Mad as Hell: The Making of Network and the Fateful Vision of the Angriest Man in Movies (7 page)

He wrote on whatever paper he could find, with whatever implement was available to him. Sometimes he expressed his ideas in complete and properly punctuated sentences. Other times they emerged in fragmentary bursts that ended on uncertain dashes. But whenever he had a thought or self-criticism, he reflexively committed it to paper, preferring unlined pages that were colored a canary yellow.

Before Chayefsky commenced on a proper screenplay it was his practice to prepare detailed organizational outlines and write novelistic, narrative prose treatments. Then he would rewrite them, and rewrite them, practically from scratch, as if testing himself to see how much of the previous draft he could still remember. Frequently he would stop in mid-summary and, in his writing, speak aloud to himself as he took stock of the situation: “What have we got?” “Okay let’s follow that through.” “Let’s just push through the story and see just what our basic premise demands.” In these necessary pauses he would decide whether he was satisfied with what he had or whether it was time to clear the table.

At the outset of his latest, nameless project, Chayefsky did not have characters so much as concepts. There was HOTSHOT, his “young (35) news producer” who is hired to bring his hit tabloid format to an ailing network newscast; KRONKITE, the fading anchorman whose on-set episode is broadcast across the nation due to a “fuggup”; and the NETWORK, on the verge of being or already bought out by an international conglomerate. Or maybe, Chayefsky speculated in capital letters, “BY THE END OF THE PICTURE, ALL THE NETWORKS WILL HAVE BEEN BOUGHT BY OTHER MULTINATIONALS.”

Within a few weeks, Chayefsky had changed some of these parameters. His young HOTSHOT hero had metamorphosed into a fifty-year-old president of the network’s news division, “a tough, but righteous fellow” who, alongside iconic broadcasters such as Edward R. Murrow and Fred W. Friendly, had been “involved up to his neck with the breaking of Senator McCarthy’s reign of terror,” and who, despite a disintegrating home life—“His wife divorced him years ago, and his children have grown further and further away from him”—still regards himself “as a man with the highest traditions of journalism.” Soon this character would also have a name, Max Schumacher, a nod to the baseball pitcher Harold “Prince Hal” Schumacher, who in Chayefsky’s youth had won the World Series with the 1933 New York Giants.

The “Krazy Kronkite” character also gained a name, Howard Beale—Howard as a tribute to Howard Gottfried and Beale for the mother-daughter duo of “Big Edie” and “Little Edie” Beale, the eccentric cousins of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis who had lately clashed with Long Island health inspectors over their garbage-ridden Grey Gardens estate. The fictional Beale now had a back story, too, as a man in his late fifties, “benign, magisterial, the archetypical network anchorman, but declining in stature and audience,” though still “an old friend and a man of genuine stature” in Max Schumacher’s eyes.

A few supporting characters began to take shape as well: a hungry young corporate executive named Hackett, and a regional news director, maybe named Gianini or De Filipo, who would clash with Schumacher after previous successes at stations in Detroit, San Francisco, and Atlanta. (“His method of doing this is to adopt a tabloid attitude towards the news, sacrificing hard news, especially international and national news, for filmed stories on sex, scandal, nudity, sports, crippled children and dying animals and lots of religion.”)

The film would begin on a typical day as Howard Beale comes in to prepare for the evening network news. But, Chayefsky wrote, “ten minutes into the news cast he flips out. He begins cussing his co-anchorman in Washington as being full of shit, throws a chair at one of the other newscasters, and generally carries on in a way startling, to say the least, for the benign, objective, pontifical dean of television anchormen.”

Six months later, Beale returns refreshed from his stay at a sanitarium, and when he is put back on the air, he loses it again.

But this time, his flip is not an unruly, profanity-ridden flip out, but an angry outburst against some piece of news. Beale erupts out of his benign, objective, pontifical image and turns into a roaring editorializing Jeremiah. Let’s say, the news is about inflation, and Beale warns in prophetic rage of what will happen if we allow inflation to proceed uninhibited. In the course of his eruption, he will call Nixon full of shit for pretending the economics of the country are being taken care of because it’s a congressional election year and Nixon is lying to the country to keep his party electable. Something like that.

