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Network by Paddy Chayefsky
Starring Robert Duvall, Faye Dunaway, Peter Finch, and William Holden |
A legendary, entertaining, and prophetic film which hilariously satires the role of the television
and news media's sensationalism
in our disenchanting modern era. Examines how a narrow, unethical corporate focus on ratings and profits has lowered programming standards, desensitized us, and blurred the line between TV news and entertainment.
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One of the American Film Institute's "100 Greatest American Movies of the 20th Century", nominated for 10 Academy Awards in 1976, and winner of 4, including Best Actor (Peter Finch), Best Actress (Faye Dunaway), Best Supporting Actress (Beatrice Straight), and Best Screenplay (Paddy Chayefsky).
- "Last night, I was awakened from a fitful sleep shortly after two o'clock in the morning by a shrill, sibilant, faceless voice...the voice said to me 'I want you to tell the people the truth, not an easy thing to do because the people don't want to know the truth.'...and I said 'Why me?' and the voice said, 'Because you're on television dummy. You have forty million Americans listening to you and after the show you could have fifty million...you're on TV man.' So I thought about it for a moment and then I said 'OK'." - UBS Nightly News anchorman Howard Beale, to his viewing audience, in Network
- "...You people and 62 million other Americans are listening to me right now because less than 3% of you people read books, because less than 15% of you read newspapers. Because the only truth you know is what you get over this tube. Right now, there is a whole, an entire generation that never knew anything that didn't come out of this tube. This tube is the gospel, the ultimate revelation. This tube can make or break presidents, popes, prime ministers; this tube is the most awesome goddamned force in the whole godless world and woe is us if it ever falls into the hands of the wrong people...This company is now in the hands of CCA - the Communication Corporation of America...and when the twelfth largest company in the world controls the most awesome goddamned propaganda force in the whole godless world, who knows what sh*t will be peddled for truth on this network." - Howard Beale, to his Nightly News Hour audience, in Network
- "The fact is I could make your Beale show the highest-rated news show in television...TV is showbiz Max and even the news has to have a little showmanship...If you're gonna hustle, at least do it right." - Diana Christensen, UBS Vice-President of Programming, in Network
HOWARD BEALE
"I'm going to blow my brains out right on the air, right in the middle of the seven o'clock news."
MAX SCHUMACHER
"You'll get a hell of a rating. I'll guarantee you that, a fifty share easy...We could make a series out of it. Suicide of the week. Hell why limit ourselves? Execution of the week."
HOWARD BEALE
"Terrorist of the week."
MAX SCHUMACHER
"I love it. Suicides, assassinations, mad bombers, mafia hitmen, automobile smash-ups. The death hour. Great Sunday night show for the whole family. We'll wipe Disney right off the fu*king air."
- Howard Beale and UBS Executive/News Director Max Schumacher in Network
- "So, you listen to me!...Television is not the truth! Television is a goddamned amusement park! Television is a circus, a carnival, a traveling troupe of acrobats, story-tellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, side-show freaks, lion-tamers and football players. We're in the boredom-killing business! So, if you want the truth, go to God, go to your guru, go to yourselves because that's the only place you'll ever find any real truth! But, man, you're never going to get any truth from us. We'll tell you anything you want to hear. We lie like hell! We deal in illusions, man! None of it is true!...You're beginning to believe the illusions we're spinning here. You're beginning to think that the tube is reality and your own lives are unreal...This is mass madness, you maniacs! In God's name, you people are the real thing! We are the illusion! So turn off your television sets! Turn them off now, turn them off right now!" - Howard Beale, to his Nightly News Hour audience, in Network
- "I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job, the dollar buys a nickel's worth, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter, punks are running wild in the streets, and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it. We know the air's unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TV's while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be...It's like everything everywhere is going crazy...So we don't go out any more. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we're living in is getting smaller, and all we say is please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms...Well, I'm not going to leave you alone...I want you to get mad. You've got to say: 'I'm a human being, goddammit. My life has value.' So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now, and go to the window, open it, and stick your head out and yell, 'I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take this any more!' - Howard Beale, to his UBS Nightly News audience, in Network
"Reality" television. Mean-spirited game shows. Trashy talk shows. Formulaic, unoriginal sitcoms. Whether it's turning ABC into a meat market or aggressively sensationalizing the animalistic tendencies of the public, the majority of network television has become a circus sideshow sprawled across a landscape of sheer wasteland. Admittedly, some of it is seductively entertaining, and many of us obtain hours of mindless escape and pleasure in it. But even the most ardent fans of modern network television would be hard-pressed to deny the astounding lack of quality so often evident on our screens. A new generation of viewers is growing up thinking that this is simply the way most of television inherently is. But some of us are old enough to remember that it wasn't always like this. Even in the "good old days" of television in decades past, there were always bad or unoriginal shows, but they weren't as common, crude, or in your face as many of today's. So you may find yourself asking: what is responsible for this steady rise of shallow, uninspiring television?
