by Dave Itzkoff
No T.O. for Love (Chayefsky musical)
Nun’s Story, The
O’Brien, Donn
O’Brien, Edna
Odets, Clifford
Olbermann, Keith
Olivier, Laurence
Onassis, Jacqueline Kennedy
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
O’Neill, Eugene
O’Neill, Liam Dunaway
O’Neill, Terry
One Is a Lonely Number
Ophüls, Marcel
O’Reilly, Bill
O’Reilly Factor, The
O’Toole, Peter
Outlaw Josey Wales, The
Paint Your Wagon
Pakula, Alan J.
Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)
Palestinian, The
Paley, William S.
Paper Moon
Parade magazine
Passion of Josef D. (Chayefsky stage play)
Patton
Pawnbroker, The
PBS
NewsHour
Penn, Arthur
Pentimento (Hellman)
People magazine
Person to Person
Philco-Goodyear Television Playhouse, The
Picker, Arnold M.
Picker, David V.
Platoon
Poitier, Sidney
Polanski, Roman
Police Woman
Polillo, Pat
Pollack, Sydney
Powers, Stefanie
Preminger, Otto
Price, Frank
Priestley, Tom, Jr.
Prince, William
“Printer’s Measure” (Chayefsky teleplay)
Producers, The
Pryor, Richard
Put Them All Together (first Chayefsky play)
Puzzle of a Downfall Child
Rabbi Mystery Show, The (Chayefsky TV series idea)
Rachel Maddow Show, The
Raid on Entebbe
Rather, Dan
Reagan, Nancy Davis
Reagan, Ronald
Reasoner, Harry
Redgrave, Vanessa
Reds (Chayefsky treatment)
Reed, Carol
Reed, John
Reed, Oliver
Reed, Rex
Reinking, Ann
“Reluctant Citizen” (Chayefsky teleplay)
Reynolds, Debbie
Rich, Frank
Rigg, Diana
Rio Lobo
Rissner, Dan
Ritchie, Michael
Robards, Jason
Robinson, Jackie
Rocky
Roizman, Owen
Rolling Stone
Rose, Reginald
Rosebud
Rosemary’s Baby
Rosenberg, Philip
Rosenfelt, Frank E.
Ross, Diana
Rukeyser, M. S., Jr.
Russell, Ken
Salant, Richard
Sanford, Bobby
Sargent, Alvin
Saroyan, William
Saturday Night Live
Saturday Review
Scarborough, Chuck
Schaffner, Franklin
Schary, Dore
Schatzberg, Jerry
Schlein, Herbie
Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr.
Schlesinger, John
Schuler, Fred
Schumacher, Caroline (character)
Schumacher, Harold “Prince Hal”
Schumacher, Louise (character)
Schumacher, Max (character)
casting of
Scorsese, Martin
Scott, George C.
Screen Actors Guild
See It Now
Serling, Carol
Serling, Rod
Serpico
Sevareid, Eric
Shales, Tom
Shalit, Gene
Shampoo
Sheehan, William
Sherlock Holmes (Conan Doyle)
Shore, Dinah
Simcha Productions
Simon, John
60 Minutes
Sleeper
Smith, Howard K.
Smith, Lane
Smith, Liz
Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, The
Social Network, The
Sommers, Joanie
Sorkin, Aaron
South Pacific
Soviet Union
Spanbock, Maurice
Sports Night
Spy Who Loved Me, The
Stage Mother, The (Chayefsky TV series idea)
Stage Struck
Stalag
Stalin, Josef
Stallone, Sylvester
Stanley, Kim
Stanton, Frank
Stanwyck, Barbara
Star Is Born, A
Stars and Stripes newspaper
Star Wars
Steiger, Rod
Steinberg, David
Stewart, Jimmy
Stewart, Jon
Stiller, Jerry
Stone, Oliver
Straight, Beatrice
Streep, Meryl
Streetcar Named Desire, A (Williams)
Suncoast Digest
Sunday Bloody Sunday
Sunset Boulevard
Swanson, Gloria
Sydney Sun
Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA)
Taking of Pelham One Two Three, The
Taxi Driver
Taylor, Elizabeth
Taylor, Juliet
Tchinarova, Tamara
Tebet, David
television industry
changes in, post-Network
Chayefsky’s vision of
regional newscasts and
Ten Days That Shook the World (Reed)
Tender Mercies
Tenth Man, The (Chayefsky stage play)
Texaco Star Theater
That Kind of Woman
That’s Entertainment
Thomas, Marlo
Thomas Crown Affair, The
Three Days of the Condor
Threepenny Opera, The (Brecht and Weil)
Tidyman, Ernest
Time magazine
Tisch, Laurence A.
