2
STRANGELOVE-Y AS HELL
As the president of the news department of the NBC network, Richard Wald was a man entitled to some respect. He ran one of only three operations in the country with the privilege, the duty, and the means of gathering the events of the day and transmitting them to the television sets of some fifty million viewers in homes across the country. As such, he held a share of the power of deciding what was worth communicating to America and what was not. The division he oversaw commanded an annual operating budget of $100 million and employed a thousand people in roughly thirty domestic and foreign bureaus. It was his custom, as it was for many of his peers, to arrive for work each day at 9:00 A.M. sharp, attired in a neatly pressed suit, shirt, and tie, and polished shoes. He would enter his corner office on the fifth floor of NBC’s art deco headquarters at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, take off his jacket, roll up his sleeves, loosen his tie, and begin to read the morning’s newspapers in preparation for the day.
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.
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.”
An especially grim possibility considered by Chayefsky centered on a radical he named Achmed Abdullah, who is being groomed by Diana for a television show of his own and whom she convinces that “if he assassinates Beale and takes film of it—doing it right on camera during a Beale show,” it “would give his show a tremendous kickoff for his first season.” Chayefsky was at one point so certain he was on the right track that he wrote the following words, drew a black box around them, added a red box around the black box, and placed six red check marks next to the red box: “So the terrorist story is really the story of Achmed Abdullah, the mad terrorist who is slowly corrupted into a TV star and finally winds up slaughtering everybody + HB just to give his TV show a terrific looking audience for his first show.”
Had this version of the story come to pass, it would have ended with Achmed Abdullah using himself as a suicide bomb to blow up Beale and his studio audience, leaving only Diana “alone in the shambles wondering if there can be another way for the world to go.”
The conclusion that Chayefsky instead settled on was milder, if only slightly. “We’ve got to replace Beale,” he wrote to himself. “They replaced Allen with Paar—they replaced Paar with Carson and that show’s still killing everybody—It’s not Beale—it’s his bullshit that sells.” The solution was to have Diana get her up-and-coming terrorist group to assassinate Beale—“It not only gets Howard off the air, but it gives terrific promotion for the counter-culture hour”—and in the final joke of the movie, “they kick this idea around just like any other network decision.”
If Chayefsky felt any sense of confidence or closure after reaching this conclusion, it was short-lived. It was here that he pulled a sheet of lined paper out of a notebook and dejectedly wrote to himself across the top of the page: “THE SHOW LACKS A POINT OF VIEW.” Whatever this thing was that he had been laboring on all these months, it had “no ultimate statement beyond the idea that a network would kill for ratings, and even that doesn’t mesh with the love story and whatever the love story says thematically.” Maybe there was something darkly funny about these futile characters and the dehumanizing institutions they occupied, but he had not created them “just for laughs.” “They are allegorical figures in a social satire—extreme social forces trying to get power through the medium of television—But, at the same time they are corrupted and eventually dominated by the medium they are trying to exploit.” Chayefsky berated himself for not taking a clear stand in the narrative—“I’m not for anything or anyone”—and seemed to believe that the correct path to a meaningful message would necessarily lead him back to Howard Beale. But this created further problems: “If we gave Howard a speech at the end of the show,” he asked himself, “what would he say?”
Acknowledging his self-doubt did nothing to overcome it; the anxiety had not been staved off so much as set down on a page. In the same routine and workmanlike way, Chayefsky typed out a blunt piece of text that, with a bit of revision, would become the opening lines of his screenplay.
This story is about Howard Beale who was the network news anchorman on UBS-TV. In his time, Howard had been a mandarin of television, the doyen of anchormen, silver-haired, magisterial, dignified to the point of divinity, and with a HUT rating of sixteen and a twenty-eight per cent audience share. In 1969, however, his preeminence was yielded first to Walter Cronkite and then to John Chancellor, and, finally, in 1972, Howard K. Smith and Harry Reasoner took pretty much of what was left of Howard’s audience. In 1973, his wife died, and he was left a childless widower whose ratings were sinking. He began to drink heavily, he became morose and isolated, and, on September 23, 1974, he was fired, effective in two weeks.
