Mad as Hell: The Making of Network and the Fateful Vision of the Angriest Man in Movies (28 page)

7

CORRUPT AND LUNATIC ENERGIES

On April 3, 1978, almost a year to the day after he won his Oscar for the screenplay of
Network
, Paddy Chayefsky returned to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles, as a presenter at the Fiftieth Annual Academy Awards. That evening’s milestone program opened with Debbie Reynolds performing a song-and-dance salute to the maturity of Hollywood and the progress that American cinema had made in the last half century. “Look how we’ve matured!” she crowed. “Look how self-assured! We’ve been through pranksters and monsters and gangsters, and look how we endure!” But Chayefsky was in no mood for backslapping congratulations.

As the celebratory telecast ticked toward its third hour, a glittering backdrop on the theater’s stage rose to reveal Chayefsky ambling down a flight of stairs, dressed in a tuxedo and bow tie nearly identical to those he had worn at the previous year’s ceremony, as he headed toward the lectern to announce the winners of the screenplay awards. His mind, however, was not on his assigned duties but on an acceptance speech made earlier in the night by Vanessa Redgrave, who, in receiving her Oscar for best supporting actress in
Julia
, had used her own time at the microphone to decry the “small bunch of Zionist hoodlums” who had protested
The Palestinian
, a documentary she had produced in support of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Those remarks had drawn some jeers from the audience, mixed within an equal smattering of approving applause, but had otherwise gone unacknowledged in a show that had nonetheless made time for the banter of R2-D2 and C-3PO, the chirpy robot sidekicks of
Star Wars
, and a performance by Aretha Franklin of “Nobody Does It Better,” the theme song of
The Spy Who Loved Me
, accompanied by a cadre of neon leotard–clad dancers who could have stepped right off the cover of a David Bowie album.

With the passing of each interminable minute yielding no other champion to rise and confront Redgrave on comments that Chayefsky felt were clearly outrageous and anti-Semitic, the author decided he would do so himself. He weighed in his mind the words he should use and the mood he should strike, sensing the potential of the moment that would soon be upon him. But he could hardly have expected that the words he was about to speak, considered for a matter of minutes and uttered in the span of just a few more, would come to define him as completely as any lines of dialogue he had labored over in his decades-long career as a dramatist. Nor could he have known that, for many thousands seated in the theater and millions more watching him on television that night, they were likely to be the last words they would ever hear him say.

*   *   *

In the months since
Network
was released, the film had woven its way into the fabric of the national culture—if not the entire movie, then one discrete and memorable moment from it. As Richard Kahn, MGM’s vice president of advertising and publicity, wrote to Chayefsky in a memo in early 1977, “There must be no greater reward for a writer than to be able to penetrate the general consciousness of the public.”

Attached to the letter was a packet of recent news clippings that all, in some form or another, referenced Howard Beale’s combustible catchphrase. The headline of a
Los Angeles Times Magazine
article introducing its readers to alternative and overlooked candidates in an upcoming election cycle read, “
WE’RE MAD AS HELL AND WE’RE NOT GOING TO TAKE IT ANY MORE
…” A letter to the editor of the
Los Angeles Times
, responding to a report that Barbara Walters would soon be leaving her coanchor’s chair at ABC News after an irreconcilable falling-out with Harry Reasoner, began, “‘I’m as mad as hell! And I’m not going to take it anymore!’ No truer words can be uttered. This is the way I feel when I read articles on such people as Harry Reasoner versus Barbara Walters.” When that same newspaper wanted to editorialize on the plight of American agriculture, it published a cartoon depicting a farmer in his fields using a tractor to carve out the start of a message that read,
I’M MAD AS HELL AND I’M NOT GONNA TAKE IT A.
And when
Time
recounted the story of Anthony Kiritsis, a failed businessman who had held his mortgage broker hostage at gunpoint for sixty-three hours, the magazine described this thwarted kidnapper as a man who “was mad as hell, and he decided not to take it any more.”