Tisch, Robert Preston
Today Show
To Kill a Mockingbird
Tomlin, Lily
Tommy
Tonight Show
Tony Awards
Toronto Sun
Towering Inferno, The
Tracy, Spencer
Transamerica Corporation
Trials of Oscar Wilde, The
True Glory, The
Turner, Yolande
Turning Point, The
TV Guide
Twelfth Night (Shakespeare)
12 Angry Men
20th Century-Fox
Twilight Zone
2001
Ullmann, Liv
United Artists
United Broadcasting System (UBS, fictional TV network)
Network News Hour
U.S. Army
U.S. Senate
U.S. Special Services
U.S. Supreme Court
Universal Studios
Univision Primer Impacto
Uris, Leon
Vanderbilt, Gloria
Van Devere, Trish
Van Runkle, Theadora
Variety
Verdon, Gwen
Vidal, Gore
Vietnam War
Vogue
Voight, Jon
Voltaire
WAGA-TV (Atlanta)
Wald, Richard
Wallace, Mike
Walters, Barbara
Waltons, The
War Against the Jews, The (NBC project proposed)
Warfield, Marlene
Warner Bros.
Warren, Harry
Washington Post
Washington Week
Watergate scandal
Weaver, Fritz
Weeks, Edward
Weill, Kurt
Wertmüller, Lina
Westinghouse Studio One
West Side Story
West Wing, The
Westworld
Where’s Poppa?
Whitehead, Robert
Whitney, William Collins
Wiesel, Elie
Wilder, Billy
Williams, Brian
Williams, Tennessee
Willingham, Calder
Wilson, Earl
Wiz, The
Wizard of Oz, The
W magazine
WNAC-TV (Boston)
WNBC-TV (New York)
Wohl, Burton
Wolf, Peter
Wolff, Bill
Women in Love
Women’s Wear Daily
Wood, Natalie
Woods, James
Woodward, Joanne
Woolley, Monty
World of Suzie Wong, The
World War II
Writers and Artists for Peace in the Middle East
WXLT-TV (Sarasota)
Yablans, Frank
Yiddish theater
Yom Kippur War
You Are There
Your Place or Mine (Chayefsky teleplay)
Zinnemann, Fred
Zionism
Paddy Chayefsky in 1954 on a New York street during the filming of the motion picture Marty, for which he would win his first Academy Award. (Credit: Jack Stager/Globe Photos/ZUMApress.com)
Paddy Chayefsky working on the screenplay of Network in 1976. Having won a second Oscar for The Hospital, he found himself frustrated when his scripts were not executed according to his precise wishes. He channeled his disappointments, personal fears, political paranoia, and inside industry knowledge into his new project. (Credit: Photograph by Michael Ginsburg)
Director Sidney Lumet on the set of Network in Toronto. Lumet, the celebrated director of 12 Angry Men, Serpico, and Dog Day Afternoon, had moved in a career path parallel to Chayefsky’s and had gone into films after starting in television’s Golden Age. Lumet’s TV experience would prove crucial to Network, which simulated the production of several live broadcasts. (Credit: Photograph by Michael Ginsburg)
Lumet shows the actor Peter Finch how to execute a nervous breakdown he would perform in the role of Howard Beale, the mentally unstable anchorman of Network. A British-born actor who grew up in Australia, Finch was living in Jamaica and considered himself semi-retired before he was hired to play Howard Beale, after the part had been turned down by several top Hollywood stars, including Paul Newman and George C. Scott. (Credit: Photograph by Michael Ginsburg)
The producer Howard Gottfried on the set of Network with Paddy Chayefsky in Toronto. Gottfried had worked as a producer of Off-Broadway theater and television before he started producing Chayefsky’s motion pictures. Gottfried was genial and accommodating; he could fight the battles Chayefsky wasn’t equipped for and put out the fires his partner started. (Credit: Photograph by Michael Ginsburg)
The star-studded principal cast of Network was rounded out by Robert Duvall, who played the belligerent executive Frank Hackett; Faye Dunaway, the glamorous leading lady of Chinatown and Bonnie and Clyde, as the ratings-obsessed TV executive Diana Christensen; and the former marquee idol William Holden as Max Schumacher, the defeated news-division president who falls under Diana’s spell. (Credit: MGM Studios/Getty Images)
Chayefsky’s primary concern during the filming of Network was to ensure that every line of dialogue was performed exactly as he had written it. And to best observe the actors’ work, he felt it was necessary to situate himself as close as possible to their performances. To accommodate him (and prevent him from appearing in their shots), the Network crew created a light where he could stand and called it “the Paddy light.” (Credit: Photograph by Michael Ginsburg)