* * *
Dialogue was Chayefsky’s single greatest talent. He was a conduit for spoken words—words as they were authentically spoken and as he wished to hear them spoken—and they emanated from him at variable speeds. Some lines came quickly, and some speeches seemed to pour out of him fully formed, ready for camera on the first draft. Others developed at a more deliberate pace, requiring extensive revisions and evolving over time as his thoughts about his characters changed.
As during the organizational stage of his scriptwriting, Chayefsky sometimes preferred to write in a straight prose style. These exercises could generate dialogue or stage directions that would carry over into a formal screenplay, or simply reveal the mood of a scene, as in a late exchange between Schumacher and Diana showing that they are drifting apart emotionally.
She sank into an overstuffed chair, submitted to its comfort, closed her eyes. “I’m dead” she said, “worn out. I’m trying to get some kind of season together for January, and I think I’m going nuts in the process.” She opened her eyes and regarded Max now sitting across from her. “I can’t tell you how good it is to see you, Max. I’ve missed you terribly, thought about you. Do you still hate me for taking over your network news show?” “Me,” said Max, “In fact I’ve become quite a fan. I watch Howard every night. In a curious way, he’s become a solace to me. I suppose I’m going through a menopausal panic. All of a sudden, I’ve begun contemplating death and disease. I’ve become conscious of every twitch, stitch, twinge and creak.”
Or a decisive confrontation between Schumacher and Hackett, the ruthless executive enforcer.
“I mean, what the hell! What was this, some kind of demented gag!” “Oh, stop screaming, you monkey,” growled Max. “You’ve been after my ass ever since you joined this network, and now you’ve got it. You’ll have my resignation tomorrow and I’ll be out of here by Friday.” “The enormity of it!” screamed Hackett. “I mean, do you have any understanding of the enormity of what you Katzenjammer kids just did!” “I don’t have to take your shit!” roared Max. “Your reorganization plan isn’t effective till January, and I’m not accountable to you! I’m accountable to Mr. Ruddy and Mr. Ruddy only!”
These words did not all survive to the finished script, but it was in the course of working through this exchange that Chayefsky penciled in, almost as an afterthought, a bit of vulgar marginalia that became one of Hackett’s more lasting utterances: “He was hoping I’d fall on my face with this Beale show, but I didn’t. It’s a big, fat, big-titted hit, and I don’t have to play footsie with Ruddy any more.”
Some ideas and characters fell out of the screenplay completely at this stage: a scene following the opening narration in which Howard Beale is found by his housekeeper “still wearing the clothes he wore last night, curled in a position of fetal helplessness on the floor in the far corner of the room”; Beale’s nineteen-year-old daughter, Celia, who bemoans her fate as having “a nut for a mother and a drunk for a father”; a psychiatrist, Dr. Sindell, who examines Beale and suggests to Schumacher that he be institutionalized for his catatonic trances and manic delusions that “are traditional to schizophrenia, not that any of us know what the hell schizophrenia is.”
Chayefsky’s internal editor excised dialogue when it tended to be too overtly didactic—for example, a line spoken by Hackett in private to his fellow television and corporation executives: “Television is the most powerful communications medium that has ever existed. Its propagandistic potential hasn’t even been touched. I sent several confidential memos to you about just that, Clarence.”
But when his sense of humor was allowed to expand to its fullest dimensions of cynicism and morbidity, he did not always recognize when he had gone too far. In the scene where Beale and Schumacher drown their sorrows after the anchorman has been told of his firing and they drunkenly brainstorm the terrible TV programs that could follow his on-air suicide, Schumacher’s imaginary pitch for The Death Hour is to be accompanied by additional suggestions for The Madame Defarge Show and something called Rape of the Week.
The rise and fall of Schumacher and Diana’s love affair, from devious flirtations to smoldering passion to burned-out ashes, is a trajectory Chayefsky worked out over numerous revisions. When the female lead of his screenplay was still called Louise, she was a more romantic soul who, with dewy eyes, confesses to Schumacher that she’d previously met him when he gave a guest lecture during her senior year of college: “You and Ed Murrow and Fred Friendly had knocked off McCarthy, a craggy man, about thirty-eight, tie askew, collar unbuttoned—I think you were affecting the manners of the hard-bitten, hard-drinking, tell-them-like-it-is reporter. You made a terrific hit with the kids. I fell instantly in love with you. I had never had a crush on anyone before.”
