, searching without success for a distinctive location where he could capture her with her Academy Award. During his initial assignment to shoot the actress for People, O’Neill would later recall, he had approached Dunaway with a proposition: “I said to her, ‘I’ve got this idea for a picture that I wanted to do of an Oscar winner, because I’ve seen plenty of Oscar winners, and I can’t stand that picture afterwards—you know, the one where they’re standing there, holding it up smiling and all that.’ I didn’t feel that it told any story. I knew the fact that the next day, they’re sort of stunned. They’ve now won the Oscar and they’re dazed the next day, when they realize that their money’s going to double or triple and they’re going to get offered every top part.”

  Finding insufficient inspiration on the after-party circuit, O’Neill sent Dunaway back to the Beverly Hills Hotel, where she and the rest of the Network team were staying, and told her to meet him at the hotel pool at 6:30 the following morning. There, the photographer documented a weary Dunaway, dressed in her nightgown and a pair of high-heeled sandals, as she leaned back in a beach chair and struck a pensive pose. In the background was the placid, shimmering pool, lit by the rising sun,
and rows of unoccupied patio furniture and cabanas; in the foreground was Dunaway’s breakfast table, ornamented with unconsumed food and beverages, a cigarette lighter, and an Oscar statuette that the actress appeared to be contemplating only partially as she gazed into an unseen distance. Strewn on the table and the ground beneath her were various periodicals and newspapers that O’Neill had obtained before the shoot, including a copy of that morning’s Los Angeles Times, lying at the foot of Dunaway’s chair, whose front-page headline clearly read POSTHUMOUS OSCAR FOR FINCH.

  To O’Neill, this indelible image, published a few days later in Time, depicted Dunaway in a “really reflective” moment. “First of all,” he said, “she’s had three hours’ sleep. That was one thing. And also, it was suddenly dawning on her, the enormity of winning the Oscar. That was when it dawned on her, this was going to be a new beginning for her career.” He added, however, that “different people see different meanings in it.” As Dunaway herself described the photograph, “In Terry’s picture, success is a solitary place to be. In my life, it has been the same.… Or as Peggy Lee sang, ‘Is that all there is?’” But others saw it as a moment of supreme apathy—apathy to the enormity of her own accomplishment, and to the sanctity of a place where a colleague and fellow honoree had breathed what might have been his last breaths.

  On the morning of March 30, the Beverly Hills Hotel sent a note to the room of Paddy Chayefsky, congratulating him on winning his latest Oscar and thanking him for his stay during the Academy Awards. But the screenwriter had checked out the previous day and was already headed back to New York. Los Angeles did not really suit his temperament; neither did awards ceremonies, nor did fawning attention. While he made the journey home, the latest addition to his trophy case would for the time being stay behind in Hollywood, in the possession of Howard and Mary Lynn Gottfried, who would make arrangements for the pristine memento to be engraved with Chayefsky’s name. Until then, the couple kept it on display in their hotel room, where the occasional bellman or housekeeper would ask to hold it to feel its weight or just to gaze in awe at the unetched and anonymous statuette.

  7

  CORRUPT AND LUNATIC ENERGIES

  On April 3, 1978, almost a year to the day after he won his Oscar for the screenplay of Network, Paddy Chayefsky returned to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles, as a presenter at the Fiftieth Annual Academy Awards. That evening’s milestone program opened with Debbie Reynolds performing a song-and-dance salute to the maturity of Hollywood and the progress that American cinema had made in the last half century. “Look how we’ve matured!” she crowed. “Look how self-assured! We’ve been through pranksters and monsters and gangsters, and look how we endure!” But Chayefsky was in no mood for backslapping congratulations.

  As the celebratory telecast ticked toward its third hour, a glittering backdrop on the theater’s stage rose to reveal Chayefsky ambling down a flight of stairs, dressed in a tuxedo and bow tie nearly identical to those he had worn at the previous year’s ceremony, as he headed toward the lectern to announce the winners of the screenplay awards. His mind, however, was not on his assigned duties but on an acceptance speech made earlier in the night by Vanessa Redgrave, who, in receiving her Oscar for best supporting actress in Julia, had used her own time at the microphone to decry the “small bunch of Zionist hoodlums” who had protested The Palestinian, a documentary she had produced in support of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Those remarks had drawn some jeers from the audience, mixed within an equal smattering of approving applause, but had otherwise gone unacknowledged in a show that had nonetheless made time for the banter of R2-D2 and C-3PO, the chirpy robot sidekicks of Star Wars, and a performance by Aretha Franklin of “Nobody Does It Better,” the theme song of The Spy Who Loved Me, accompanied by a cadre of neon leotard–clad dancers who could have stepped right off the cover of a David Bowie album.

  With the passing of each interminable minute yielding no other champion to rise and confront Redgrave on comments that Chayefsky felt were clearly outrageous and anti-Semitic, the author decided he would do so himself. He weighed in his mind the words he should use and the mood he should strike, sensing the potential of the moment that would soon be upon him. But he could hardly have expected that the words he was about to speak, considered for a matter of minutes and uttered in the span of just a few more, would come to define him as completely as any lines of dialogue he had labored over in his decades-long career as a dramatist. Nor could he have known that, for many thousands seated in the theater and millions more watching him on television that night, they were likely to be the last words they would ever hear him say.

