Mad as Hell: The Making of Network and the Fateful Vision of the Angriest Man in Movies (24 page)

In a similar spirit, he argued that
Network
was in fact a satirical send-up of what could someday be, not a criticism of things as they were. “The American tradition of journalism is objectivity,” Chayefsky said. “We have an editorial page. We have a comic page. There is nothing valuable about a journalist—or anybody for that matter—getting up and comicalizing the news. The news should not—must not—become part of the entertainment scheduling. To make a gag out of the news is disreputable and extremely destructive.”

*   *   *

The first major review of
Network
to see print was published in the
New York Times
on November 15, one day after the film’s premiere. It was a rave. Tweaking its sensationalized promotional campaign, Vincent Canby wrote that the film was, “as its ads proclaim, outrageous. It’s also brilliantly, cruelly funny, a topical American comedy that confirms Paddy Chayefsky’s position as a major new American satirist. Paddy Chayefsky? Major? New? A satirist? Exactly.”

As astounded as he expected his audience to be that the observant dramatist and common-man champion of
Marty
had matured into the withering ironist of
The Hospital
and now
Network
, Canby wrote of Chayefsky, “His humor is not gentle or generous. It’s about as stern and apocalyptic as it’s possible to be without alienating the very audience for which it was intended.” But to dismiss the absurdities of
Network
as scenarios that could never happen was to miss the point: “These wickedly distorted views of the way television looks, sounds and, indeed, is, are the satirist’s cardiogram of the hidden heart, not just of television but also of the society that supports it and is, in turn, supported.” Praising the performances of Finch, Holden, and Dunaway (who was “touching and funny” as “a woman of psychopathic ambition and lack of feeling”), the supporting turns of Duvall and Beatty, and the direction of Lumet, Canby concluded, “As the crazy prophet within the film says of himself,
Network
is vivid and flashing. It’s connected into life.”

In the
Saturday Review
, Judith Crist declared
Network
“a ruthless exploration of the ‘aesthetics’ and ‘art’ of television that goes beyond its present-day realities to forecast the brave new world of the medium’s tomorrow, let alone some innovations of this very season,” adding that “Chayefsky’s drama is rooted in the realities of life in those Sixth Avenue monoliths that house the networks, its near-roman à clef personalities identifiable to anyone familiar with the industry.” The
Daily News
gave it two thumbs-up as well, with film critic Rex Reed deeming
Network
“a blazing, blistering indictment of television by the brilliant probing mind of Paddy Chayefsky,” while television editor Kay Gardella wrote that it “sustains an artistic perception of network television that is both outrageously funny and, with a good stretch of the imagination, quite believable.”

A few days later, Canby was back in the pages of the
New York Times
praising
Network
in a follow-up essay as “a satiric send-up of commercial television that contains only one decent, upstanding, honorable, moral fellow of recognizable strength in the cast of characters—that is, Chayefsky, who doesn’t appear on the screen at all but is the dominant presence in the film.”

“Though Sidney Lumet has directed it as if we were there and it was happening now,” Canby wrote, “
Network
is not meant to be realistic, a movie-à-clef. It’s a roller coaster ride through Chayefsky’s fantasies as he imagines what television might do if given the opportunity.” This, he realized, was not going to be everyone’s cup of tea.

I understand people simply not finding this sort of thing as funny as I do. It’s a bit masochistic, like sitting on the stern of the Titanic and giggling all the way until you finally slide under the water. But to be morally outraged by Chayefsky’s moral outrage, on the grounds that Chayefsky (1) offers no solutions, (2) finds no redeeming factors, or (3) sets himself up as judge and jury, seems to me to be missing the point of satire, which is to be as sweepingly stern as an Old Testament prophet, intelligently concerned and bitterly comic. Satirists have no obligation to be fair to the enemy, or especially accurate.… It would be reassuring if we could piously blame TV’s ills on a few isolated people. It might also be the same as blaming Patty Hearst for having had the poor form to allow herself to be kidnapped.