When she became Diana, her temperament changed, too. Like her namesake, she had the unattainability of a goddess and her animal wiles, but she was also volatile, joyless, and depressed, telling Schumacher that she lived “on the brink of despair” twenty-four hours a day.
If I could stand the taste of liquor I’d be a lush. I had three wretched years of marriage and four futile years of psychoanalysis. I’ve tried hallucinogen drugs, commune living, activist politics.… In order of appearance, I’ve tried to believe in God, the dignity of man, love and marriage, drugs and feminism and even the absolutism of sex, and I was lousy at all of them, especially sex. I can’t tell you how many men have told me what a lousy lay I am. I seem to have a masculine temperament. I arouse quickly, consummate prematurely, and promptly lose interest.
As the relationship turned physical, Chayefsky’s prose was at times prurient, and he was unabashedly direct that Diana’s presence in Schumacher’s office, her lithe form “lit only by his desk lamp,” was enough to give the old newsman an erection: “it was nipple clear that she was bra-less; when she leaned to his desk to flick an ash from her cigarette into the tray, he could see the assertive swells of her body, and, damn, if he wasn’t reacting to all this like a schoolboy.”
Over the course of an evening’s seduction, the action moves from the UBS office building to a deserted Hamptons beach to a romantic Italian bistro to the dimly lit bedroom of a highway motor lodge—but the conversation, even in flagrante delicto, never changes from the subject of the TV business. Schumacher and Diana were, in a prelude to their lovemaking, meant to exchange more of Chayefsky’s acidic and willfully awful ideas for new programming. She suggests a show adapted from The Exorcist (“I think that occult shit just might go very big as a series”), and he replies, “Sounds like good family entertainment. A ten year old girl who masturbates with crucifixes every week.” She says, “I also want to do a soap on homosexuals,” and he answers, “We’ll call it The Faggots—the heartrending saga of a man’s helpless love for his wife’s boyfriend.” All of these lines would be rewritten before Diana and Max moved on to their “accumbent embrace and intensified foreplay.”
When their affair began to buckle under the intruding weight of reality, Chayefsky toyed with the possibility that Christensen and Schumacher’s coupling might somehow remain intact, as in a set of handwritten lines that begins with her offer to marry him.
DIANA
I’ll try to make a home with you. If I have to, I’ll bear children for you. And if that isn’t love, it’ll have to do.
MAX
It’ll do.
DIANA
Until the real thing comes along.
MAX
It is the real thing—
But the hopefulness of this denouement must have surely rung false to Chayefsky, who instead prescribed for his two lovers to break apart with maximum brutality. Before the author extracted some of the venom in the scene, Schumacher’s last words to Diana were to be “We’re born in terror and we live in terror. Life can be endured only as an act of faith, and the only act of faith most of us are capable of is love. And you’re a vast wasteland, Diana. You haven’t got a single cell of living emotion in you! Goddam right I’m going back to my wife!”
This, too, was discarded in favor of a kiss-off that more fluently spoke the language of television, in which Schumacher declares “a happy ending” for himself: “Wayward husband comes to his senses, returns to his wife with whom he has built a long and sustaining love. Heartless young woman left alone in her arctic desolation. Music up with a swell. Final commercial. And here are a few scenes from next week’s show.”
In his stage direction, Chayefsky adds, “We can hear the CLICK of the door being opened and the CLACK of the door closing” as Diana is left “alone in arctic desolation.”
Chayefsky’s monologues did not necessarily go through as much revision as his dialogue. The only substantial edits made to a speech given by Arthur Jensen, the chairman of UBS’s parent company, the Communications Corporation of America (CCA), that wins Beale over to his “corporate cosmology,” were for length. At its top, Chayefsky amputated a long windup in which Jensen argues that human suffering is not only unavoidable but a natural and necessary element in the reaction that produces progress: “Our generation fought two world wars in which we killed thirty more million men to uphold their dignity,” he was to tell Beale. “We have barely endured two world-wide depressions, and, this year alone, twenty-five million people will starve. There’s something less than efficient about all that.”