The actors seen here as members of the radical Ecumenical Liberation Army include Kathy Cronkite (center, with prop gun pointed at Chayefsky), as Mary Ann Gifford, a kidnapped heiress in the mold of Patty Hearst, and Arthur Burghardt (right), as its leader, the Great Ahmed Kahn. Cronkite, the daughter of the CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite, was struggling to define her identity, while Burghardt had recently served twenty-eight months in prison for draft evasion. (Credit: Photograph by Michael Ginsburg)
Dunaway brought her tantalizing and intimidating exterior, curious intellect, boundless passion, and mercurial mood to the part of Diana Christensen. Her strong ideas and even stronger will would nearly cost her the role, but she believed the character was worth fighting for. “If you wanted to succeed as a woman in a man’s world, you had to beat them at their own game,” she said. “Diana, I knew, would end up right in the middle of that debate.” (Credit: MGM Studios/Getty Images)
Beatrice Straight, a member of one of New York society’s most prominent families, believed that her role as Louise Schumacher, the loyal wife devastated by the infidelity of her husband, Max, was too small to merit attention for awards. “If you blink, you miss it, but it is a lucky break,” she said. “It’s just a contrast in the film.” (Credit: Photograph by Michael Ginsburg)
Peter Finch became synonymous with Network for his searing delivery of a monologue in which the increasingly unhinged Howard Beale announces to his TV audience, “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” He was only able to perform the scene once in its entirety during the filming of the movie. During Take 2, Lumet said, “He stopped halfway through. He said, ‘Sidney, I can’t do any more.’ ” That was as much the director was willing to ask of Finch. (Credit: MGM Studios/Getty Images)
“You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won’t have it!” Ned Beatty, who played Arthur Jensen, the explosive tycoon who converts Howard Beale to his “corporate cosmology,” was a late addition to the cast, replacing the character actor Roberts Blossom. After auditioning for Chayefsky, Lumet, and Gottfried, Beatty told them he had a competing offer from another film. But Beatty later admitted, “I was lying like a snake.” (Credit: MGM Studios/Getty Images)
The poster for the original theatrical release of Network, designed by Stephen Frankfurt, an advertising executive who had also created campaigns for Rosemary’s Baby and Lay’s potato chips, promised controversy and outrage. And while the movie was a commercial and critical success, receiving ten Academy Award nominations including best picture, it also provoked angry reactions from reviewers and the TV news business, with much of that indignation directed squarely at Chayefsky. (Credit: MGM Media Licensing)
Peter Finch died of a heart attack on January 14, 1977, one month before his portrayal of Howard Beale earned him an Academy Award nomination for best actor. When Finch won the award that March, Chayefsky—who had just received his own Oscar for the Network screenplay—invited the actor’s widow, Eletha Finch, onto the stage to pick up the trophy for her late husband. (Credit: Bettmann/CORBIS)
The morning after she won the Oscar for best actress, Faye Dunaway allowed Terry O’Neill to photograph her at the pool of the Beverly Hills Hotel, surrounded by strewn newspapers as she contemplated her statuette with uncertainty. O’Neill said the image depicted Dunaway in a “really reflective” moment, while the actress said it showed that “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?’ ” (Credit: Terry O’Neill/Getty Images)
Acknowledgments
Television, as someone once observed, may be a goddamned amusement park, but book publishing is serious business, and telling this remarkable story required the assistance of many people, to whom I am most grateful.