By this point
Network
was in need of a few ardent defenders. Reviewing the film for
New York
magazine, John Simon wrote that
Network
“inherits the Glib Piety Award direct from the hands of
The Front
, the previous winner. When it comes to sanctimonious smugness and holier-than-thou sententiousness, the new laureate is even more deserving of the unsavory prize.
Network
, moreover, is a further lap in Paddy Chayefsky’s, the scenarist’s, fascinating race against decrepitude and impotence.… The onscreen result is worse than a three-ring circus, however: verbal and intellectual Grand Guignol.” While impressed by Lumet’s direction and the work of the acting ensemble (though Holden, “alas, has not aged well”), Simon concluded that “this crude film really panders to whatever is smug and pseudosophisticated in an audience of self-appointed insiders; their smart-alecky laughter was not an inspiriting thing to hear.”

At the
Nation
, Robert Hatch asked rhetorically, “So this is a slashing comment on network television and therefore exceedingly bold? Not by a country mile. There is plenty wrong with television, plenty to satirize. But
Network
prudently misses the point, dishing up an outrageous razzle-dazzle stew that will ruffle no network feathers and delight a popular audience that enjoys being titillated by improbable threats.”

And in the
New York Post
, a young film critic named Frank Rich dismissed
Network
as “a mess of a movie” that “is drastically out of control—dramatically, cinematically and intellectually—and it treats its audience with more contempt than any other serious American movie this year.” With some economy and restraint, Rich wrote, Chayefsky “might have had a classic 15-minute sketch for
Saturday Night Live
.” Instead:

We begin to feel that Chayefsky is a cranky paranoid who’s overstacked his polemical deck, and we stop believing in his message. Since the script treats the mass public that watches TV as morons, too,
Network
at times seems to be saying that we deserve the TV we get—and that neutralizes the film’s point even further.… You begin to suspect that Chayefsky wrote
Network
not so much to attack TV as to attack a generation of American kids who frighten and baffle him.

Overall, Rich said that
Network
“contains so much extraneous material that it’s hard to believe Chayefsky ever wrote a second draft.” And he lambasted Dunaway’s performance (playing “the meanest woman to be seen in an American film since the Wicked Witch of the West”) as a living embodiment of the film’s flaws: “She’s so busy trying to outrage us that she doesn’t even notice that she’s drowning in her own bile.” But then again, he wrote, “In
Network
, everybody stinks—except Chayefsky.”

Perhaps the most scathing response to the film came as a one-two punch published in the December 6 issue of the
New Yorker
. Pauline Kael, in a film review unpromisingly entitled “Hot Air,” wrote, “In
Network
, Paddy Chayefsky blitzes you with one idea after another. The ideas don’t go together, but who knows which of them he believes, anyway? He’s like a Village crazy bellowing at you: blacks are taking over, revolutionaries are taking over, women are taking over. He’s got the New York City hatreds, and ranting makes him feel alive.”

Though the story of Howard Beale’s breakdown might contain “a fanciful, Frank Capra nuttiness that could be appealing,” and Finch’s “fuzzy mildness is likable,” Kael wrote that “Chayefsky is such a manic bard that I’m not sure if he ever decided whether Howard Beale’s epiphanies were the result of a nervous breakdown or were actually inspired by God.” And while Dunaway brings to her performance “a certain heaviness … that has made some people think her Garbo-esque,” her character ultimately isn’t “a woman with a drive to power, she’s just a dirty Mary Tyler Moore.”

Kael wrote that, for all of
Network
’s flaws, blame rested squarely on its author, for whom the film is “a ventriloquial harangue” that he spends thrashing around “in messianic God-love booziness, driving each scene to an emotional peak.”

What happened to his once much-vaunted gift for the vernacular? Nothing exposes his claims to be defending the older values so much as the way he uses four-letter words for chortles. It’s so cheap you may never want to say **** again. Chayefsky doesn’t come right out and tell us why he thinks TV is so goyish, but it must have something to do with his notion that all feeling is Jewish.