At its end, Chayefsky lopped off a section in which Jensen lays out his vision for “a world of total orderliness, Mr. Beale, a planned and programmed world without war and famine, oppression and brutality, crime and disease, one massive, global tutelary corporation where all men can serve their specific functions, their necessities provided, their anxieties tranquilized.”
From its midsection, Chayefsky cut a portion where Jensen observes that mankind may still get “hit with a tidal wave now and then, an earthquake, a tornado, and we still depend somewhat on natural snow for our ski weekends. But on the whole we control nature. We control everything.” But he left behind the very next line, in which Jensen gives his grand summation: “You have meddled with the inexorable”—no, make that primal—“forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won’t have it, is that clear?!”
Another speech, this one designed for Beale—the moment that would transform him from a madman ranting at sixty million viewers to a true prophet of the modern day—contained some of the rawest, most unrelenting language Chayefsky would write, even as it was composed in a methodical and incident-free manner. A hint of it appeared on a handwritten note made for himself, on a mostly blank page bearing only these words: “I want you people to get mad—You don’t have to organize or vote for reformers—You just have to get mad—”
A more fleshed-out version of the speech appeared in one of Chayefsky’s narrative treatments, with its most crucial expression still not fully formulated and pivoting on Beale’s metaphor that, though nobody could seem to explain what television ratings were, his viewers themselves were the ratings. To that, he added: “Open all your windows. Everybody. The whole family. Fathers, mothers, lovers, kids. Everybody. Stick your heads out. Now, I want you to yell. I want you to yell: ‘We’re not going to take it any more. We’re mad as hell, and we’re not going to take this any more.’ Yell that out into the streets.”
A further refinement of the monologue dropped the too precise television jargon. Instead, Beale warns his viewers that he won’t let them retreat into anesthetized isolation and orders them to unleash their anger, not in the form of physical violence but through the expression of language.
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 and watch our teevees while some local newscaster tells us today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be. We all know things are bad. Worse than bad. They’re crazy. It’s like everything’s going crazy. So we don’t go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we live in gets smaller, and all we ask is, please, at least leave us alone in our own living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my teevee and my hair dryer and my steel-belted radials, and I won’t say anything, just leave us alone. Well, I’m not going to leave you alone. I want you to get mad.
I don’t want you to protest. I don’t want you to riot. I don’t want you to write letters to your congressmen. Because I wouldn’t know what to tell you to write. I don’t know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the defense budget and the Russians and crime in the streets. All I know is first you’ve got 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 you to get out of your chairs and go to the window. Right now. I want you to go to the window, open it, and stick your head out and yell. I want you to yell, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this any more!”
The truncated stage direction that now followed Beale’s speech only hinted at the power of the national reaction that his sermon was supposed to have generated. But in a narrative treatment, Chayefsky spelled out more emphatically his vision of what happened next.
Thin voices penetrated the dank rumble of the city, shouting: “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it any more!” Then, suddenly it began to gather, the edges of sounds and voices, until it all surged out in an indistinguishable roar of rage like the thunder of a Nuremberg rally.
* * *
To the outside world, which believed that the once-prolific and fiercely outspoken Paddy Chayefsky had exhausted his energy and had nothing left to say, the screenwriter did not mind helping to perpetuate the illusion. A brief report published in the New York Times in January 1975 pointed out that he had not presented anything on the stage since The Latent Heterosexual and that his last new work of any kind was The Hospital, a film released in the bygone era of 1971. “Since that production,” the article said, “nothing.” Speaking from his office at 850 Seventh Avenue, Chayefsky mentioned that he was “in the middle” of a new screenplay, and when the Times reporter inquired if the project was, perhaps, a comedy, the screenwriter was poker-faced. “I always think of them as comedies,” he replied.
