Mad as Hell: The Making of Network and the Fateful Vision of the Angriest Man in Movies (20 page)

“All I had to do was sit there and not bemoan the loss of my vaunted, wonderful career in doing this,” Burghardt said, fully expecting that there would be future consequences for the choice he had made. “‘Oh, yeah,’ I thought, ‘I’ll probably never work again. A lot of black people won’t like me doing this role. People on television won’t want me
in
television.’”

*   *   *

The festive assignment on St. Patrick’s Day, March 17, was to caravan out of the city to the Sea Spray Inn, a small hotel and a cluster of cottages on Ocean Avenue in East Hampton. There, Holden and Dunaway shot most of the scenes that occur during Max and Diana’s Long Island getaway: their frolicking on the beach, their secluded dinner at an Italian restaurant, their tense, excited moments as they enter the motel room where the principal activity of the evening is about to occur. But once the actors passed through the door to their boudoir, their work was done: all their most intimate activities had already been filmed the previous day.

As part of the arrangement to pacify the recalcitrant Dunaway, the interior of the bedroom at the Sea Spray Inn was re-created in a small studio on West Forty-Eighth Street in Manhattan, where only essential personnel were allowed. Despite the semi-seclusion these accommodations offered her, Dunaway remained nervous about the sequence. “I’m never at ease in love scenes, and actually feel quite shy about them,” she said. “But this was a scene I was terrified to do. It seemed so outrageous, and I felt foolish astride Bill and babbling away about ratings in between gasps. It is one thing when the camera is shooting two people in bed, mostly hidden by sheets and blankets, with a shoulder exposed here, a leg there. It is quite another when you know that the camera is spending a lot of time shooting close-ups of your face as you try to enact this incredibly intimate moment.”

In a further measure of consideration, Lumet spoke with Dunaway in advance and, without mincing words, described exactly how he planned to shoot the scene. “We would open with a high shot of the two in bed, then the camera would dolly in behind her,” he said. “I assured her that the bedsheet would be high enough that we would see no crack of the ass. As we moved in closer, her arm would be at such an angle it would cover her breast. And during filming we stuck to that agreement. I would not violate it, because among other things, Faye had to play the scene. It wouldn’t have been good, much less funny, if there was so much tension she couldn’t act.”

The official filming log from that day is consistent with the pre-shoot strategy Lumet laid out. The scene begins with a wide shot of Max and Diana, the camera dollying in as they kiss and she removes her boots. In a second shot, they remove their shirts, and Diana is fleetingly seen topless before she dives underneath the bedsheets. In the third shot, Diana lifts up the sheet to allow Max into the bed, and in the fourth she has her orgasm, “screams climactically and collapses,” according to the shooting script. The last remaining shot is a close-up of Diana in climax; the accompanying notes say she was either “clean” or “clear” as she “drops down out of frame.” “For all the Sturm und Drang that went on about it,” said Philip Rosenberg, one of the few crew members permitted on the closed set, “it was a very uneventful shoot that day. It was all very controlled and very quick.”

As Dunaway later recalled the experience, the key ingredient that allowed her and Holden to complete the sequence was “a huge measure of good humor.” “Bill could not make it through a scene without dissolving into laughter at some point along the way,” she said. “And Lumet was great, he just went zooming about on his invisible roller skates as if this scene was like all the others.”

Without quite revealing what had transpired off camera, Lumet would later say that his sympathies during the love scene were with Holden, who in this circumstance was “an actor being used.” “To be one of the biggest stars, and let the other person have all of the fun, the whole speech, and you have to lie there, faking that you’re pumping into her, and not allowed any reaction that’s going to interfere with the comedy”—to put up with all that, Lumet said, was “noble of him.”

One more step remained before this material could be used in the film. Under her agreement to perform the love scene, Dunaway was also permitted to join Lumet, Chayefsky, Gottfried, and their editor, Alan Heim, when they watched the raw footage from the shoot, and accounts vary as to how she reacted when the day’s results were presented to her at Heim’s editing suite. According to Gottfried, the actress was unimpressed with what she saw and, after having fought so vigorously to keep herself covered up on-screen, looked at the takes and said, “You could have shown a little more.” “She complained because they were so unsexy,” Gottfried said. “That’s the funny thing about her. I mean, really.”

