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

by Dave Itzkoff

  These qualities can make Network seem like a onetime occurrence: the result of a rare confluence of an author with a mission to make his voice heard, a movie business that cared more about being taken seriously than (or at least as much as) about turning profits, and audiences eager to be engaged by challenging ideas. In an age when all the major broadcast networks are now either owned by or affiliated with a motion picture and entertainment conglomerate, and when their empires have grown to include cable TV channels and home video distribution services that exploit and repurpose the content they create, it is hard to imagine a studio turning its guns on itself in the same way, let alone providing one angry man with the ammunition to satirize them so savagely.

  Was Paddy Chayefsky the last member of a class of dramatists who would grab you by the lapels and shout in your face if that was what it took to get you to pay attention? And when he correctly predicted the conditions that would lead to the diminishment of television news and the networks that broadcast it, was he also anticipating the circumstances that would spell the demise of the confrontationally consciousness-raising style of moviemaking he purveyed? Or does his rabble-rousing, mad-as-hell spirit live on in some part of mainstream Hollywood entertainment?

  Some filmmakers who hit their stride in the period following Chayefsky’s argue that there is a retrospective tendency to romanticize the 1970s as a decade when it was somehow easier to make studio movies with strong points of view. “It’s never easy,” said Oliver Stone, who became enamored of The Hospital soon after he graduated from New York University’s film school in 1971. “It wasn’t easy back in the seventies, and it’s certainly not easy now. People complain about that, but if you do it, you do it. It gets done.”

  Stone first wrote some of his best-known scripts in the late 1970s, including Platoon (which would later win him an Oscar for best director and a nomination for best screenplay), in 1976, the year of Network’s release, and Born on the Fourth of July (which would eventually earn him another Oscar for best director), in 1979, but both were considered too risky—“too downbeat, too realistic”—to get made at the time, and would remain on hold for at least a decade.

  Network, for all of its fire and brimstone, was nonetheless propelled along by the part of Chayefsky that knew how to keep audiences amused even as he was exhorting them. “You’ve got to make it entertaining enough as a whole,” Stone said. “Sometimes you need that soapy advertising line. ‘I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore’—whoever thought that line would go down? He wrote so many brilliant lines; that’s not his best. But that line for some reason caught on.”

  But what made the difference in getting Network produced was Chayefsky’s single-minded drive to see it brought to the screen. “He sweated buckets to do what he did,” Stone said, “and sometimes I guess you’ve got to be a little bit tougher, because you’re going to get your heart broken.”

  Even if the modern-day movie studios could countenance a film as volatile as Network, Stone said the economics of such a movie would likely make it untenable, with no way to satisfy their needs for mammoth opening-weekend grosses and ongoing franchises. “They had to make bigger and bigger tent poles in order to attract attention,” he said. “The occasional blockbuster became the ordinary event. You have to open on a Friday with numbers that are essentially the old blockbuster numbers, and no one can rub the wheel that way and not get ground up at the end of the day.”

  James L. Brooks, who revisited the scene of the cutthroat television newsroom for his 1987 romantic comedy Broadcast News, said he could still envision a category of studio filmmaking that Network would fit into today. “It was great,” said Brooks. “Could I imagine a great movie getting made today? Yeah. That’s the genre. The genre is: great.”

  Brooks, who was himself a thoroughly accomplished television writer and producer before he turned to writing and directing his own films, knew Chayefsky casually in his career and attended the author’s funeral. But while Broadcast News explores some of the same issues as Network (albeit with a gentler, more humanistic approach)—the moral responsibility of mass communication and the toll it exacts from the people who produce it—Brooks said his film was not inspired by Chayefsky’s. Rather, Brooks was looking to tell a story about a certain kind of woman who defined the moment—and not Diana Christensen. At that time in the mid-1980s, Brooks said, “Every picture was a feminist picture, every picture was saying the same thing. And I just felt, really, in my gut, that there was a different kind of woman happening, and to try to find her.”

  The preliminary research that Brooks, a self-described “news junkie,” did for his Broadcast News characters at the 1984 Republican and Democratic national conventions revealed attitudes that were far less respectful to the news media than when Chayefsky undertook his own similar investigations a decade prior. Brooks said of one TV journalist (whom he declined to identify), “He had gotten a job because he was a pretty face, and I had this pissy attitude toward him. Then, during the course of the interview, I realized he knew they were laughing at him; he knew they were feeling superior to him.” As surely as he saw in this person the recognition that his own viewers regarded him as inadequate, Brooks said he saw the inverse in himself: “feeling like an asshole that I had been one of those smug people.”

  Broadcast News, which concludes with a wave of firings and corporate restructurings that scrambles the lives of its characters, arrived in theaters only a few months after the industry-altering bloodletting at CBS News. Brooks said he did not require any clairvoyance to see it coming. “I was chasing a movie that was happening in front of me, that’s basically it,” he said. “Everything about the movie was based on conversations and just really doing the homework.”