The crucial twist here, wrote Chayefsky, “is instead of objective reporting, we put a raging prophet on the air, a prophet in the biblical sense, who will prophesy doom and disaster every day, who will roar out against the inequities, hypocrisies and absurdities of our times.” The problem, he realized, “is a man doing the raging prophet every day can get to be repetitive and dull and a pain in the ass, so the trick is to keep Beale straight but letting the audience know that you never know when and where he will erupt.”

“Okay, let’s push on,” he wrote. “Maybe the incidents will clear themselves up.”

While he cycled through possible endgame scenarios for the screenplay—the networks versus Nixon? the multinational corporations declare war on Chile?—Chayefsky decided to add a love interest for Schumacher, “a no bullshit girl who sees through all of Max’s high principled bullshit,” whom he would dislike at first but who would, in the long run, come to represent the virtuous path he needed to follow. He also devised an early scene in which Schumacher and Beale “get smashed” together as they contemplate their dispiriting professional futures, in which Schumacher jokingly suggests to Beale that he commit suicide on the air—after giving the network a week to promote the event—so that the anchor can depart with the best ratings he’s ever had. Beale, who is more depressed than Schumacher realizes, announces on the air the next day that, in one week’s time, he is going to commit suicide on his show.

This scenario eerily paralleled a tragic real-life incident that occurred while Chayefsky worked on the screenplay. On the morning of July 15, 1974, viewers of WXLT-TV 40 in Sarasota, Florida, watched as Christine Chubbuck, the auburn-haired twenty-nine-year-old host of the morning show
Suncoast Digest
, appeared to be wrapping up a brief news report. Instead, Chubbuck looked into the camera and said, “In keeping with Channel 40’s policy of bringing you the latest in blood and guts and in living color, you are going to see another first—an attempted suicide.” She then drew a .38-caliber Smith and Wesson pistol from a shopping bag hidden behind her desk and shot herself behind the right ear. Chubbuck, who had a history of depression and had been discussing suicide with friends and coworkers in the preceding days, died later that night.

Whether Chayefsky was aware of Chubbuck’s death at the time he was writing his screenplay is unclear. Months later, he wrote a line for Beale in which the anchor declares he will “blow my brains out right on the air, right in the middle of the seven o’clock news, like that girl in Florida,” then deleted it from the script. But a set of screenplay notes dated July 16, 1974—the day after the horrific broadcast, when news of Chubbuck’s suicide would have been widely known—makes no reference to her or the incident.

In that same set of pages, however, Chayefsky determined that the rising hotshot and the romantic interest for Schumacher were to be the same person, a female programming executive he called Louise Dickerson, then Diana Dickerson, and finally Diana Christensen. (He did not discard the name Louise entirely, giving it instead to the faithful wife Schumacher abandons to pursue his affair.) In an early description of the character that would carry through in future drafts, Chayefsky said Diana was “tall, willowy and with the best ass ever seen on a Vice President in charge of Programming.” As she pursued her seduction of Schumacher, she would also try to capitalize on Beale’s unexpected success, bringing his show and the increasingly unstable newsman under the umbrella of her department. She “encourages Howard to get madder and madder and more and more prophetic,” Chayefsky wrote. “Howard doesn’t need the encouragement. He gets madder and madder and finally achieves a state of grace and beatitude.” In pencil, he added to this: “He is no longer a prophet; he has become a messiah.”

Then followed the increasingly familiar muddle of intramural backstabbing and deal making among the network, its corporate parent, and the U.S. government, until Beale, Schumacher, and Diana are left “wandering the streets of the country preaching goodness, forgotten, ignored, even despised.” Within these notes Chayefsky also sketched out a formative encounter between Schumacher and Diana in which, he wrote, “She looks him up and down, says: ‘You’re married, aren’t you?’ He says, yeah. She says: ‘Then we better go to my place.’” On this page, Chayefsky wrote in red ink and underlined the words “
LOVE STORY.
”

All along, Chayefsky had wanted to tell a story that was global in its scope, from the continent-spanning clashes of governments and corporations to the atomic-level collisions of mere people, but the overwhelming sprawl of his narrative was becoming apparent. The harder he pressed himself to figure out how his characters fit together, the larger his roster of dramatis personae grew, and the longer he toiled without success to bring his story to an end—what logical conclusion was suggested by the inherently illogical universe he had built?—the more frustrated he became.

