Mad as Hell: The Making of Network and the Fateful Vision of the Angriest Man in Movies (22 page)

A second article in the press circular, from
Newsday
, drew heavily from the
Women’s Wear Daily
story; it reported that “advance word on the yet-unfinished
Network
touts it as the most controversial movie ever made about television,” and noted that “a gossip columnist for
Women’s Wear Daily
called it ‘the bitterest attack yet on television’ and claimed that the U.S. TV networks had refused to cooperate because they were so angered by the script.” Howard Gottfried countered that
Network
was really about “the destruction of the individual and traditional American ideals through a system dedicated to conformity, standardization and the least common denominator,” and made the preliminary claim that the studio segments of the movie were filmed in Toronto simply because it offered “superior facilities to anything available in New York.” Chayefsky added that while critics had treated his movie
The Hospital
as if it were an exposé, it was embraced by the medical profession. “I think the same sort of thing will happen to
Network
,” he said. “I basically write stories about institutions as a microcosm of human behavior.”

Also on the record about
Network
for the first time was
CBS Evening News
anchor Walter Cronkite, who had been an ally to Chayefsky and Lumet in the making of the film. Asked to account for his daughter Kathy’s appearance in a movie that satirized his profession, Cronkite responded: “The two things don’t impinge on each other. I’m just delighted she’s got work.” He acknowledged he had not seen
Network
yet.

In the fall, Chayefsky began receiving letters of congratulations from industry colleagues who had been shown the movie at preliminary screenings. Mark Goodson, one of the prolific television producers behind game shows such as
I’ve Got a Secret
and
The Price Is Right
, wrote to say that he had reacted to
Network
as follows:

1. Whimpered and pouted a lot because I hadn’t been invited to a screening by you.

2. Ground my teeth in rage as I once again suffered the experience of realizing how brilliantly you create—harnessing tight discipline and wild imagination.

3. Had one of the best nights of my life—laughing, gasping, recognizing, appreciating.

Phil Gersh, the Hollywood agent whose clients included Arthur Hiller, the director of
The Hospital
, said in an otherwise complimentary letter to Chayefsky, “I only have one regret and that is that Arthur Hiller wasn’t involved.” On his personal stationery, Peter Bogdanovich, the in-demand director of
Paper Moon
and
The Last Picture Show
, wrote to Chayefsky that he thought
Network
was “absolutely terrific, as I’m sure you know.” He added: “It’s as if you’ve been rehearsing all your life to write it. That script is the only one in memory I wish had been offered to me, though I can’t imagine it having been done better.”

A few weeks later, Chayefsky replied to Bogdanovich to thank him for his compliments, but also to register his hurt feelings that he had been abandoned by many of the people with whom he had made
Network
. “Of all people,” he wrote, “you must have some idea of the hysteria attendant on the opening of a film, and I have been right in the middle of it. Sidney Lumet was up in Toronto shooting EQUUS, Faye Dunaway simply refused to do any public relations at all; so the whole burden of the East Coast nonsense fell on me.” Once this flow of admiration had passed, Chayefsky anticipated that a larger and more menacing wave was looming.

MGM sent out its invitations to preliminary screenings of
Network
in October, billing the film as “a penetrating look at the complex machinery of television,” and announced that its official premiere would be held at the Sutton Theater in New York on November 14, prior to a national run that would begin the following month.

Well before most ticket-buying audiences knew what
Network
was, they were being told by the news media how their own industry members felt about the film and what they thought it was saying about them, beginning with an October 24 feature by Tom Shales in the
Washington Post
that was evocatively titled “‘Network’: Hating TV Can Be Fun.” The article noted that the movie “won’t open in New York until mid-November (and in Washington until mid-December) but already dozens of broadcasting people and critics have seen the picture in Los Angeles and New York advance screenings.” “Whatever critics eventually decide about the film’s cinematic worth,” it continued, “it is already a guaranteed hot potato. One network producer became ‘physically ill’ during the picture, says one of the man’s colleagues. Two weeks later—though it could only be coincidence—he had a heart attack.”