  * * *

  In the months since Network was released, the film had woven its way into the fabric of the national culture—if not the entire movie, then one discrete and memorable moment from it. As Richard Kahn, MGM’s vice president of advertising and publicity, wrote to Chayefsky in a memo in early 1977, “There must be no greater reward for a writer than to be able to penetrate the general consciousness of the public.”

  Attached to the letter was a packet of recent news clippings that all, in some form or another, referenced Howard Beale’s combustible catchphrase. The headline of a Los Angeles Times Magazine article introducing its readers to alternative and overlooked candidates in an upcoming election cycle read, “WE’RE MAD AS HELL AND WE’RE NOT GOING TO TAKE IT ANY MORE…” A letter to the editor of the Los Angeles Times, responding to a report that Barbara Walters would soon be leaving her coanchor’s chair at ABC News after an irreconcilable falling-out with Harry Reasoner, began, “‘I’m as mad as hell! And I’m not going to take it anymore!’ No truer words can be uttered. This is the way I feel when I read articles on such people as Harry Reasoner versus Barbara Walters.” When that same newspaper wanted to editorialize on the plight of American agriculture, it published a cartoon depicting a farmer in his fields using a tractor to carve out the start of a message that read, I’M MAD AS HELL AND I’M NOT GONNA TAKE IT A. And when Time recounted the story of Anthony Kiritsis, a failed businessman who had held his mortgage broker hostage at gunpoint for sixty-three hours, the magazine described this thwarted kidnapper as a man who “was mad as hell, and he decided not to take it any more.”

  To Chayefsky, these accumulated citations were hardly validating. Instead they represented a gross oversimplification of the themes of Network—encroaching technology, malleable media, and the battle to maintain individuality in a complex world—reducing them to an easily digestible slogan, a caricature. There was even a Mad magazine parody of the movie, titled “Nutwork,” in which a news anchor named Harrowed Bile instructs his viewers to “go to your windows and open them and yell, ‘I’M MAD AS HELL, AND YOU AIN’T GETTING A LOUSY PIZZA! WITH OR WITHOUT EXTRA CHEESE AND PEPPERONI!’” In a manner similar to its source material, the satire ends with the character’s assassination—not by the Great Ahmed Kahn, but by pistol-packing cartoons of Harry Reasoner, Walter Cronkite, John Chancellor, and Barbara Walters.

  Back in New York, viewers could turn on their television sets and see a commercial for a local banking chain lampooning the Beale speech by showing enraged citizens running to their windows and screaming for free checking. Though this would-be tribute displeased Chayefsky, he concluded he could not stand in its way. “They shouldn’t have appropriated my idea,” he groused. “It just isn’t right. The most I could do, however, is seek an injunction.”

  Asked later how he had hit upon the “Mad as hell” monologue when he was writing Network, Chayefsky showed no particular preference or affinity for the scene. “I just made it up,” he explained. “That’s one of those things you count on from impetus.”

  If this fetishization of Beale’s angry motto mystified its author, equally mystifying to his audience was why such bleak signals should be emanating from Chayefsky, who, having earned his reputation for being so closely attuned to the plights and frustrations of the common man, now seemed to be picking up his transmissi
ons from some darker and more despairing place. In one of the author’s rare daytime TV talk show appearances, the usually ebullient Dinah Shore told him, in a soft and conciliatory tone, “You’re the fellow who wrote those lovely, delicate, tender, sensitive characterization pieces—Marty and The Middle of the Night, and now you come out with a scorcher.”

  With uncommon gentleness, Chayefsky replied, “It’s not me. I’m still writing tender, delicate pieces. It’s the world that’s gone nuts.”

  There was no imminent pressure on Chayefsky to produce a follow-up to Network, and for once in his career he could patiently consider his next move. He walked away from a $500,000 offer to write a screenplay about the Israel Defense Forces’ successful rescue mission at Entebbe Airport in Uganda (the NBC television version of this story, Raid on Entebbe, had been Peter Finch’s unexpected swan song), and declined an NBC project called The War Against the Jews. Though the network would find success with a similar production, called Holocaust, an Emmy Award–winning miniseries starring Fritz Weaver, Meryl Streep, and James Woods, Chayefsky concluded that “the subject was simply too painful for me to write about.” More to the point, he said, the network was “going to cut it any way they want to cut it. They’re not going to give me the final control.”

  During the theatrical release of Network, the eminent science-fiction author Ray Bradbury had written a tongue-in-cheek essay suggesting that the film should not have ended with Beale’s death; instead, Bradbury said, Beale should have been given a stately funeral that would have driven the ratings at UBS even higher, and buried in a “grandiose tomb” with “an immense sculptured rock in front.” After three days, the rock would have been rolled away and the tomb would have been found empty, setting the stage for Beale’s Second Coming. “The assassination, of course, was a fraud,” Bradbury wrote. “Finch, struck by soft bullets that anesthetized rather than killed, has been kept on ice in some Florida rest home against the day when it is time for his ecclesiastical rebirth.”