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

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.