As you begin to consider this decline in quality, you may find yourself naturally becoming more curious about who makes the decisions on what airs and what criteria are used to do so. And, as it happens, many well-respected groups and individuals - including some U.S. Senators - share the same concerns and are taking a much deeper look these days at such issues of (Fix - link to Adbusters or Culture Jam??) media ownership and control. In fact, so widespread has this examination of our media become that only the most uninformed person remains completely unaware that television is a business. Most of us realize on some level that network executives air the shows that receive the highest ratings and make them the most money, and that these shows are then copied by the other networks competing to attain similar success. When taken to the extreme, however, this ratings and money-based decision-making process, in combination with such transparent copycat programming, can lead to an array of thoughtless, base shows. However, when pure entertainment is the goal, it seems a stretch to call this outcome damaging. After all, it's all in the name of fun, right?
But there is one type of show that isn't all in the name of fun. We turn to it for an objective view of our world, and more than we realize, we take what its highly trusted personalities say as the truth. It has a powerful effect because of its ability to slip under our radar and be accepted at face value. It affects our perspectives, beliefs, and decisions. That show is our nightly news broadcast. If the ratings and profit-driven motive, so common amongst other television programming, was to be applied to the television news, we can agree that the damage might be more acute. But, just how immune is the news to the Jerry Springer-style, circus-like atmosphere reigning over so much of the rest of television? Do the same networks that bring us Survivor and The Weakest Link suddenly take on an air of complete professionalism, objectivity, and truth as soon as the news hour rolls around?
Like the rest of television, the news seemed somehow of higher quality in the past. The public airwaves were still expected to serve the public interest and dignified journalists such as Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Morrow embodied the mythic "good old days" of newscasting. Meanwhile, today's major network anchors like Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather, and Peter Jennings approach the twilight of their careers, the remnants of a dying breed from this bygone era. In turn, a focus on profit and ratings is replacing them with a new generation of newscasters focused on style more than substance, promoted just as superficially, and equipped with an increasingly sensational agenda. This fact has not been lost on Cronkite, who in recent years has actively spoken out about the decline of television since his heyday.
But, back in the 1970's, few could have predicted what was to come in the decades ahead and few in the mainstream even stopped to question who was behind that screen pulling the strings. Now that the influence and motivations of network executives are becoming more apparent, many of us are growing tired of the resulting "if it bleeds it leads" trend in television news. Those of us who want better quality realize the need to make others aware of the problem. Yet, how can more people be made aware of this trend and its causes when the only vehicle with adequate power to reach a critical mass of people is that ratings-based media outlet itself? Even Cronkite no longer has the means to truly reach the masses. But, can you imagine if someone like Brokaw, still on the air, with the ability to speak to millions every evening, got sick of it and decided to tell all? What if the hidden world behind the scenes of television and the news became news itself?
"Every day, five days a week, for fifteen years, I've been sitting behind that desk - the dispassionate pundit - reporting with seemly detachment the daily parade of lunacies that constitute the news, and just once I wanted to say what I really felt."
- Howard Beale to his UBS Nightly News audience in Network
That is the premise of Paddy Chayefsky's legendary, Oscar-winning screenplay, Network, a hilariously prescient and satirical indictment of the news media and corporate television industry, which brought Chayefsky his third Oscar, following past wins for Marty and Hospital. With this modern classic, taught in screenwriting classes everywhere, Chayefsky introduced us all to the unseen world behind our television screens. Brought to life by director Sidney Lumet (12 Angry Men, The Verdict), Network's success insured that its viewers would never again unquestioningly trust their television sets, and inducted an unforgettably unique fictional anchorman named Howard Beale - "the mad prophet of the airwaves" - into that legendary pantheon of broadcasting paragons.
From Network's opening fade in on a chattering panel of various evening newscasts, we focus in on one - that of UBS, the United Broadcasting System - and its anchor of eleven years, Howard Beale (Peter Finch of Sunday Bloody Sunday). It was for this timeless role as Beale, the "grand old man" of television news, that Finch beat out his co-star William Holden (Sunset Boulevard, Bridge on the River Kwai) for the Best Actor Oscar, becoming the first ever to win it posthumously, having died just months before the ceremony. After a long, distinguished career, Beale has been reduced to helplessly watching UBS' news division losing more and more money each year, while his own ratings are steadily slipping, and with them, his life. All comes to a head for Beale upon being given his two weeks' notice by best friend and executive Max Schumacher (William Holden). As the two old friends share a drink, a depressed Beale half-jokingly shares his plan to blow his brains out live on the newscast. When he then actually announces the plan to his viewing audience during his next broadcast - much to Schumacher's surprise, and without the slightest notice by the oblivious producers - the intriguingly morbid revelation makes the lead story on all the other channels' news broadcasts. Suddenly, Beale's embarrassing antics on the UBS Evening News are more newsworthy than the news itself. UBS' executives are utterly disgraced, and Beale is pulled off the air immediately.
