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

by Dave Itzkoff

  Then followed the increasingly familiar muddle of intramural backstabbing and deal making among the network, its corporate parent, and the U.S. government, until Beale, Schumacher, and Diana are left “wandering the streets of the country preaching goodness, forgotten, ignored, even despised.” Within these notes Chayefsky also sketched out a formative encounter between Schumacher and Diana in which, he wrote, “She looks him up and down, says: ‘You’re married, aren’t you?’ He says, yeah. She says: ‘Then we better go to my place.’” On this page, Chayefsky wrote in red ink and underlined the words “LOVE STORY.”

  All along, Chayefsky had wanted to tell a story that was global in its scope, from the continent-spanning clashes of governments and corporations to the atomic-level collisions of mere people, but the overwhelming sprawl of his narrative was becoming apparent. The harder he pressed himself to figure out how his characters fit together, the larger his roster of dramatis personae grew, and the longer he toiled without success to bring his story to an end—what logical conclusion was suggested by the inherently illogical universe he had built?—the more frustrated he became.

  His cast had been expanded to include a female radical who leads a left-wing revolutionary group and her second-in-command, a sort of “Leader of the People guy, a hot-headed impulsive terrorist who wants to shoot it out with the cops all the time.” At the other end of the spectrum is the chairman of the corporation that owns the network, an executive named Arthur Jensen, who is to have a meeting with Howard Beale and tell him “the revealed truth as it really is”: “The world will soon be totally technological and the individual human will be just a piston rod in the whole vast machinery, a world dominated by the ultimate laws of production and consumption.” Beale not only will be persuaded by this line of thought, but will embrace Jensen “as his new god to replace his voices.”

  In his notebooks, Chayefsky wrote year-by-year biographies for his characters. Schumacher doggedly worked his way up through the army’s Stars and Stripes newspaper, local papers, radio, NBC morning news, See It Now, CBS Reports, and network documentary and news departments to become the president of his division. Diana, by contrast, had just five previous television credits—at a children’s show, in audience research, and in daytime programming—before she reached her own vice president post. He drafted for himself a twenty-three-person roster of nonexistent executives at the fictional network he called UBS (a detail recycled from The Imposters), from its chairman of the board down to its vice presidents of programming, legal affairs, public relations for the news, and public relations for the network. He drew up a seven-night programming grid for UBS, inventing every show that aired from Monday through Sunday, 6:00 P.M. to 1:00 A.M., with such evocative and snidely reductive titles as Surgeon’s Hospital, Pedro and the Putz, Celebrity Canasta (paired on Wednesday evenings with Celebrity Mah-jongg), Lady Cop, and Death Squad. None of this information would make its way into the screenplay.

  For more practical purposes, Chayefsky wrote out a page-long list of synonyms for the verb corrupt—adulterate, debase, dilute, suborn, defile, befoul, taint, tarnish, contaminate, degrade, debauch, putresce—which he would surely need to draw from as his writing proceeded. For unclear reasons, he also created a separate, three-page list of the increasingly ominous political calamities he could imagine befalling the United States (“racist hysteria + jingoism”; “police violence in the ghettos + barrios”; “a consolidation of a United Front joining together all sections of the revolutionary, radical + democratic movements”; “the sheer numbers of the prisoner class and their terms of existence make them a mighty reservoir of revolutionary substructures and infrastructures”).

  Over lunches at the Russian Tea Room with his friends Bob Fosse and Herb Gardner, Chayefsky conjured up new screenplay concepts to distract him from the matter at hand. Starting from the semi-facetious suggestion that the three of them collaborate on a movie for Dino De Laurentiis, the deep-pocketed producer of a coming remake of King Kong, Chayefsky hit upon the idea of reinventing another classic horror tale, turning Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde into the story of a latter-day character who experiments with an array of drugs, devices, and therapies as he studies “the states of human consciousness.” For now this idea was little more than a literal sketch, a doodle of his imagined hero: pinched, peanut-shaped head, comb-over hairdo, pointy nose, and prominent chin.