  In spite of his optimism that a provocative film such as Network could still find favor in the studio system, Brooks wondered whether the uniquely nonconformist talent required to create it could still navigate contemporary Hollywood without being corrupted. “It’s very, very tricky, ’cause everybody’s been co-opted—almost everybody,” he said. “Somebody comes out here and they write a good screenplay, and all of a sudden they have a lawyer; all of a sudden they have a company name. Every man a salesman.”

  Even if such a person could bring this idea to bear, Brooks wondered whether a movie studio would still be able to recognize its intrinsic value. “It used to be that the pursuit of excellence was part of the conversation,” Brooks said. “I did just have a studio head say to me, ‘My prayer is every day, don’t let me make something just because I like it’—saying it like it was a badge of honor.”

  To a new class of filmmakers who idolize the movies of the 1970s—in many cases the decade when they first started going to the movies—features such as Three Days of the Condor and All the President’s Men represent a quintessence of cinematic realism and social consciousness combined with commercial success, yet something about Network exceeds them. “The difference between commerce and art is that in art there is a kind of insurgency,” said Ben Affleck, the actor and director. “And there’s a profound insurgency in Network.”

  Affleck, who stylistically modeled his 2012 Iranian hostage thriller, Argo, on the hit dramas and suspense movies of the film’s turn-of-the-eighties setting, also included in his film the real-life news footage of a man who quotes Howard Beale’s “Mad as hell” speech to express his sense of helplessness about the hostage crisis. For Affleck, this moment was his tip of the hat to the enduring resonance of Chayefsky’s words, and how “society was still really informed by that perspective on the world—that sense of being beaten down and the game is rigged.”

  “In Network,” Affleck said, “we’re straining against the confines of corporatism and complacency, and the other pernicious effects of society are starting to strangle us, and we want to break out of that—even if it’s through a kind of madness or illogical behavior. That’s a theme, an undercurrent in the era.”

  If the twenty-first-century equivale
nts of Network seem harder to find on movie studios’ release schedules, Affleck said that may be partly the fault of directors preemptively talking themselves out of such projects. “There’s been a ghettoization of these kinds of films, and part of that’s self-conscious because people go, ‘Oh, no one’s going to see this, so I’m just going to make it for a few people,’” he said.

  But other key dynamics of the entertainment industry, well known to Chayefsky and his peers, have not changed. “The studios then, like they are now, are influenced almost exclusively by the marketplace,” Affleck said. “If people are going to see superhero movies in huge numbers, that’s what they’re going to keep making. Then, it was cool to make interesting movies. Kramer vs. Kramer was a blockbuster and made people rich. Kramer vs. Kramer wouldn’t make people rich today. There’s a bunch of those movies that came out then that would now be vying, basically, for a slot at Sundance.”

  To make a movie like Argo—a film that gives nearly equal consideration to Iran’s position in the events that precipitated the hostage crisis as it does to America’s—Affleck knew that he would have to trade in part on his celebrity and the desire of a studio to want to remain in business with him. But what such projects ultimately come down to is a filmmaker’s will. “It can get made, but you have to want to make it,” he said. “You’ve got to believe in that kind of film as something that is relevant and that can work to a broader audience. It’s definitely possible.”

  The public’s eroding esteem for the news media, not to mention its progressively diminished expectations for an entertainment industry that can defy its expectations or speak to it intelligently, has not stopped dramatists from continuing to view the television newsroom as a tantalizing crucible of character and human conflict. “People become aware of very dramatic things first,” said MSNBC’s Bill Wolff. “We know about stuff first. And then there is a lot of drama in the decision making about how to report and what to report.” He continued, “Among the non-heroic, non-lifesaving professions, ours is pretty dramatic”—even if, he added, “we’re not nearly as important as we think we are.”

  Nor have the years since Network’s release seen any appreciable reduction in the uneasiness we feel about the world around us. While there may be no way to determine if the number of existential threats we face on a daily basis has increased or decreased, we have more media than ever at our disposal to educate us about crises and catastrophes brewing anywhere on the globe, and we have become increasingly accustomed to having this information delivered to us instantly. “In the 1970s,” said Wolff, “mass communication was still in its infancy, and it had a greater effect on people’s level of anxiety. People are just used to it now. The choice was: become numb to the threats or become paralyzed by fear.”

  So it was a bittersweet moment in 2011 when Aaron Sorkin took the stage of the Kodak Theatre to accept his Academy Award for the screenplay of The Social Network, a motion picture about the dizzying reach of mass media, the responsibility of wielding it, and the enmity it stirs up in the people who do. Sorkin, who in his television series Sports Night, The West Wing, and The Newsroom offers his own idealized visions of how information is transmitted to the American people, began his Oscar acceptance speech by saying, “It’s impossible to describe what it feels like to be handed the same award that was given to Paddy Chayefsky thirty-five years ago, for another movie with Network in the title.” As Sorkin said later, “The commoditization of the news and the devaluing of the truth are just a part of our way of life now. You wish Chayefsky could come back to life long enough to write The Internet.”