The article mentioned that Chayefsky’s fifty-second birthday was just a few days away and that his son, Dan, was now nineteen, but there was no mention of his wife, Susan. Even his close friends and collaborators knew not to ask about her, and that such inquiries would produce half-mumbled responses, shrugs, or no answers at all. She was forty-eight now, and though she had been an often reliable presence by the author’s side at public events in the 1960s and a reluctant entertainer and sandwich maker at his late-night poker games, members of the Chayefskys’ social circle noticed that they had been seeing less and less of her over the years and that their interactions with her were mostly over the telephone.
Gwen Verdon, the actress and wife of Bob Fosse, estimated that she saw Susan a total of five times in her life, and Ann Reinking, Fosse’s mistress, was surprised by Susan’s beauty on the rare opportunities she was allowed access to her. “She had the kind of skin that doesn’t need powder or makeup,” Reinking said. “She changed her hair color when I knew her. One time she was blond and the next time she was brunette.” She added, “My impression was that she had her own life, which from all appearances remained largely separate from Paddy’s.”
Mary Lynn Gottfried, Howard’s wife, was newly married to her husband in 1973 when he and Chayefsky took what would be their final trip to Israel before work was halted on The Habakkuk Conspiracy. (As Mary Lynn would continue to joke thereafter, “I got the wedding; Paddy got the honeymoon.”) Before the intrepid filmmakers embarked on their journey, the Chayefskys and the Gottfrieds all excitedly piled into a car that delivered them to the airport, where everyone kissed and hugged good-bye and the wives watched from the ground to wave at the plane that carried their husbands off beyond the horizon. Susan, as Mary Lynn recalled, was bright, vivacious, engaged in events and conversations, and not looking forward to the long absence of her spouse and the late-night, long-distance phone calls from seven time zones away. This was to be one of the last times Mary Lynn would see Susan Chayefsky in public.
Paddy Chayefsky could do nothing to cure Susan’s ailments and hardly much more to ease her suffering. But he tried to integrate her into his professional life as best he could, and cared for her opinion enough that he sought her input on the screenplay he had nearly completed. In broad cursive strokes that were looser and less regimented than her husband’s handwriting, Susan offered Paddy her comments, recorded on a memo pad that one might keep on a nightstand to jot down telephone messages. Whether she was directed by her husband’s instructions or her own personal preferences, Susan gravitated in her notes to the scenes that involved female characters, and commented frequently on the distress these sequences stirred up within her.
After reading the argument between Max Schumacher and his wife, Louise, in which Max confesses that he has been conducting an affair with Diana Christensen while suspecting deep down that she is not “capable of any real feelings,” Susan wrote to Paddy that it was “not comforting in reading it.” Similarly, Susan wrote that she was “uncomfortable” with the series of caustic, businesslike remarks made by Diana throughout her overnight getaway with Schumacher, but “It pays off tho” when the two characters tumble into bed with each other. The scene, which Paddy later toned down, was “funny,” Susan wrote, but you “almost don’t want it that brutal.”
A conversation between Diana and Laureen Hobbs, the leader of the revolutionary radicals, laden with swear words, TV-industry jargon, and references to left-wing political figures, was flagged by Susan for its “Very ‘in’ talk—think audience will not comprehend.” She added that this scene “should be cut substantially—viewers won’t understand it.” When Beale resurfaces in a following scene to decry the CCA’s clandestine takeover by a Saudi Arabian investment group, Susan observed, “you feel Howard is no longer in the picture. It is Diana + Max’s picture.” “By this pg,” she wrote, “we feel we know what Howard is going to say,” when what was needed was “a scene in which he ‘relates’ to other people.” Responding to the climactic moment in which Schumacher harshly dismisses Diana and leaves her for good, Susan wrote, “love speech but wished I could see her through his eyes, so that when he makes the speech I believe it more.”
There is no precise way to determine which of Susan’s suggestions were directly incorporated into the script, which ones may have influenced its author in more oblique ways, and which may simply have caused him to chuckle or stroke his beard. But when Paddy Chayefsky arrived at what he felt was a complete version of the screenplay, which he had by now named Network, he took a marker and wrote its title across the cover page in block capital letters. Beneath this, he added in pen a parenthetical dedication: “(The original version for my Suzy).”