Jonathan Pace introduced me to the Paddy Chayefsky papers at the Billy Rose Theatre Division of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, and launched me on a cinematic and literary journey that continues after three years and counting. Kit Messick and Brad Campbell performed the invaluable service of cataloguing and processing the Chayefsky papers, and offered essential guidance at the outset of my research. Kare
n Nickeson, Annemarie van Roessel, Jeremy Megraw, and the staff of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts consistently went above and beyond to facilitate my access to the Chayefsky papers and other archival materials.
Of everyone who shared their personal recollections with me, I am particularly indebted to Dan Chayefsky and Howard Gottfried, who were unfailingly generous with their time and their candor.
Owen Roizman bravely agreed to speak to me before I’d conducted any other interviews, and was crucial in connecting me to many more of his Network colleagues.
I am doubly obliged to Kay Chapin, who allowed me to review her Network production diary, and who taught me how to read a shooting script.
For offering their memories of Paddy Chayefsky, the making of Network, its era, and its aftermath, I thank: Ned Beatty, Warren Beatty, Arthur Burghardt, Jordan Charney, Francis Ford Coppola, Kathy Cronkite, Diana Finch-Braley, Mary Lynn Gottfried, Alan Heim, Barry Krost, Sherry Lansing, Shirley MacLaine, Mike Medavoy, Terry O’Neill, Tom Priestley Jr., Philip Rosenberg, Fred Schuler, Carol Serling, Maurice Spanbock, David Steinberg, Juliet Taylor, Richard Wald, Barbara Walters, and Marlene Warfield.
Michael Ginsburg added further dimensions of emotion and humanity to this story with his extraordinary photographs from the Network set.
Keith Olbermann was an especially energetic source of insights about the television news business and the prophetic genius of Paddy Chayefsky. I also suspect he knows the entire Network screenplay by heart.
For sharing their thoughts about the enduring influence of Network, I thank: Ben Affleck, James L. Brooks, Stephen Colbert, Anderson Cooper, Gwen Ifill, Peggy Noonan, Bill O’Reilly, Aaron Sorkin, Oliver Stone, and Bill Wolff.
For arranging interviews, connecting me to sources, and sharing ideas, materials, and conspiracy theories, thank you also: Susie Arons, Michael Barker, Anne Bell, Cindi Berger, Peter Biskind, Carrie Byalick, Leslee Dart, Patrick Farrell, Joy Fehily, Leslie Gimbel, Bill Hader, Simon Halls, Sean Howe, Lilith Jacobs, Melody Korenbrot, Matt Mayes, Deborah Miller, Stan Rosenfield, Shawn Sachs, Betsy Sharkey, Shimrit Sheetrit, Lauren Skowronski, Jonathan Wald, Makeda Wubneh, Nicole Yavasile, and Mark Scott Zicree.
Tomoko Kawamoto, Barbara Miller, and the Museum of the Moving Image; Carrie Oman and the Paley Center for Media; and Jenny Romero and the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences were instrumental in providing documents and other resources.