Elsewhere in that same issue, Michael J. Arlen, the magazine’s television critic, provided his own epitaph for the film. “As entertainment, it’s probably fair to say that
Network
is lively, slick, and highly professional, and combines the attention to background detail and the avoidance of interior complexity which more or less define the show-business ethos it was attempting to criticize,” he wrote. “As satire or as serious comment, the movie seemed oddly pious and heavy-handed. In other words, it was another typically overmounted, modishly topical, over obvious popular entertainment—good for a few laughs, and something to do after dinner.”

*   *   *

The polarizing responses to
Network
played right into the campaign devised for it by MGM and United Artists, which were busy producing thousands of buttons and bumper stickers that read,
I’M MAD AS HELL AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE IT ANYMORE.
The controversy surrounding the film merely suggested to audiences that it was something they needed to see for themselves and form an opinion about; and the harder it was attacked, the more bulletproof it became.

Propelled by some of the reviews that described
Network
as a roman à clef, an idea had taken hold in the media that each character in the film was an analog for a real-world figure who had somehow wronged or offended Chayefsky, and the screenplay was his mocking revenge on him. An item in
New York
magazine straightforwardly declared that Max Schumacher was based on Edward R. Murrow; that the UBS executives played by William Prince and Wesley Addy were William S. Paley and Frank Stanton of CBS; and Laureen Hobbs was Angela Davis. There was wide consensus, too, that Diana Christensen was a gloss on NBC’s female vice president of daytime programming, Lin Bolen, who had spoken briefly by phone with Dunaway while she was preparing for the role. “’Tis said Lin axed some of Paddy’s pet TV projects,” the gossip columnist Liz Smith wrote. Had anyone sought to confirm these claims with the author, he would have handily dismissed them.

As the year drew to a close,
Time
magazine published its own battlefield update from the ongoing skirmishes that continued to be waged around
Network
. Dubbing it “The Movie TV Hates and Loves,” the newsweekly reported that Lumet had recently been barred from a screening at NBC because of the film, while quoting an anonymous NBC vice president who said of the movie, “It’s a piece of crap. It had nothing to do with our business.” The article also cited supporters such as Norman Lear, who called it “a brilliant film,” and Gore Vidal, who said, “I’ve heard every line from that film in real life.”

In a sidebar to the
Time
article, Chayefsky did not address his supporters or attack his detractors, but took aim directly at the medium of television. In a treatise that could have come right from his
Network
screenplay, he wrote, “I think the American people deserve some truth—at least as much truth as we can give them—instead of pure entertainment or pure addiction.”

“Let’s at least show the country to ourselves for what it really is,” Chayefsky wrote.

It includes more than pimps, hustlers, junkies, murderers and hit men. All family life is not as coarse and brutalized as it is presented to us on TV. There is a substantial thing called America with a very complicated, pluralistic society that is worth honest presentation.… Television coarsens all the complexities of human relationships, brutalizes them, makes them insensitive. The point about violence is not so much that it breeds violence—though that is probably true—but that it totally desensitizes viciousness, brutality, murder, death so that we no longer actively feel the pains of the victim or suffer for the mourners or feel their grief.… We have become desensitized to things that are usually part of the human condition. This is the basic problem of television. We’ve lost our sense of shock, our sense of humanity.

Desperate as these words sounded, Chayefsky had not yet given up entirely on his fellow man. Amid the furious back-and-forth over the release of
Network
, he had received an unexpected note of support from an ABC employee named Barbara Gallagher, the assistant to the president of the network’s entertainment division, who sent him an appreciative fan letter. “Wow! What a movie!” Gallagher wrote. “I was caught up in ‘Network’ … I can’t tell you what an impact it had on me. It’s a classic,
+
absolutely the best picture I’ve seen in years. Bravo!” Then, beneath her signature, she informed him: “P.S. I’m quitting my job…”

Chayefsky gently mimicked Gallagher in his reply, writing, “Wow! What a note! You are terrific. You are also very sweet and kind to have taken the trouble to write me.”

He added: “Don’t quit yet. On the whole, ABC has been very kind to me.”

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PRIMAL FORCES AND PHANTASMAGORIA