  Turning back to the screenplay he was supposed to be writing, Chayefsky tossed aside potential endings as fast as he could imagine reasons why they wouldn’t work. What if the revolutionary group kidnapped Beale as a way of attracting attention for their group? But, wrote Chayefsky, “If their show is a hit, they already have attention—Ransom? They’re already rich from TV—in fact, we are trying to say their revolutionary ideals have already been corrupted by TV—in what way?” None of this sounded like the American counterculture he thought he saw sprouting up all around him, which, he wrote, “wants chaos, depression + disaster to produce the popular discontent necessary to the creation of a revolutionary class.”

  An especially grim possibility considered by Chayefsky centered on a radical he named Achmed Abdullah, who is being groomed by Diana for a television show of his own and whom she convinces that “if he assassinates Beale and takes film of it—doing it right on camera during a Beale show,” it “would give his show a tremendous kickoff for his first season.” Chayefsky was at one point so certain he was on the right track that he wrote the following words, drew a black box around them, added a red box around the black box, and placed six red check marks next to the red box: “So the terrorist story is really the story of Achmed Abdullah, the mad terrorist who is slowly corrupted into a TV star and finally winds up slaughtering everybody + HB just to give his TV show a terrific looking audience for his first show.”

  Had this version of the story come to pass, it would have ended with Achmed Abdullah using himself as a suicide bomb to blow up Beale and his studio audience, leaving only Diana “alone in the shambles wondering if there can be another way for the world to go.”

  The conclusion that Chayefsky instead settled on was milder, if only slightly. “We’ve got to replace Beale,” he wrote to himself. “They replaced Allen with Paar—they replaced Paar with Carson and that show’s still killing everybody—It’s not Beale—it’s his bullshit that sells.” The solution was to have Diana get her up-and-coming terrorist group to assassinate Beale—“It not only gets Howard off the air, but it gives terrific promotion for the counter-culture hour”—and in the final joke of the movie, “they kick this idea around just like any other network decision.”

  If Chayefsky felt any sense of confidence or closure after reaching this conclusion, it was short-lived. It was here that he pulled a sheet of lined paper out of a notebook and dejectedly wrote to himself across the top of the page: “THE SHOW LACKS A POINT OF VIEW.” Whatever this thing was that he had been laboring on all these months, it had “no ultimate statement beyond the idea that a network would kill for ratings, and even that doesn’t mesh with the love story and whatever the love story says thematically.” Maybe there was something darkly funny about these futile characters and the dehumanizing institutions they occupied, but he had not created them “just for laughs.” “They are allegorical figures in a social satire—extreme social forces trying to get power through the medium of television—But, at the same time they are corrupted and eventually dominated by the medium they are trying to exploit.” Chayefsky berated himself for not taking a clear stand in the narrative—“I’m not for anything or anyone”—and seemed to believe that the correct path to a meaningful message would necessarily lead him back to Howard Beale. But this created further problems: “If we gave Howard a speech at the end of the show,” he asked himself, “what would he say?”

  Acknowledging his self-doubt did nothing to overcome it; the anxiety had not been staved off so much as set down on a page. In the same routine and workmanlike way, Chayefsky typed out a blunt piece of text that,
with a bit of revision, would become the opening lines of his screenplay.

  This story is about Howard Beale who was the network news anchorman on UBS-TV. In his time, Howard had been a mandarin of television, the doyen of anchormen, silver-haired, magisterial, dignified to the point of divinity, and with a HUT rating of sixteen and a twenty-eight per cent audience share. In 1969, however, his preeminence was yielded first to Walter Cronkite and then to John Chancellor, and, finally, in 1972, Howard K. Smith and Harry Reasoner took pretty much of what was left of Howard’s audience. In 1973, his wife died, and he was left a childless widower whose ratings were sinking. He began to drink heavily, he became morose and isolated, and, on September 23, 1974, he was fired, effective in two weeks.

  * * *

  Dialogue was Chayefsky’s single greatest talent. He was a conduit for spoken words—words as they were authentically spoken and as he wished to hear them spoken—and they emanated from him at variable speeds. Some lines came quickly, and some speeches seemed to pour out of him fully formed, ready for camera on the first draft. Others developed at a more deliberate pace, requiring extensive revisions and evolving over time as his thoughts about his characters changed.