“People in broadcasting,” Shales wrote, “are calling it ‘preposterous.’” And they were happy to line up to do so, by name and on the record, in his article. Paul Friedman, who had newly been appointed the producer of NBC’s
Today Show
, said
Network
was “heavy-handed” and “outrageous,” adding that “it would be a shame if it were a big hit,” because it presented a distorted picture of the people who work in television.

“It’s so unfair,” Friedman said of the film. “It’s simply not true. Television is not as powerful as Paddy Chayefsky thinks it is. ‘Indifferent to suffering?’ Come on. We do lots of things that deal with joy, too. We had something on the
Today Show
, just this morning—scenes from
Porgy and Bess
. People were crying in the studio, it was so beautiful.

“Of course it’s an attack,” he continued. “What makes me mad is that magazine and newspaper writers will be rubbing their hands with glee over it. There’s an incredible inferiority and hate complex on the part of people in the print media who write about TV, and they’ll just take this and run with it.”

Richard Salant, the president of CBS News, said that he had not yet seen
Network
but, the
Post
wrote, “he has read the script and does he ever hate it!” It was “awful,” Salant said, “just such a caricature. It simply couldn’t happen. Will I go see it? Oh yeah. I’ll see it because it’s something about us.”

William Sheehan, the president of ABC News, had not seen
Network
, either, but that did not prevent him from characterizing the film as “an unflattering portrait of the business we’re in.” Even so, he said he would “definitely” see the movie, “even if I have to pay to get in.”

Meanwhile, the newsmen who had assisted Chayefsky in researching his screenplay did not provide many ringing endorsements. John Chancellor, the anchor of the
NBC Nightly News
, could only vaguely remember reading the script for
Network
(“I think I’m in it,” he said) and seemed to recall it was about “an anchorman who goes crazy,” while also containing what he thought was “a marvelous scene where the woman programming executive sort of rapes the head of the news division.” Well, Chancellor concluded with an all-but-audible shrug, “Paddy said he was going to write something funny.”

At CBS, Walter Cronkite had now changed his tune. He dismissed
Network
as a “fantasy burlesque” and said, “I really don’t find any great significance in it.” Asked if he had been irritated by the film, television’s most trusted newsman replied, “Oh—no, I don’t think so. I might be irritated by those who find it important, however. I just thought it was a rather amusing little entertainment.” He added: “I laughed, quite a bit in fact. I think I laughed at some of the wrong places.”

Chayefsky, for his part, seemed baffled by these hostile responses, and unsure why anyone would read
Network
as his personal payback against the television business. “Nothing bad happened to me in television,” he told the
Post
. “All the people in television I’ve talked to love the picture. Of course, unless it’s a big kiss on the you-know-what, some people will take offense at anything.”

On Election Day, as Jimmy Carter defeated Gerald Ford and ensured that the last vestiges of Richard M. Nixon’s administration would be swept from the White House in January, an outwardly joyous Chayefsky was in the Milton Berle Room of the New York Friars Club, toasting the successes of the president-elect, the soon-to-be-released
Network
, and what he called “the best chef salad in town.”

Yet even as the screenwriter was celebrating, he was that same day being pummeled by a second barrage of disapproving and disgruntled newsmen who were angry at how
Network
portrayed their line of work. An article in the
Christian Science Monitor
, which said the film was “seen as a searing but unfair indictment of television morality,” once again turned to CBS’s Richard Salant, who said that reading the screenplay had made him “sick.” “It is an all-out attack on TV news, and I have no intention of seeing it,” Salant said. “It is a distorted fantasy and simply could never happen.” To the chorus of censorious voices was added that of esteemed NBC journalist Edwin Newman, who in September had moderated the first presidential debate between Ford and Carter, and who said of
Network
, “I didn’t understand it to be a black satire—I couldn’t tell which parts were supposed to be taken literally and which parts were supposedly exaggerated. There are valid things to be said about TV news, but this movie didn’t say them.” M. S. Rukeyser Jr., an NBC executive who held the title of vice president of public information, added that the film was “very boring,” having “nothing to do with our business,” and was “written by somebody who doesn’t know how network television operates.”