To Chayefsky, these accumulated citations were hardly validating. Instead they represented a gross oversimplification of the themes of
Network
—encroaching technology, malleable media, and the battle to maintain individuality in a complex world—reducing them to an easily digestible slogan, a caricature. There was even a
Mad
magazine parody of the movie, titled “Nutwork,” in which a news anchor named Harrowed Bile instructs his viewers to “go to your windows and open them and yell, ‘I’M MAD AS HELL, AND YOU AIN’T GETTING A LOUSY PIZZA! WITH OR WITHOUT EXTRA CHEESE AND PEPPERONI!’” In a manner similar to its source material, the satire ends with the character’s assassination—not by the Great Ahmed Kahn, but by pistol-packing cartoons of Harry Reasoner, Walter Cronkite, John Chancellor, and Barbara Walters.

Back in New York, viewers could turn on their television sets and see a commercial for a local banking chain lampooning the Beale speech by showing enraged citizens running to their windows and screaming for free checking. Though this would-be tribute displeased Chayefsky, he concluded he could not stand in its way. “They shouldn’t have appropriated my idea,” he groused. “It just isn’t right. The most I could do, however, is seek an injunction.”

Asked later how he had hit upon the “Mad as hell” monologue when he was writing
Network
, Chayefsky showed no particular preference or affinity for the scene. “I just made it up,” he explained. “That’s one of those things you count on from impetus.”

If this fetishization of Beale’s angry motto mystified its author, equally mystifying to his audience was why such bleak signals should be emanating from Chayefsky, who, having earned his reputation for being so closely attuned to the plights and frustrations of the common man, now seemed to be picking up his transmissions from some darker and more despairing place. In one of the author’s rare daytime TV talk show appearances, the usually ebullient Dinah Shore told him, in a soft and conciliatory tone, “You’re the fellow who wrote those lovely, delicate, tender, sensitive characterization pieces—
Marty
and
The Middle of the Night
, and now you come out with a scorcher.”

With uncommon gentleness, Chayefsky replied, “It’s not me. I’m still writing tender, delicate pieces. It’s the world that’s gone nuts.”

There was no imminent pressure on Chayefsky to produce a follow-up to
Network
, and for once in his career he could patiently consider his next move. He walked away from a $500,000 offer to write a screenplay about the Israel Defense Forces’ successful rescue mission at Entebbe Airport in Uganda (the NBC television version of this story,
Raid on Entebbe
, had been Peter Finch’s unexpected swan song), and declined an NBC project called
The War Against the Jews
. Though the network would find success with a similar production, called
Holocaust
, an Emmy Award–winning miniseries starring Fritz Weaver, Meryl Streep, and James Woods, Chayefsky concluded that “the subject was simply too painful for me to write about.” More to the point, he said, the network was “going to cut it any way they want to cut it. They’re not going to give me the final control.”

During the theatrical release of
Network
, the eminent science-fiction author Ray Bradbury had written a tongue-in-cheek essay suggesting that the film should not have ended with Beale’s death; instead, Bradbury said, Beale should have been given a stately funeral that would have driven the ratings at UBS even higher, and buried in a “grandiose tomb” with “an immense sculptured rock in front.” After three days, the rock would have been rolled away and the tomb would have been found empty, setting the stage for Beale’s Second Coming. “The assassination, of course, was a fraud,” Bradbury wrote. “Finch, struck by soft bullets that anesthetized rather than killed, has been kept on ice in some Florida rest home against the day when it is time for his ecclesiastical rebirth.”

Sidney Lumet, who had been sent a copy of the essay by Bradbury, wrote back to say that he loved the idea and would forward it to Chayefsky, adding, “Among other things, it gives us a chance for NETWORK two.” “Also,” Lumet continued, “with the reality of television, it would allow them an on-going series because each time he is shot and the stone rolled back and he reappears, it could be the beginning of a new series.” The resurrected Beale, the director suggested, “could come back each time in the guise of whatever is in fashion: i.e., a black militant, Bella Abzug, an esoteric film director, or, what have you. Who knows, he could even come back as a fashion designer.”

As he promised, Lumet sent the offbeat proposal to Chayefsky, where it went no further.

In this same period, Chayefsky made slightly more progress on a screenplay treatment for
Reds
, Warren Beatty’s motion picture about John Reed, the American journalist and author of
Ten Days That Shook the World
, who was a firsthand witness to the Bolshevik Revolution. After reading biographies of Reed, Chayefsky began to sketch out the acts of a story that would follow the journalist over a period of five years, on a journey from Portland, Oregon; to Greenwich Village; to Petrograd. (Beatty would later say that he was asking Chayefsky only to provide his informal advice on
Reds
, not to write the screenplay. “I was not asking him to work on it,” Beatty said. “I was mooching on his opinion.”) But Chayefsky agonized over how he would make a hero out of Reed, who not only had been an ardent supporter of communism—a system Chayefsky fervently believed was inferior to capitalism and destined for failure—but had given his life for an inherently flawed and ultimately wrongheaded movement.

