Mad as Hell: The Making of Network and the Fateful Vision of the Angriest Man in Movies (32 page)

Before he died at 11:45
A.M.
on August 1, 1981, he wrote his last words on a pad to his wife, Susan. They read, “I tried. I really tried.”

*   *   *

With the same prescient accuracy that informed so much of his writing, Paddy Chayefsky seemed to sense that he was not destined for old age. As Dan Chayefsky would later recall, “I once read his palm when I was young, and I said, ‘You have a long life,’” which was of course not correct, because he died at fifty-eight. And he said, ‘Oh, shit.’” As his father neared the end of his life, Dan said, “He almost willed himself to go. There was a lot of pressure on him, that he took on. I think if he had a choice to stay or go, he would go.”

The author had seriously contemplated the likelihood of his own demise in the months after his 1977 heart attack, and at that time had drafted a set of instructions for his funeral, as precise and exacting as any script he had written, yet more forgiving and informal than any production he had previously overseen. He wanted the service “to be as easy on those attending as possible,” and not to cause his family “unnecessary distress.” A eulogy would be nice, the instructions continued, but not from “a rabbi who never met me in his life.” “Since I don’t know any rabbis that well,” Chayefsky added, “I guess that leaves out rabbinical eulogies.”

Furthermore, Chayefsky wrote in these directions, “Our family has never taken death all that seriously, and I don’t want my death taken all that seriously either. Say what prayers have to be said to maintain my Jewishness; a few kind words about me from people who mean it would be appreciated; as brief and as painless a burial service at the cemetery as possible; and then back to the comfort of somebody’s home where I honestly wish everybody a good time.”

In keeping with these wishes, Chayefsky’s funeral service was held on August 4 at Riverside Memorial Chapel on the Upper West Side, drawing more than five hundred attendees that included family members, friends, and admirers from throughout his career. In a eulogy, the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. said that the theme of Chayefsky’s life’s work had been “the corrupt and lunatic energies secreted by our great modern organizations … those energies that in time crazily explode through the deceptively rational surface of things.” Despite his unsentimental bent, Schlesinger said, Chayefsky was “sardonic, not cynical.… For all his relish in human folly, he never abandoned hope in humanity.” Nodding to that first sympathetic television drama that had made Chayefsky’s whole career possible, he added that the writer’s gift for satire “sprang from love—from his instinctive, sweet understanding of the inarticulate Martys and Claras of the world, bravely living lives of quiet desperation.”

Lumet said at the funeral, “Of all the people I worked with, the only one who is irreplaceable is Paddy.” Bob Fosse said, “Paddy and I had a deal: If I died first, he’d tell jokes, and if he died first, I’d do a dance”; he began to perform a tap step but broke down crying. “I’m doing it for you, Paddy,” he said through tears. “I can’t imagine my life without you.” Herb Gardner said in his remarks, “Paddy is dead, and when he finds out he’s going to be mad as hell.”

In one of the last interviews he gave before his death, Paddy Chayefsky offered his typically modest, emblematically skeptical wishes for how he wanted to be preserved by history. “A writer is what he writes,” he said, “and I would like to be remembered as a good writer. I would like the stuff I write to be done and read for many generations. I just hope the world lasts that long.”

8

IT’S ALL GOING TO HAPPEN

Speaking from his comfortably shabby office at 850 Seventh Avenue in the spring of 1981, Paddy Chayefsky offered his vision for what he expected the network news would look like someday—not as it might be depicted in
Network
, but as he believed it would appear on actual television sets as watched by people across the country. “There will be soothsayers soon,” he asserted.
Network
, he said, “wasn’t even a satire. I wrote a realistic drama. The industry satirizes itself.”

Pointing to the rise of so-called happy news programs on ABC, Chayefsky asked, was this “much different from what I said was going to happen?” Instead of turning its news division over to a made-up figure such as Diana Christensen and her programming department, hadn’t this network instead simply placed it under the direction of her real-life equivalent Roone Arledge, its young and innovative head of sports? “What’s the difference?” Chayefsky grumbled. “It’s all going to happen.”