His cast had been expanded to include a female radical who leads a left-wing revolutionary group and her second-in-command, a sort of “Leader of the People guy, a hot-headed impulsive terrorist who wants to shoot it out with the cops all the time.” At the other end of the spectrum is the chairman of the corporation that owns the network, an executive named Arthur Jensen, who is to have a meeting with Howard Beale and tell him “the revealed truth as it really is”: “The world will soon be totally technological and the individual human will be just a piston rod in the whole vast machinery, a world dominated by the ultimate laws of production and consumption.” Beale not only will be persuaded by this line of thought, but will embrace Jensen “as his new god to replace his voices.”

In his notebooks, Chayefsky wrote year-by-year biographies for his characters. Schumacher doggedly worked his way up through the army’s
Stars and Stripes
newspaper, local papers, radio, NBC morning news,
See It Now
,
CBS Reports
, and network documentary and news departments to become the president of his division. Diana, by contrast, had just five previous television credits—at a children’s show, in audience research, and in daytime programming—before she reached her own vice president post. He drafted for himself a twenty-three-person roster of nonexistent executives at the fictional network he called UBS (a detail recycled from
The Imposters
), from its chairman of the board down to its vice presidents of programming, legal affairs, public relations for the news, and public relations for the network. He drew up a seven-night programming grid for UBS, inventing every show that aired from Monday through Sunday, 6:00
P.M.
to 1:00
A.M.
, with such evocative and snidely reductive titles as
Surgeon’s Hospital
,
Pedro and the Putz
,
Celebrity Canasta
(paired on Wednesday evenings with
Celebrity Mah-jongg
),
Lady Cop
, and
Death Squad
. None of this information would make its way into the screenplay.

For more practical purposes, Chayefsky wrote out a page-long list of synonyms for the verb
corrupt—adulterate
,
debase
,
dilute
,
suborn
,
defile
,
befoul
,
taint
,
tarnish
,
contaminate
,
degrade
,
debauch
,
putresce
—which he would surely need to draw from as his writing proceeded. For unclear reasons, he also created a separate, three-page list of the increasingly ominous political calamities he could imagine befalling the United States (“racist hysteria
+
jingoism”; “police violence in the ghettos
+
barrios”; “a consolidation of a United Front joining together all sections of the revolutionary, radical
+
democratic movements”; “the sheer numbers of the prisoner class and their terms of existence make them a mighty reservoir of revolutionary substructures and infrastructures”).

Over lunches at the Russian Tea Room with his friends Bob Fosse and Herb Gardner, Chayefsky conjured up new screenplay concepts to distract him from the matter at hand. Starting from the semi-facetious suggestion that the three of them collaborate on a movie for Dino De Laurentiis, the deep-pocketed producer of a coming remake of
King Kong
, Chayefsky hit upon the idea of reinventing another classic horror tale, turning
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
into the story of a latter-day character who experiments with an array of drugs, devices, and therapies as he studies “the states of human consciousness.” For now this idea was little more than a literal sketch, a doodle of his imagined hero: pinched, peanut-shaped head, comb-over hairdo, pointy nose, and prominent chin.

Turning back to the screenplay he was supposed to be writing, Chayefsky tossed aside potential endings as fast as he could imagine reasons why they wouldn’t work. What if the revolutionary group kidnapped Beale as a way of attracting attention for their group? But, wrote Chayefsky, “If their show is a hit, they already have attention—Ransom? They’re already rich from TV—in fact, we are trying to say their revolutionary ideals have already been corrupted by TV—in what way?” None of this sounded like the American counterculture he thought he saw sprouting up all around him, which, he wrote, “wants chaos, depression
+
disaster to produce the popular discontent necessary to the creation of a revolutionary class.”