* * *
Chayefsky’s first attempt at selling Network to Hollywood, in the summer of 1974, while the screenplay was still a work in progress, yielded a deal so quickly that he must have been suspicious. Following a discussion with David Begelman, the president of Columbia Pictures, Chayefsky received an offer on June 24, guaranteeing him $100,000 for the Network script—$50,000 on signing and $50,000 on delivery—and as much as $300,000 in total screenwriting fees if the film were produced. By July the deal was dead when Columbia balked at a profit-sharing proposal that would have given Chayefsky and Gottfried 50 percent of the film’s net proceeds. Suddenly a reconciliation with United Artists did not seem like such a bad option.
When Chayefsky and Gottfried were not feuding with United Artists and when it was not crushing their hopes and squandering their efforts, their relationship with the studio could be fruitful. In the 1950s, United Artists had released both Marty, one of the few filmmaking experiences Chayefsky did not regard as a psyche-scarring trauma, and his less successful movie adaptation of The Bachelor Party. More recently it had released The Hospital, but it frustrated Chayefsky and Gottfried with its handling of the television rights for that film and by putting the brakes on The Habakkuk Conspiracy. Once the dispute over The Hospital was settled, however, United Artists emerged as a good fit for the sort of scathing social indictment that Network offered.
By the end of 1974, the American motion picture industry was in the midst of a systemic transformation. Hollywood had not abandoned the bloated big-budget spectacles it had been turning out for the past twenty-five years, if films such as Airport and The Towering Inferno were anything to judge by. But a new species of cinema was arising, one that tapped into the tumultuous changes taking place in the country. These films were stylish and spoke with a cool, contemporary vocabulary; also, several of them made money. The financial success of features such as Easy Rider, a 1969 release that took in more than $40 million on a budget of $360,000, had shown that movies could be anti-establishment and pro box office.
Profitability and prestige were not mutually exclusive, either. It was not uncommon to see movies such as Midnight Cowboy, MASH, The French Connection, and The Last Picture Show atop lists of the year’s high-grossing releases while also being nominated for—and winning—Academy Awards. Mike Medavoy, a veteran producer who was then the vice president of production at United Artists, would later summarize the prevailing philosophy of the day: “People thought about making good movies to make money.”
United Artists had taken only partial advantage of this shift in values, during which time it was led by Arthur B. Krim, a former adviser to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, and by David V. Picker, a third-generation movie industry executive whose uncle Arnold M. Picker had revitalized the company alongside Krim in the 1950s. The studio’s eclectic offerings included Woody Allen comedies such as Bananas and Sleeper and the James Bond movie franchise; its highest-grossing release in 1971 had been Diamonds Are Forever, and its second-highest was The Hospital. The studio saw sweeping potential in the independent film adaptation of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which it had recently acquired, and its executives were not afraid to get their hands dirty in support of more esoteric offerings: Picker and Krim had fought with the studio’s parent company, the Transamerica Corporation, to allow United Artists to release X-rated features such as Midnight Cowboy and Last Tango in Paris.
A deal offered by United Artists for the Network screenplay in the fall of 1974 gave Chayefsky highly favorable terms, similar to those he would have received at Columbia: he would be paid $300,000 in total, receiving $100,000 for the finished script, $150,000 on commencement of principal photography, and a final deferred payment of $50,000. While United Artists retained final approval on the film’s budget, director, and principal cast, the studio gave a substantial 42.5 percent of any net profits from the picture to Chayefsky’s Simcha Productions.
The studios nonetheless retained private reservations about what kind of movie Network would turn out to be. An internal MGM memo cited “an off-the-record speculation” from the manager of the Hollywood Code Office at the National Association of Broadcasters, expressing concern that Network’s depiction of the television industry raised “serious doubts about the property’s acceptability to U.S. networks for exhibition on television.” Also problematic in this regard was its use of words such as Chrissakes, fucking, shit, son of a bitch, and cocksmanship. And when Chayefsky delivered a finished draft of the screenplay in May 1975, Marcia Nasatir, the head of script development at United Artists, wrote in a memo that it was “very funny” and “very pertinent,” but she worried that it offered “no hero” and “no hope.” If The Hospital presented the portrait of “a committed man,” Nasatir wrote, Network “is all madness and bullshit philosophy. Accurate picture of TV and U.S.A. life but Chayefsky is too much of a do-gooding humanist to write a totally successful black comedy.”