It is not hard to imagine readers in 1981 laughing to themselves at Chayefsky’s remarks and the thought of this funny, fussy curmudgeon having fallen down the rabbit hole of his own prophecy. Certainly,
Network
was a passionate and sometimes wildly visionary movie. But it was just a movie. Even its most ardent admirers knew that it was an outrageous, over-the-top send-up of what could happen to television if all the wrong choices were made, not a step-by-step proposal for its eventual undoing. Anyone who was overly troubled by
Network
or who received its twisted wisdom with a straight face was a person not to be trusted entirely—even if that person was its own author.

Paddy Chayefsky lived and died in a world of three monolithic television broadcasters, invincible in their hegemony, transmitting their content to hundreds of millions of American viewers. There was only one way for them to present the news: stoic and serious, and read by a white man; the information offered by each network was generally identical to what the others provided, and its overall accuracy was regarded as unimpeachable. The only widely available means of instantaneous, two-way communication was the telephone, and keyboards were for typewriters, which were used to write letters, or possibly novels or screenplays, if you believed that you inhabited a world of ideas and were strong and single-minded enough to think that your thoughts and feelings could reshape it.

Yet to look at the American media landscape some three decades later is to see an environment that is unmistakably Chayefskyian. It is a realm where the oligarchy of the three networks has been assailed by a fourth rival and by a fifth, and overwhelmed by a hundred-pronged attack from cable, a metastasizing organism perpetually subdividing itself into smaller and narrower niches. Where nationally televised news had been a once-nightly ritual, it has since grown into a twenty-four-hour-a-day habit, available on channels devoted entirely and ceaselessly to its dissemination. The people who dispense these versions of the news seem to take their direction straight from the playbook of Howard Beale: they emote, they inveigh, and they instruct their audiences how to act and how to feel; some of them even cry on camera.

There is no longer one holistic system of news for audiences of every stripe, size, color, and creed: there is news for early-morning risers and news for late-night insomniacs; news for liberals and news for conservatives; sports news for men and feel-good news for women; news delivered in comedic voices and even, for a time, news for viewers who preferred to receive it from a Spanish-speaking puppet. Information is instantaneous and perilously subjective in an era when every man or woman can potentially be his or her own broadcaster. But when this array of apparently endless choice is untangled, and every cable wire and satellite beam is followed back to its source, what is revealed is a decidedly finite roster of media companies with the power to decide what is said and who is saying it: a college of corporations providing all necessities, tranquilizing all anxieties, amusing all boredoms.

Such a world may sound like the wildest dream of the
Network
corporate chief, Arthur Jensen, but it reverberates with the prophetic echoes of Howard Beale, who preached that television was “the ultimate revelation”: “This tube is the most awesome goddam force in the whole godless world! And woe is us if it ever falls in the hands of the wrong people.” And deeper still, one can hear the voice of Paddy Chayefsky, who warned without irony or tongue in cheek, “It’s all going to happen.”

In fact, it has already happened. And it is with only the slightest exaggeration that a contemporary screenwriter such as Aaron Sorkin can say, “No predictor of the future—not even Orwell—has ever been as right as Chayefsky was when he wrote
Network
.”

So how did it happen?

“Chayefsky’s warning was made to people who knew everything he said was true, but they felt powerless to stop it,” said Peggy Noonan, the
Wall Street Journal
columnist and former speechwriter to presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, who in the late 1970s was a producer for CBS Radio. “It was as if a young doctor came into a great teaching hospital in nineteenth-century France and announced, ‘I’ve figured it out, if we wash our hands before operating there will be fewer infections!’ And the other doctors look at him and say, ‘Yes, but we’re not going to start washing our hands for a long time.’ We’re on an irrevocable slide in that department.”

To a generation of television news professionals who came of age in the post-
Network
era, the film does not play as a radical comedy so much as a straightforward, that’s-the-way-it-is statement of fact. Short of witnessing the assassination of an on-air personality, “I have seen everything in that movie come true, or it’s happened to me,” said Keith Olbermann, the former anchor of ESPN’s
SportsCenter
and MSNBC’s
Countdown
. “There have been enough broadcasters killed—it’s just that we haven’t gotten around to any of them being killed for bad ratings.”