"Yesterday I announced on this program that I was going to commit public suicide, admittedly an act of madness. Well I'll tell you what happened. I just ran out of bullsh*t...I don't know any other way to say it except I just ran out of bullsh*t...if there's anybody out there who can look around this demented slaughterhouse of a world we live in and tell me man is a noble creature, believe me that man is full of bullsh*t."
- Howard Beale to his UBS Nightly News audience in Network
But, a funny thing happens on the way to retirement. Allowed one final moment on the air to say goodbye to his viewers and atone for his prior disgrace, Beale instead launches into another tirade - this time about the meaninglessness of both life in general, and his own in particular. The Polish poet and Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz once said that "In a small room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot." Beale's pistol shot strikes the heart of a widespread popular sentiment, and while the UBS executives prepare their damage control plan, Beale's all-important ratings surprisingly skyrocket. The executives, in desperate need of a new network cash cow to appease their worried stockholders, are left torn between treating Beale's obvious madness and exploiting his newfound popularity. At this pivotal point, money and ratings win out, and Beale is given back the reins of his show under the guise of an "angry prophet denouncing the hypocrisies of our times." Where the network once fired him for his apocalyptic polemics, they are soon urging him to be even more apocalyptic. Anything for ratings.
Beale is only too happy to oblige, as he grows more and more messianic, preaching vigorously - and with eerie accuracy - on topics ranging from inflation to crime to international relations. But, are his enlightening tirades the admonitions of a man who has clearly seen the light or the ravings of a lunatic? While Schumacher wonders if Beale needs serious psychiatric care, the network brass will hear none of it. Ratings are too high and profits are up. Madman or messiah, Beale is a huge hit. Schumacher is simply relieved of his duties, and the ultra-ambitious, calculating Frank Hackett (Robert Duvall of To Kill a Mockingbird, The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, and A Civil Action) sees to it that Beale is milked for all he's worth. As the network continues to exploit him, his Nightly News Hour becomes less information and more carnival - real news meets Ringling Brothers - with Beale the freak at center stage. With its motto, "We're mad as hell and we're not going to take it anymore," the show reaches number four on all of television. Huge studio and viewing audiences gather to hear Beale ironically take on the American public's general stupidity, dearth of reading, and most of all their mindless acceptance of what they hear on "the tube" ("You do whatever the tube tells you. You dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube, you even think like the tube," Beale exhorts).
"It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet!...There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and Dupont, Dow, Union Carbide and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today...The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable by-laws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale!...And I have chosen you, Mr. Beale, to preach this evangel."
- Media mogul Arthur Jensen, head of Communication Corporation of America, to Howard Beale in Network
As long as the viewers keep tuning in and the dollars keep on flowing, the network executives would be more than happy to let Beale denounce their very families on the air. But, when Beale turns his wrath on the business side of his own network, something has to be done. Rather than pull Beale off the air, Arthur Jensen (Ned Beatty of Deliverance and All the President's Men), the owner of the media empire that controls UBS, sees that with a new mindset, Beale could be used as a powerful tool with which to promote his pro-corporate agenda. After being subjected to an unforgettably comical tirade by Mr. Jensen - a scene which single-handedly earned Ned Beatty an Oscar nomination - Beale changes his tune, recants much of what he has said, and his ratings start to falter again. The network executives, wanting desperately to fire him, find themselves in a head on collision with ownership. Can they find a way to maximize ratings, profits, and marketing while taking care of this "Beale business"?
Some of Network's funniest scenes satirize television's growing sensationalism. This willingness to exploit all manner of tragedy, heartache, and viewer gullibility for profit is embodied by UBS Vice-President of Programming, Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway of Bonnie and Clyde, Chinatown, and Three Days of the Condor), the most avid proponent and orchestrator of Beale's growing fame. Christensen is a woman whose eyes light up with dollar signs at bank robbery footage and the sleazy appeal of psychics, and to whom even life and death represent corporate business decisions measured in ratings points. Hers is a world where ethics have gone quite literally down the tube. Christensen's search through a hilarious litany of cliche and tired new program proposals culminates in an outlandish new series featuring the Ecumenical Liberation Army, a group of radical Communists who tape themselves in the act of committing various crimes, which Christensen is all too happy to exploit for ratings and profit. The resulting "Mao Zedong Hour" provides a startlingly unethical predecessor of today's reality television programs, with mutual exploitation taken to its extremes, and before long the network executives and the radicals grow increasingly difficult to distinguish.