  * * *

  Paddy Chayefsky was an accidental prophet. For all the irascible, after-the-fact certainty he professed about Network and the specter of television’s future that it predicted, his ambitions in creating it were grander and more wide-reaching. He sought to do more than simply speculate on the fortunes of a medium he alternately regarded as past its prime and eternal, and whose true capacity for decadence would not come into view for many years after his death, in forms that even a wit as uncompromising as his had suggested only as jokes. He shared perhaps a little too much with his greatest creation, Howard Beale, a forecaster attuned to higher truths whose origins he could not pinpoint, and who, in his lifetime, would not see his divinations appreciated for their accuracy.

  What Chayefsky understood best of all, better than television and better than the business behind it, was anger: omnipresent in his own life, in his frustrations and his failures as well as his successes, and how it had become an indivisible part of the American character. Rage fueled competition, put wind in sails, and powered that patriotic desire to succeed at all costs; it also offered cover from all the world’s unfairness and uncertainty, and protection from the elements that gave rise to what the uninitiated and naïve dismissed as paranoia but that an educated, attentive few knew were worthy and sensible fears. Sometimes it was the only way to get people’s attention. Chayefsky saw a country burning from the heat of its thwarted ambitions and the friction of running up against its own limitations, and no matter his life span, he knew that those fires would only grow stronger and hotter in time.

  In Network, Chayefsky bequeathed to America more than a movie, more than its characters or their lasting speeches, even if it could all be distilled down to those few words that the author himself never gave any special credence. To declare for yourself that you were mad as hell and not going to take it anymore was not just a way to rally fans at sporting events, to protest the loss of your economic security, gun rights, or health care access, or to vent your desire to maintain a vegan diet in a world biased toward carnivores—although it would become the rallying cry in all these scenarios and many more like them. It was an act of acknowledging all the forms of anger that preceded it and the unknown expressions yet to come, a plea for basic dignity and a recognition that in anger there was power and there was community. It said that it was permissible to be angry, and if all you could do was be angry, it was enough.

  As his friend the writer-director Joshua Logan said of Chayefsky, “You can’t build for the future with nice, polite people. They’re too round. What you need are concrete blocks like Paddy.” Thick, sturdy, stubborn, and unrelenting, Chayefsky could be a vessel to contain those flames, but he was also occasionally the great gust of air that stoked them. His only peace was in shouting ever more loudly. Nothing made him madder than voicelessness. And he shouted.

  Notes

  The page numbers for the notes that appeared in the print version of this title are not in your e-book. Please use the search function on your e-reading device to search for the relevant passages documented or discussed.

  All citations beginning CP, followed by a box number and a folder number, refer to the Paddy Chayefsky papers (1907–1998, bulk 1952–1981), archived at the Billy Rose Theatre Division of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, New York, NY.

  1. The Imposter

  Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood couldn’t “sing for shit”: Shaun Considine, Mad as Hell: The Life and Work of Paddy Chayefsky (New York: Random House, 1994), p. 249.

  They were three Jewish show business veterans kibitzing around a table: This story is derived from an author’s interview with Howard Gottfried, Mar. 9, 2012, and from Chayefsky’s own fictionalized account of the event in the pilot treatment of The Imposters (CP, Box 127, Folder 8).

  “television has been a kind medium”: Paddy Chayefsky, Television Plays (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1955), pp. ix–xiv.

  “Are people any wiser than they were a hundred years ago?”: Paddy Chayefsky, The Collected Works of Paddy Chayefsky: The Television Plays (New York: Applause Books, 1994), p. 79.

  Chayefsky wandered away from rehearsals and encountered a leftover sign: Tom Stempel, Storytellers to the Nation: A History of American Television Writing (New York: Continuum Publishing, 1992), p. 49.

  “Sooner or later,” he declares, “there comes a point in a man’s life”: Chayef
sky, Television Plays, p. 154.

  “You don’t like her. My mother don’t like her”: Ibid., p. 182.

  “it tried to show love to be a very real emotion”: Paddy Chayefsky, “Playwright Turns Self-Critic,” TV Guide, Oct. 22, 1955.

  “We thought that ‘Marty’ was based upon, a lot, on Paddy Chayefsky”: Interview for PBS, The Golden Age of Television, Aug. 29, 1981.

  born on January 29, 1923, in the Bronx home of his parents: CP, Box 166, Folder 3.

  “the rich Bronx—in the Riverdale section—not the Odets Bronx”: J. P. Shanley, “Big Decision on a Bronx Gridiron,” New York Times, Dec. 12, 1954.

  His bar mitzvah was held at a storefront synagogue on West 234th Street: Considine, Mad as Hell, p. 12.

  “My parents weren’t writers but they were great readers”: Carol Taylor, “I’m Never a Prima Donna at Work,” World-Telegram and Sun (New York), June 7, 1958.

  a machine-gun-wielding infantryman in the army’s 104th Division: CP, Box 166, Folder 3. According to his discharge papers, Chayefsky incurred the injury on Nov. 23, 1944.

  “We were out on patrol”: Considine, Mad as Hell, p. 22.

  “Paddy is built like an office safe”: Joshua Logan, Movie Stars, Real People, and Me (New York: Dell, 1978), p. 116.

  “I thought I was the sloppiest soldier in the Army”: Helen Dudar (with Sally Hammond and Jack Fox), “A Post Portrait: Paddy Chayefsky,” New York Post, Jan. 4, 1960.