To Olbermann and many of his peers, whatever sanctity their industry still possessed was lost only a few years after Chayefsky’s death. First came the 1986 maneuvering by the sibling corporate titans Robert Preston Tisch and Laurence A. Tisch that gave their Loews Corporation a substantial stake in CBS—at the time, the nation’s second-place network, behind NBC—and helped put Laurence Tisch in charge of a broadcasting company saddled with $1 billion in debt. Next came the dark day in March 1987 when CBS fired 215 employees from its news department, despite an offer by CBS anchor Dan Rather and others to reduce their own salaries if it would save the jobs of some colleagues.

Before that day, the notion that news divisions were supposed to be self-supporting profit centers for their networks was broadcasting heresy. “They lost thirty million dollars a year,” said Olbermann, “when thirty million dollars a year was not the price of the highest-paid baseball player—thirty million dollars bought you maybe sixty Walter Cronkites. It was essentially the charitable contribution that those three networks paid to be allowed to dump everything else on TV in the audience’s mind.” But, he added, “once news got out from under the sacrosanct umbrella of public service, of a commitment that the FCC demanded of the individual stations, it would become part of entertainment.”

There is a self-admitted tendency in the news business to remember the broadcast industry’s golden age as more pristine and objective than it actually was: even in its formative days, even before television was the dominant medium, Edward R. Murrow was delivering radio broadcasts from the London Blitz that, in their stark factuality, were also meant to encourage American intervention in World War II; later, on TV, he was making his “urbane small talk” with Samuel Goldwyn, Eva Gabor, and Groucho Marx on
Person to Person
while addressing the impact of McCarthyism on
See It Now
. Walter Cronkite wiped his watery eyes as he reported the assassination of John F. Kennedy and cheered the moon landing and editorialized against the Vietnam War, but he jostled privately with colleagues, chased ratings fervently, and made no secret of his liberal leanings. “God Almighty,” he declared at a 1988 dinner honoring the Democratic congresswoman Barbara Jordan, “we’ve got to shout these truths in which we believe from the rooftops, like that scene in the movie
Network
. We’ve got to throw open our windows and shout these truths to the streets and to the heavens.”

But something changed forever in the 1980s, as the networks and their news divisions were absorbed into larger conglomerates and wrung for every penny they could produce; and those journalists who kept their lucrative jobs were left, as
60 Minutes
creator Don Hewitt would later write, “in no position to join the chorus” of criticism against these troubling consolidations. “Why aren’t we broadcast journalists hollering about it?” Hewitt asked. “Because we want it both ways. We want the companies we work for to put back the wall the pioneers erected to separate news from entertainment, but we are not above climbing over the rubble each week to take an entertainment-size paycheck for broadcasting news.”

In that same era, the Federal Communications Commission in 1987 abolished its long-standing Fairness Doctrine, which was supposed to ensure that broadcasters covered crucial public issues with impartiality and balance, and rules were relaxed that had prevented the concentration and cross-ownership of media companies in the hands of only a few parent corporations. When journalists entered the industry after this point, they joined up accepting certain fundamental truths that would have horrified previous generations.

“It was everyone’s basic understanding—and never necessarily even spoken of as a problem, just a basic, tacit understanding—that the information business was a
business
,” said Bill Wolff, the vice president of programming at MSNBC and executive producer of
The Rachel Maddow Show
, who began his career at ESPN in 1989. “You were responsible to be profitable. It was true in sports in 1989, and it’s true across the board today.”

The proliferation of cable television channels, which barely registered a blip in Chayefsky’s day, has added hundreds of UBS-style networks to the programming grid, all scrambling to fill their airtime with content that will deliver maximum returns on minimum investments, including a whole new breed of channels reporting the news for increasingly narrow slivers of niche viewerships and aiming their coverage at partisan audiences.