"...If I stay with you, I'll be destroyed! Like Howard Beale was destroyed! Like Laureen Hobbs was destroyed! Like everything that you and the institution of television touch is destroyed! You're television incarnate, Diana, indifferent to suffering, insensitive to joy. All of life is reduced to the common rubble of banality. War, murder, death - all the same to you as bottles of beer. And the daily business of life is a corrupt comedy. You even shatter the sensations of time and space into split-seconds and instant replays."
- Max Schumacher to Diana Christensen in Network
It is for so eloquently personifying the maniacally material ambition of the television industry - which often overshadows the very world it purports to reflect - that Dunaway won her Best Actress Oscar. Her character is a frightening example of the resulting systematic desensitization that limits the worldviews of both the viewers and creators of television. Christensen's life has devolved into a script where human emotions like pleasure, pain, and love have become nothing but plot techniques without humanity behind them. What is said is less important than getting a reaction, and even a controversial reaction is better than none. Problems are invariably expected to resolve happily within thirty minutes, and if one doesn't, she reaches frantically for life's remote control to "change the channel". Oblivious to so much of the reality going on around her, lost in an illusive television world of her own making, she is - in Howard Beale's words - a "humanoid", like so many people raised in this era of trashy television. As we watch her growing relationship with Max Schumacher, a living contrast between the values of the new and old television generations, we experience a twinge of recognition each time we relate to one of her vile traits, and wonder how much the ubiquity of television has affected us, as well.
Most of all, Network attempts to shatter the myth of media "objectivity", showing that even the news is driven not by truth, but by ratings, money, and corporate politics. Tightly planned and scripted, precisely marketed, and delivered by carefully made-up anchors, the news, as much as any other television program, is show business. And while it was always so to a lesser extent, Network foretold the coming of an era in which the rather modest song-and-dance routine that was television devolved into today's "dirty dancing". Truth in this setting is as much a function of the desires of the advertisers or the stockholders as it is of actual events. Indeed, even the personal and romantic lives of the UBS executives exert greater influence over the network's programming than the pursuit of truth.
"I am therefore pleased to announce I am submitting to the Board of Directors a plan for the coordination of the main profit centers and with the specific intention of making each division more responsive to management...in effect, the news division would be reduced from an independent division to a department accountable to network."
- UBS Executive Frank Hackett, diplomatically describing his new policy of corporate control, in Network
And, at the root of this crumbling of quality, according to Beale and others, is the rise of highly-concentrated, global media empires, where unethical corporate concerns take precedence over morals, relationships, and sometimes even life itself. Network's zany plotline uncannily presaged the gradual trend towards increased corporate control and endless mergers - a trend facilitated by the Federal Communication Commission's dangerously broad relaxation of regulations that previously helped insure diversity in our media. And, like the huge media empires that have swallowed up such a majority of the television networks, Network puts forth that the institution of television itself devours all that comes into its path. It helps shatter the relationship between Max Schumacher and his wife, provoking a classic confrontation that earned Beatrice Straight an Oscar for a riveting eight minutes on-screen - one of the shortest performances to ever merit the award. It turns the Ecumenical Liberation Army from a devoted group of political activists to a loose group of money and fame-hungry animals. Whether it be Howard Beale, Diana Christensen, our relationships, or our children, nothing and noone is safe from its all encompassing influence.
In its biting style and socially conscious message, Network is a film that was before its time, and which grows more relevant with each passing year. It's hard to believe that at the time this movie was written, Jerry Springer was still busy preparing to run for Mayor of Cincinnati and Survivor was a band that sang the (FIX - AMAZON) theme song from Rocky. In the days to come, more and more films such as (Fix - Amazon links) The Insider, (Fix- better one?) Broadcast News, State and Main, and The Player would directly take on the hypocrisies of the media and Hollywood. The fact that, looking back, some of Network's commentary now sounds cliche is further testament to the prescience of Chayefsky's legendary script and the copycat process that is as evident in Hollywood as in television. But, just as in television, few derivative films can beat the original - especially a landmark of originality like Network. After decades of attempted imitation, its unforgettable dialogue and characters insure that it remains eminently entertaining today.
Furthermore, Network serves as a telling example of the stunning capacity of the visual media of film and television to shape our views and incite us to action. After all, these technologies are undoubtedly the most powerful communications tools in human history. As we plunge ahead in the 21st century, will we find ways to use them in the service of constructive solutions or will Howard Beale's dire predictions continue to hit closer and closer to home? Will we recapture the "good old days" of television or will its barren landscape continue to wither in drought? One thing is certain: to find the truth, you'll have to look to sources beyond just your local news.
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