Mad as Hell: The Making of Network and the Fateful Vision of the Angriest Man in Movies (6 page)

On one such morning in the spring of 1974, Wald’s routine was interrupted by a visitor: a small, disheveled-looking man shabbily dressed in a sweatshirt with an undershirt poking out through its collar, baggy corduroy pants, and a beat-up pair of boots. Through large glasses, this bearded man looked at Wald expectantly, as if waiting for him to say something. Wald looked back at him with similar uncertainty. Awkward seconds passed silently until the visitor spoke.

“I’m going to spend the day with you,” Paddy Chayefsky told him.

“Okay,” Wald replied. “What the hell.”

A few days earlier Wald had received a call from an executive in NBC’s entertainment division, vouching for Chayefsky as a friend and asking if the writer could spend some time observing the operations of the news department while he researched a new project. Without inquiring much further, Wald agreed, and now he directed Chayefsky to a chair in the corner of his spacious office and proceeded to conduct his work. Throughout the day, colleagues buzzed in and out to discuss arcane matters—labor relations at NBC, personnel problems, the possibility that another network was pirating NBC’s broadcasts. Chayefsky took notes, sketching out the department’s floor plan, counting the number of desks, and jotting down bits of lingo that tickled his ear:
HUT ratings
.
Audience flow. The dark weeks
. He asked no questions, and at no time did Wald explain to anyone who he was or what he was doing there.

The next morning, Chayefsky returned to Wald’s office wearing the same clothes he had worn the day before and repeated his practice of silently watching the news department transact its business. At lunchtime Wald invited Chayefsky to a dining club on the sixty-fifth floor for a meal and a conversation he did not expect to be particularly scintillating. Based on what he’d seen of Chayefsky so far, Wald said, “I expected grunts.”

Instead, when Wald asked Chayefsky what he was up to, the writer replied, “Well, I’m doing a movie.” Chayefsky said he had been visiting the various television networks to see if there was a cinematic story to be told about them, and he had narrowed down his screenplay plans to one of two approaches: one, a documentary-style, day-in-the-life look at a single network over a twenty-four-hour period; the other, in the style of
The Hospital
, would be a more “far-out” satire.

How, asked Wald, would he decide which route to take? “From the way it appears,” Chayefsky explained. “The way you look at it and you talk to the people and everything else. And it develops, one way or the other.” Chayefsky indicated that he did not have a strong feeling either way but, Wald recalled, “He was very charming, and he was very funny about some of the people he’d seen. Which led me to believe that he was not going to treat them kindly.”

As early as December 1973, Chayefsky had started to revisit the core idea of a story set within the television industry, as he had laid out in his pilot script for
The Imposters
. But he recognized that its Bertolt Brecht setup was out of date and, if anything, did not treat its intended target seriously enough. The medium had evolved substantially since the era of “Marty,” as the infatuations of TV programmers and audiences vacillated from game shows to Westerns to the cornpone comedies of
The Beverly Hillbillies
and
The Andy Griffith Show
to the social satire of
All in the Family
. More crucially, television had grown into an invisible nexus capable of linking all Americans instantaneously—more than 90 percent of the country had tuned in to witness historical moments such as the raucous 1968 Democratic National Convention or the Apollo 11 moon landing—and Chayefsky had deep misgivings about this power.

“The thing about television right now is that it is an indestructible and terrifying giant that is stronger than the government, certainly Nixon’s and Agnew’s government,” he wrote in a preliminary treatment. “It is possible through television to take a small matter and blow it up to monumental proportions.”

Starting fresh, he sketched out the premise of a fictional news anchor he variously called Holbein, Munro, Kronkhite, or Kronkheit (whether intentionally or accidentally, he did not use the more customary spelling), who has a “crack up on the air” in prime time, unexpectedly boosting the ratings of his show and creating expectations for more extreme behavior in future broadcasts. This could provoke his TV rivals to have to keep pace with his outrageousness or provide the framework for a story about his network being swallowed up by a sinister multinational corporation. “So far,” Chayefsky wrote, “Kronkheit hasn’t done anything but express outrage.” But: “What would happen if he started inventing news—The basic joke is that the networks are so powerful they can make true what isn’t true and never even existed—The networks are so powerful they make the ravings of the maniac Kronkheit true.”