  As during the organizational stage of his scriptwriting, Chayefsky sometimes preferred to write in a straight prose style. These exercises could generate dialogue or stage directions that would carry over into a formal screenplay, or simply reveal the mood of a scene, as in a late exchange between Schumacher and Diana showing that they are drifting apart emotionally.

  She sank into an overstuffed chair, submitted to its comfort, closed her eyes. “I’m dead” she said, “worn out. I’m trying to get some kind of season together for January, and I think I’m going nuts in the process.” She opened her eyes and regarded Max now sitting across from her. “I can’t tell you how good it is to see you, Max. I’ve missed you terribly, thought about you. Do you still hate me for taking over your network news show?” “Me,” said Max, “In fact I’ve become quite a fan. I watch Howard every night. In a curious way, he’s become a solace to me. I suppose I’m going through a menopausal panic. All of a sudden, I’ve begun contemplating death and disease. I’ve become conscious of every twitch, stitch, twinge and creak.”

  Or a decisive confrontation between Schumacher and Hackett, the ruthless executive enforcer.

  “I mean, what the hell! What was this, some kind of demented gag!” “Oh, stop screaming, you monkey,” growled Max. “You’ve been after my ass ever since you joined this network, and now you’ve got it. You’ll have my resignation tomorrow and I’ll be out of here by Friday.” “The enormity of it!” screamed Hackett. “I mean, do you have any understanding of the enormity of what you Katzenjammer kids just did!” “I don’t have to take your shit!” roared Max. “Your reorganization plan isn’t effective till January, and I’m not accountable to you! I’m accountable to Mr. Ruddy and Mr. Ruddy only!”

  These words did not all survive to the finished script, but it was in the course of working through this exchange that Chayefsky penciled in, almost as an afterthought, a bit of vulgar marginalia that became one of Hackett’s more lasting utterances: “He was hoping I’d fall on my face with this Beale show, but I didn’t. It’s a big, fat, big-titted hit, and I don’t have to play footsie with Ruddy any more.”

  Some ideas and characters fell out of the screenplay completely at this stage: a scene following the opening narration in which Howard Beale is found by his housekeeper “still wearing the clothes he wore last night, curled in a position of fetal helplessness on the floor in the far corner of the room”; Beale’s nineteen-year-old daughter, Celia, who bemoans her fate as having “a nut for a mother and a drunk for a father”; a psychiatrist, Dr. Sindell, who examines Beale and suggests to Schumacher that he be institutionalized for his catatonic trances and manic delusions that “are traditional to schizophrenia, not that any of us know what the hell schizophrenia is.”

  Chayefsky’s internal editor excised dialogue when it tended to be too overtly didactic—for example, a line spoken by Hackett in private to his fellow television and corporation executives: “Television is the most powerful communications medium that has ever existed. Its propagandistic potential hasn’t even been touched. I sent several confidential memos to you about just that, Clarence.”

  But when his sense of humor was allowed to expand to its fullest dimensions of cynicism and morbidity, he did not always recognize when he had gone too far. In the scene where Beale and Schumacher drown their sorrows after the anchorman has been told of his firing and they drunkenly brainstorm the terrible TV programs that could follow his on-air suicide, Schumacher’s imaginary pitch for The Death Hour is to be accompanied by additional suggestions for The Madame Defarge Show and something called Rape of the Week.

  The rise and fall of Schumacher and Diana’s love affair, from devious flirtations to smoldering passion to burned-out ashes, is a trajectory Chayefsky worked out over numerous revisions. When the female lead of his screenplay was still called Louise, she was a more romantic soul who, with dewy eyes, confesses to Schumacher that she’d previously met him when he gave a guest lecture during her senior year of college: “You and Ed Murrow and Fred Friendly had knocked off McCarthy, a craggy man, about thirty-eight, tie askew, collar unbuttoned—I think you were affecting the manners of the hard-bitten, hard-drinking, tell-them-like-it-is reporter. You made a terrific hit with the kids. I fell instantly in love with you. I had never had a crush on anyone before.”