And in another salvo from Walter Cronkite, the CBS anchor incorrectly observed, “They cut my daughter’s part down to almost nothing.”

Edwin Newman expanded on his remarks in
W
magazine, telling the publication that
Network
“was such an incompetent movie, such a poor job, that any point it tried to make was lost. I’ve rarely seen a drunk scene worse than the one that opened the movie. That experienced actors could wobble around that way in front of the camera surprises me.” He added that real-life TV producers would never stoop so low for the sake of ratings. “There’s evidence that the opposite is true,” Newman said. “You ignore ratings at your risk, but you don’t base everything on them. Any news operation is a compromise—but I don’t like to use that word. When I do a program I do my best to interest people—I try to make my writing interesting, catchy, amusing—you can’t be in the news business and just employ stenographers to repeat what people in public office or sports figures tell them. It’s more complicated than that.

“As a representation of network news,” he repeated, “it was incompetent, and as a movie it was incompetent. I don’t even want to talk about it seriously.”

Cronkite, criticizing the premise of the film for a third time, agreed. “The record of network management has proved highly responsible in regard to news,” he said. “Since the birth of television, all of us have known how we could hype our ratings almost instantly through the methods of the penny press, but you don’t see any hint of things like that.

“But,” he added, “I enjoyed it. It’s a fun movie.”

Privately, Chayefsky fumed at the accumulated battering he and the movie were receiving and started drafting a response aimed at the entire television industry. In this open letter (which he characterized as a “first revolt against bullshitism”), the author declared, “Television people should stop worrying about whether their image is being tarnished and start examining their responsibilities to the public—Stop making so much money. Out of self respect, give the people a lot more beauty, commitment and reality, even if those shows lose money. So you don’t make a hundred and fifty million dollars profit.”

Following a string of disconnected maxims—“TV destroys evil along with the good,” “TV coarsens human life, reduces the complex uncertainties of common rubble”—Chayefsky defended
Network
as “a condemnation of the corporate way of life in which human life is no more than just another factor in corporate decisions.” “I think that fact is one of the basic paranoias of our contemporary way of life,” he continued. “I don’t think it is just my personal paranoia. I think it is a deeply-embedded paranoia in most Americans. I think many Americans feel they have lost the individual value of their lives.” The letter was never published.

For perhaps the only time in his career, Chayefsky began to feel regret for having hurt the industry peers he respected, and fear that he had betrayed the trust of people who had risked their reputations and the esteem of their profession to help him get his movie made. If these nagging and uneasy emotions were unfamiliar to him, so, too, was the action he took as a result, which was to apologize directly to those he may have wronged. On November 4 he composed a letter to an addressee identified as Walter—the recipient could only have been Cronkite—offering his genuine contrition. “Dear Walter,” it began:

I’m just beginning to get some negative feedback on my movie, “Network,” from some television people which, I must say, surprised me. I thought television people would like it. It is, after all, the sort of jokes television people make among themselves. But the purpose of this note is to let you know that—if this movie or I have put you in any kind of awkward spot within the industry—then I am truly sorry, and if there is ever anything I can do to make amends, please let me know. Sidney told me that, after you read the script, you said that it wasn’t about television at all; it was about our whole society and its fabric. Well, that’s gospel true, Walter. I never meant this film to be an attack on television as an institution in itself, but only as a metaphor for the rest of the times. I’m sorry, Walter, if we’ve caused you any personal inconvenience or professional discomfort. We would never have asked you to allow us to use your newscast if we had dreamed it might embarrass you. Or maybe I’m making too much out of the whole thing. I hope so.