Still, Chayefsky felt that a basic “satirical clarity” was so far missing. “The only joke we have going for us,” he wrote,

is the idea of ANGER—the American people are angry and want angry shows—they don’t want jolly, happy family type shows like Eye Witness News; they want angry shows—so they base their programming on ANGER … the American people seem to be hungering for happier days like the Depression, note The Waltons—Programming sets up depression shows with happy, starving families.

Months later Chayefsky made his visits to NBC News and took private meetings with John Chancellor, the stentorian anchorman of
NBC Nightly News
, and CBS to meet his industry rival Walter Cronkite, the trusted anchor of
CBS Evening News
, either of whom might find himself, on any given weeknight, the victor in an ongoing race for ratings supremacy. In his notes from those meetings, Chayefsky recorded the clockwork precision of their schedules—hours set aside for reading, writing, reviewing, lunches, afternoon walks—the physical layout of their workplaces, and their vocabularies filled with industry argot.

What it all added up to wasn’t clear. Yet as Chayefsky delved deeper into the basic operations of television news, exploring reports in trade publications and research papers from scholarly journals provided by his roster of industry contacts, a certain central tension began to emerge. Atop the TV news pyramid sat the networks’ national evening broadcasts, thirty minutes of serious, straightforward content presided over by serious, straightforward men. The early 1970s had provided a torrent of significant events that perfectly matched these programs’ maturing ability to deliver immediate, up-to-the-minute coverage: the Senate Watergate hearings, the downfall of the Nixon administration, the withdrawal from Vietnam, crisis upon crisis in the Middle East. Given the vital role that these news programs played in informing the American populace (and protecting, via their public service, the near-monopolistic status of the networks), they were not expected to be profitable and were managed by a hierarchy of executives wholly separate from those responsible for entertainment content.

But national network news was not the only game in town. Each regional channel in the constellation of marketplaces where these networks operated had its own local newscast, leading into the national broadcasts and then returning for another half hour or hour at night. They had chirpy, cheerful, bantering coanchors and dynamic titles such as
Action News
and
Eyewitness News
; and in their vigorous competition with their local rivals, they were far from the “jolly, happy family type shows” that Chayefsky dismissed. Many of these news programs did not necessarily see it as their sacred obligation to dispassionately provide facts and knowledge to an uninformed audience. They were more like the Wild West, and some of them even reveled in this comparison.

Among the materials that Chayefsky reviewed was the transcript of a
60 Minutes
segment from March 10, 1974, titled “The Rating War.” For this report, a skeptical and unamused Mike Wallace visited with
Channel 7 News Scene
, the increasingly popular 11:00
P.M.
news show of KGO-TV in San Francisco, hosted by a quartet of male anchors who dubbed themselves “The Four Horsemen” and who could be seen in a popular series of on-air advertisements that cast them as bronco-riding cowboys arriving in a lawless frontier town. Wallace reported that 55 percent of the stories on
News Scene
“fell into the tabloid category—items on fire, crime, sex, tear-jerkers, accidents and exorcism.” Other recent segments on the program had included a report on a Florida heiress who was hacked to death by a machete-wielding assailant on the porch of her St. Augustine home; an interview with the mother of a nudist; and the story of a severed penis that had been found in the rail yards of the East Bay. (“Male genital found on railroad track,” viewers were advised. “Stay tuned!”)

The success of
News Scene
had decimated morale at KPIX, a more straitlaced competitor, but the general manager of KGO, a silver-haired industry veteran named Russ Coughlin, was unrepentant. “Isn’t fire, crime and sex news?” he said to Wallace. “When did that get out of the news business?… We could sit around and do pontifical kind of news day in and day out. We’d be back where we were in the old days, when we were trying to be very clever and profound about news, and died, and nobody watched it.”