Heim had a different recollection of how the review with Dunaway proceeded. Far from responding with apathy and nonchalance, Heim said, the actress noticed that in one of the takes her nipples were briefly but clearly visible at the bottom of the frame—a direct violation of the written agreement between her and Gottfried—and she exploded in anger at the men, who outnumbered her in the room, demanding to know what had happened.

As Heim hurriedly explained to Dunaway, her inadvertent exposure was the accidental result of how the scene had been shot and how the footage was being played back to her, but this mistake would not show up in the completed film. When Dunaway was performing the love scene, Heim said, “She was wearing a sheet for the most part. Sometimes, though, when she moved, the sheet would expose a little bit of her nipple. When we screened that scene for Faye—and they screened it in the screening room, and unfortunately the projectionist put in the mask that was not the proper mask for the film. With that mask in the way it was, you could see a little bit of her nipples. She was furious. And I had to reassure her—we all did—that this was an anomaly. It’s on the film frame, it was never intended to be, and if you look at it in the movie, it’s not there. When it’s projected properly, you don’t see it. Sidney would not have done that; it’s not his kind of prurience.”

Even so, Heim and his cohorts could not understand what all the fuss was about. “She did have to be seminude in that scene, otherwise it wouldn’t have played,” he said. “I hate love scenes where women are wearing bras and men are wearing shorts. Give me a break.”

With this hurdle cleared, only two days of filming with the principal cast remained, all minor scenes set within the UBS offices. On Sunday, March 21, the cast and crew gathered at Sardi’s to celebrate the completion of their work—and the fact that Lumet had finished a week ahead of schedule, at a savings of $400,000—and to bid one another farewell. The party was formally hosted by Gottfried and Chayefsky, who were both in attendance, as were William Holden, Sidney and Gail Lumet, and Peter and Eletha Finch. As parting gifts, Kay Chapin, the script supervisor, received a lion’s tooth from Holden and a Gucci checkbook wallet from Finch. Marlene Warfield, who had been too shy throughout filming to engage her more illustrious colleagues, finally found the courage to approach Chayefsky at his table and ask him for his secrets to being a successful writer.

“You have to be disciplined,” he told her. “You have to get up early in the morning, every morning, and just sit in front of the page until something comes out. Write one word, if that’s all you can do in one day. And just keep doing it until things start pouring out.”

But not everyone was in such a generous mood, and amid the array of festive celebrity caricatures that decorated the walls of Sardi’s, one famous face was noticeably absent from the gathering of partygoers. As
New York Post
columnist Earl Wilson described the occasion, “Faye Dunaway ducked the ‘wrap-up’ party of the film
Network
at Sardi’s and the others were a little hurt.”

*   *   *

Even after good-byes had been said by those who wished to exchange them, one substantial portion of the film remained: the crescendo of impressionable television viewers running to their windows, at Howard Beale’s urging, to stick their heads out and yell that they, too, were mad as hell and not going to take this anymore. As Chayefsky’s screenplay had described this impromptu “Nuremberg rally,” the scene was to unfold on a stormy evening starting at the apartment of the Schumachers, as their daughter, Caroline, looks out onto “the rain-swept streets of the Upper East Side, the bulking, anonymous apartment houses and occasional brownstones.” Max then joins his daughter to gaze upon “the erratic landscape of Manhattan,” seeing “silhouetted HEADS in windows—here, there, and then out of nowhere everywhere, SHOUTING out into the slashing black RAIN.” There would be “a terrifying THUNDERCLAP, followed by a FULGURATION of LIGHTNING” that “punctuates the gathering CHORUS coming from the huddled, black border of the city’s SCREAMING people, an indistinguishable tidal roar of human RAGE.”

Chayefsky’s stage directions spelled out a clear vision for the scene, but they did not discourage Lumet from imagining an alternate presentation. As Gottfried recalled, “One day when we were talking about it, Sidney comes in with an idea. He thought it would be funnier, and perhaps even more effective, if, once the scene started with Peter, that people start shouting it in different areas. Like sitting in a taxi, they’d stick out their heads and shout, ‘I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.’ People coming from different places, coming from a taxi, coming from people walking in the street or something like that. I thought the original scene as Paddy wrote it would be far more powerful, and ultimately Sidney agreed. I know he did. That was basically changing the script, which certainly Paddy wouldn’t go in for.”