  When she became Diana, her temperament changed, too. Like her namesake, she had the unattainability of a goddess and her animal wiles, but she was also volatile, joyless, and depressed, telling Schumacher that she lived “on the brink of despair” twenty-four hours a day.

  If I could stand the taste of liquor I’d be a lush. I had three wretched years of marriage and four futile years of psychoanalysis. I’ve tried hallucinogen drugs, commune living, activist politics.… In order of appearance, I’ve tried to believe in God, the dignity of man, love and marriage, drugs and feminism and even the absolutism of sex, and I was lousy at all of them, especially sex. I can’t tell you how many men have told me what a lousy lay I am. I seem to have a masculine temperament. I arouse quickly, consummate prematurely, and promptly lose interest.

  As the relationship turned physical, Chayefsky’s prose was at times prurient, and he was unabashedly direct that Diana’s presence in Schumacher’s office, her lithe form “lit only by his desk lamp,” was enough to give the old newsman an erection: “it was nipple clear that she was bra-less; when she leaned to his desk to flick an ash from her cigarette into the tray, he could see the assertive swells of her body, and, damn, if he wasn’t reacting to all this like a schoolboy.”

  Over the course of an evening’s seduction, the action moves from the UBS office building to a deserted Hamptons beach to a romantic Italian bistro to the dimly lit bedroom of a highway motor lodge—but the conversation, even in flagrante delicto, never changes from the subject of the TV business. Schumacher and Diana were, in a prelude to their lovemaking, meant to exchange more of Chayefsky’s acidic and willfully awful ideas for new programming. She suggests a show adapted from The Exorcist (“I think that occult shit just might go very big as a series”), and he replies, “Sounds like good family entertainment. A ten year old girl who masturbates with crucifixes every week.” She says, “I also want to do a soap on homosexuals,” and he answers, “We’ll call it The Faggots—the heartrending saga of a man’s helpless love for his wife’s boyfriend.” All of these lines would be rewritten before Diana and Max moved on to their “accumbent embrace and intensified foreplay.”

  When their affair began to buckle under the intruding weight of reality, Chayefsky toyed with the possibility that Christensen and Schumacher’s coupling might somehow remain intact, as in a set of handwritten lines that begins with her offer to marry him.

  DIANA

  I’ll try to make a home with you. If I have to, I�
��ll bear children for you. And if that isn’t love, it’ll have to do.

  MAX

  It’ll do.

  DIANA

  Until the real thing comes along.

  MAX

  It is the real thing—

  But the hopefulness of this denouement must have surely rung false to Chayefsky, who instead prescribed for his two lovers to break apart with maximum brutality. Before the author extracted some of the venom in the scene, Schumacher’s last words to Diana were to be “We’re born in terror and we live in terror. Life can be endured only as an act of faith, and the only act of faith most of us are capable of is love. And you’re a vast wasteland, Diana. You haven’t got a single cell of living emotion in you! Goddam right I’m going back to my wife!”

  This, too, was discarded in favor of a kiss-off that more fluently spoke the language of television, in which Schumacher declares “a happy ending” for himself: “Wayward husband comes to his senses, returns to his wife with whom he has built a long and sustaining love. Heartless young woman left alone in her arctic desolation. Music up with a swell. Final commercial. And here are a few scenes from next week’s show.”

  In his stage direction, Chayefsky adds, “We can hear the CLICK of the door being opened and the CLACK of the door closing” as Diana is left “alone in arctic desolation.”

  Chayefsky’s monologues did not necessarily go through as much revision as his dialogue. The only substantial edits made to a speech given by Arthur Jensen, the chairman of UBS’s parent company, the Communications Corporation of America (CCA), that wins Beale over to his “corporate cosmology,” were for length. At its top, Chayefsky amputated a long windup in which Jensen argues that human suffering is not only unavoidable but a natural and necessary element in the reaction that produces progress: “Our generation fought two world wars in which we killed thirty more million men to uphold their dignity,” he was to tell Beale. “We have barely endured two world-wide depressions, and, this year alone, twenty-five million people will starve. There’s something less than efficient about all that.”