This sensibility wasn’t exclusive to evening and late-night newscasts. For his research, Chayefsky clipped an April 1974
New York Times
profile of Chuck Scarborough, a young anchorman recently delivered to WNBC in New York from WNAC in the cutthroat Boston marketplace. As compelling as the article itself was an advertisement on its second page for an NBC daytime show called
Not for Women Only
, promoting an upcoming episode called “Cats, Dogs and Underdogs.” “What kinds of animals go with what kinds of people?” the ad read. “Should your pet have a pet? How can you test a dog’s IQ? Barbara Walters and a panel of animal psychologists and other specialists discuss everything from guppies to puppies.”

In May 1974 Chayefsky and Gottfried flew to Georgia to meet Pat Polillo, a creator of the
Action News
format and a widely traveled news director who had previously worked in Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and at KGO in San Francisco before arriving at WAGA, a local Atlanta station. “You win because you have a competitive edge,” Polillo had told a convention of television executives earlier in the year. “Finding and developing that competitive edge in a market where the other stations are doing a good job in news is one hell of a fight.”

As far as Gottfried could tell, all that this inquiry yielded were more sketches of newsroom floor plans and head counts of cameramen and assistant directors. “The Atlanta trip made it clear that there was nothing that exciting, as far as a movie was concerned, that we could find to do about a local station,” Gottfried said. “Not the kind of thing that would make a formidable movie, in any event. You’d probably end up with some kind of soap opera or something.”

But in his personal notebooks Chayefsky was mapping the architecture of a structural behemoth he identified as THE NETWORK, whose internal configurations he had never closely contemplated, despite having earned his living from several of them. Each such entity had a corporate division (which, for narrative purposes, could provide a “theme relating to power
+
profits uber alles”), a programming division (“theme related to ratings”), a news division (“theme relating to ratings vs truth”), divisions for sales, sports, and so on.

What he needed, Chayefsky realized, was a “basic incident that ties all these units together—around which the various definitive characters revolve and interplay on one another’s story.” His preference, he wrote, was that this incident “evolve out of NEWS”: “Thematically, we have to reconcile the concept of RATINGS UBER ALLES and whatever statement about power we can find.”

Starting again with the incident of the television anchor who snaps on air, Chayefsky piled all the knowledge he had accumulated in his travels and research into a story that was ambitious to the point of oversaturation. There would be a young hotshot news producer who is brought in to boost a show’s sagging ratings (“What he did in Detroit was to tabloid the news, featuring sex, scandal and sports
+
slighting hard news”); resistance and consternation from the network that runs this show, which is on the verge of being bought out by an international corporation or maybe by “Arab oil sheiks”; conflict with the Federal Communications Commission, which turns out to be owned by the corporation or the sheikhs anyway. And then: “We are shooting for a third act,” Chayefsky wrote, “in which the NETWORK becomes so powerful it is an international power of itself and even declares war on some country.”

Lest he lose sight of his characters, Chayefsky reminded himself: “The Basic story is the destruction of a buccaneering independent TV HOTSHOT by surrendering his identity, patriotism and self to the dehumanized multi-national conglomerate.” At the close of act 2, he wrote, would be “where HOTSHOT submits, is sold the inevitable necessity of multinational and sells his soul in exchange.” What he envisioned, in short, was nothing less than “FAUST
+
MEPHISTOPHELES today.”

Even the author seemed to realize the preposterously high stakes he had set for himself. As he wrote in a separate set of notes, “Now, all this is Strangelove-y as hell, can we make it work?”

*   *   *

Chayefsky approached his writing like any other trade; the most crucial requirement to completing a task was not ingenuity or talent, but the application of persistence over time. “If you can get in four good hours a day,” he said of his work, “you’re in terrific shape.” Each day, after stopping off for his morning Sanka, he would arrive by 9:30 or 9:45 at his eleventh-floor office, a converted efficiency apartment indifferently decorated with worn gray carpet and haphazardly furnished with a piano, a complete collection of
National Geographic
magazines from January 1965 onward, an L-shaped desk to support his Olympia manual typewriter, and a swivel chair with stuffing spilling out of a torn armrest. The view his workspace offered, through tattered, yellowing paper window shades, was of a tenement across the street where a man could be seen at all times of day standing in his underwear and washing his hands in a basin. While his neighbor attended to his tasks, Chayefsky turned to his own solitary labors.