Lumet’s simpler approach may have been born of expediency—a preemptive expectation that shooting a sequence like this in cash-strapped, resource-starved New York would be expensive and impractical. As his camera operator Fred Schuler later said, “In California, because they always had all the money in motion pictures available, everything was, ‘You want a crane? Sure, no problem, you got a crane. What else you want?’ In New York you had to fight for everything, because it was not instantly available; it had to be made or you had to make a compromise.”

Once the commitment was made to Chayefsky’s version of the scene, it became “the biggest shooting of the picture,” according to director of photography Owen Roizman. The sequence required three nights of filming, from March 23 through 25, and more gear and equipment than had been used at any point in the New York production, including “fire trucks with water hoses to wet down the buildings, so that we could get a little sheen from the water dripping off the windowsills,” Roizman said, and “huge cherry pickers with lightning machines on them to light each building.… You could practically melt the generator with all the current that it draws.”

In one respect, the declining fortunes of New York City were beneficial to the scene and the real estate it required: urban flight had opened up an entire block’s worth of vacant residential buildings in the West Fifties, some that were being prepared for demolition and others that were simply lying dormant, that could be easily populated with the angry acolytes of Howard Beale. These apartments, however, provided nothing more than the physical space in which the shouting extras were to stand and scream—beyond that, the production had to supply its own curtains, blinds, and other window treatments; its own interior decorations; and even its own power. “There was no electricity and no elevator,” Roizman said, “so the electrical crew had to carry lights and cable all the way up to the top floor and spread out and get in there and put up lights in the rooms. Then there were these huge lightning machines which we mounted either on a cherry picker or on a roof across the street. We would shoot a section and then jump to another area and maybe do two or three a night.”

At 10:15
P.M.
on Thursday, March 25, 1976, the final cries of the “mad as hell” chorus were heard, and the filming of
Network
was complete.

*   *   *

By sticking faithfully to Chayefsky’s script, working quickly, and delivering a minimum number of options for each scene, Lumet had made it easy for editor Alan Heim to assemble a rough cut of
Network
while the film was still being shot. The studios backing the movie had already been shown portions of it before principal photography was completed and were pleased with what they saw. On March 20, MGM’s Daniel Melnick wrote to Chayefsky:

Dear Paddy,

You are a man of your word and of your words. The picture looks great and we thank you for it.

Love,

Dan

With much of this heavy lifting already out of the way, what remained for Heim to finish his cut were mostly odds and ends, such as excising most of the short but nonvital scenes that showed characters walking from one office to another in the UBS building. “I knew they were going to go immediately,” Heim said, “and we took pretty much all of them out if they didn’t further the story in some way. Paddy had wanted those in, and he never said a word about taking them out, once we took them out. We just sat there, we looked at it, and I think I said, ‘Why don’t we get rid of all the shots between stuff that’s happening? Between the important stuff.’ We got rid of that.”

But at least one crucial decision was reached in the editing stage, a choice that, if it had been made otherwise, might have eliminated Beatrice Straight’s performance from the film almost entirely. As Chayefsky had originally called for in his screenplay, Louise Schumacher’s devastated dismantling of Max was supposed to come before the motel liaison between Max and Diana. But when Heim played the film for Chayefsky, Gottfried, and Lumet, the transition between these two sequences seemed wrong somehow; the consensus among his collaborators was that Louise’s diatribe was slowing things down and needed to be eliminated, but Heim said he made a last-ditch plea to preserve it by having the motel love scene come first.

“It didn’t play,” Heim said. “I remember saying to Paddy and Howard and Sidney, ‘Look, let me just take this scene. I’ll move it here. Take a look at it and see how it plays.’ And Sidney said, ‘No, it’s not going to work. We have to drop this’—the scene being the Beatrice Straight scene. And I didn’t want that scene taken out of the picture. I would have lain across the doorway and fought with my life to keep that scene in the picture.”