Seeing no parallels with and feeling no sympathy for his would-be protagonist, Chayefsky wrote in his treatment, “We’ve got a guy who falls in love with his role in history—which is all he ever really wanted.… He is world-famous, admired, respected and influential—and all that has no more meaningfulness to it than anything else—The resolution seems to be it’s all shit, no matter what you do.” When Reed died, Chayefsky wrote, “He didn’t want to live because the great ultimate truth he had fallen in love with and given his life to—(the betterment of the world)—turned out to be as full of shit as everything else.” The overall story that Reed’s life suggested to Chayefsky was “that a man can live without love, but he can’t live without his illusions. (Something in that as a theme, maybe.)” Even for Chayefsky, it felt too nihilistic.

Forgoing other people’s pitches and suggestions, Chayefsky pursued the modernized Jekyll-and-Hyde story he had first begun to sketch out while he wrote
Network
. In his telling, the central character—first named Edward Jekyll, then rechristened Eddie Jessup—would be “an associate professor in behavioral psychology” who has for years “experimented with hallucinogenic drugs, isolation chambers, sense-deprivation tanks, hypnotic and induced trances, Eastern mysticism and Western gestalts,” and who, via an unknown mushroom compound he encounters at a tribal ceremony in Mexico, hits upon what he believes is life’s “Ultimate Force” and “Final Truth,” but is instead turned temporarily into “a small, finely furred, erect, bipedal, protohuman creature.”

In the afterglow of
Network
, Chayefsky was as committed to the project as to the target price he expected for it. “Paddy decided he wanted a million bucks,” Howard Gottfried recalled. “That’s it. He wanted a million dollars. You don’t want to pay? Forget it.”

As he had done on
Network
and
The Hospital
, Chayefsky immersed himself in field research for the project, traveling to hospitals and universities and meeting with scientific experts up and down the East Coast, at Harvard and at Duke and throughout New York, at Columbia, Hofstra, Fordham, Lehman College, and the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He familiarized himself with the writings of Aldous Huxley, Carlos Castaneda, Timothy Leary, and Dr. John C. Lilly, whose studies of human consciousness had combined the use of isolation chambers and psychedelic drugs. And on a visit to Stockton State College in California, Chayefsky tried a sensory-deprivation tank for himself, describing the experience as “a warm return to your mother’s womb.”

With the help of Sam Cohn, the powerful talent agent from ICM, Chayefsky sold, as a novel, a short, incomplete treatment of his proposed film about “the subject of laboratory experiments involving man’s primal instincts and his ability to revert to them.” Chayefsky had never written a novel before and was wary of this arrangement, but he agreed that it would help create awareness and stir interest for the eventual movie. Together with Gottfried and Daniel Melnick, the former MGM executive who had helped guide
Network
and who was now an independent producer, he then brought the new project to Columbia Pictures.

The studio was eager for its own science-fiction thriller, laden with makeup and special effects, to keep pace with the latest Hollywood vogue created by the runaway box-office grosses of
Star Wars
, which had opened in May 1977. But Columbia’s president and chief executive, David Begelman, had one lingering question about how its narrative would be resolved.

As Gottfried would later recall the meeting, “We reached the point where Paddy really has nothing else to say. And Begelman says, ‘What happens then?’ Paddy hesitates and says, ‘I don’t know.’ Begelman says, ‘What do you mean you don’t know?’ He says, ‘Well, we’ll work on it.’”

Chayefsky nonetheless had his million-dollar deal, and it was as lucrative, as intense, and as stressful a bargain as he had ever struck. He immersed himself in the project, but that summer, as he labored over the manuscript of the novel and tormented himself to devise an ending for the story—should Jessup die, or should some other unknown fate befall him?—Chayefsky suffered a heart attack. As the author, now fifty-four years old, told his son, Dan, during a visit with him in the hospital, “At least this proves I’m mortal.”