A few subsequent discussions about the project would soon discredit such a generous assessment of its creator. That spring, Mike Medavoy met with Chayefsky and Gottfried over lunch to talk about possible directors for Network and was surprised that they had enthusiastic designs on Sidney Lumet, the onetime wunderkind of television who was now the revered director of feature films such as Serpico and Murder on the Orient Express.
As Medavoy recalled the conversation, “I turned to both of them and I said, ‘Are you serious? Sidney Lumet? To do a funny movie? When was the last funny movie you saw from Sidney Lumet?’” Reminding Chayefsky and Gottfried of the agonizing scene from Lumet’s movie The Pawnbroker in which Rod Steiger penetrates his own hand with a nail, Medavoy told them, “That ain’t funny.” At which point, Medavoy said, Chayefsky “took his matzo ball soup and it went, a little bit, flying. And I looked at Paddy and I said, ‘You know what? If you feel that strongly, he’s probably a really good director for this.’ And that ended the conversation and it was time to leave. It’s one of those moments that is indelible in my mind, because I can’t remember ever having anybody turn a plate of soup on me.”
Chayefsky’s resentment of the studio personnel, whose interference with Network, he felt, could only diminish the final product, grew, with one frustrating interaction after another. Summarizing a May 15 meeting with the United Artists executive Dan Rissner, Chayefsky recounted in a letter to his lawyer, Maurice Spanbock, some of the studio’s suggestions for revising the script, including:
1. That Diana seduce Howard Beale for some not too clear reasons.
2. That Howard Beale and Max turn up at the affiliate convention and kick up some kind of comic ruckus.
3. That the characters of Althea and the Great Aga Khan [the domestic terrorists who would become Laureen Hobbs and the Great Ahmed Kahn] be merged into one character.
“All these suggestions are so amateurish and counter-productive they are hardly worth commenting on,” Chayefsky wrote, “but I maintained my temper.”
A few days later, Chayefsky and Gottfried were summoned to the studio’s offices in New York to see William Bernstein, the head of its business affairs department. The meeting began in a friendly manner, with Bernstein complimenting Chayefsky on the Network screenplay. There was, of course, a qualification coming.
“He says, ‘Listen, guys, it’s a great script, but there’s something about it that bothers me,’” Gottfried recalled Bernstein saying. “This is what he opens our meeting about. So I said, ‘What about it bothers you?’ So he looks at us, particularly Paddy, and he says, ‘There’s something about Howard Beale that I don’t think works.’ So, Paddy looks him in the eye. He says, ‘Let me get this straight: There’s something about Howard Beale that bothers you?’ He said, ‘That’s it.’” Without speaking a single word more, Chayefsky stood up and exited the meeting, leaving Gottfried behind with Bernstein.
“I’m still there and I look at him,” Gottfried said. “I knew the guy well. I said, ‘You dumb son of a bitch.’ Paddy really was an easy guy, but it was coming from the wrong place.”
When Gottfried completed his own solitary journey from the aborted meeting back to Chayefsky’s office, he found the author on the phone with Spanbock, asking that the United Artists deal for Network be dissolved.
It was a bold but not totally self-destructive move on Chayefsky’s part. By this time, news of his volatile and exciting screenplay had reached other studios. Among them was Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which had once dominated the industry with a leonine might with epic films such as Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, and Ben-Hur, but which had not had much to roar about since 1960s-era hits such as The Dirty Dozen and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Under its head of production, Daniel Melnick, MGM in the 1970s released about five to ten films a year, finding modest success with Westworld, a science-fiction thriller, and That’s Entertainment, a feature-length compilation of vintage music and dance numbers celebrating the studio’s fiftieth anniversary. But awards and credibility had recently proved elusive.
Melnick wanted to make Network, even if his corporate superiors did not. “They didn’t want to have anything to do with it,” he later recalled. “They were very scared, which was understandable. At that time MGM was working on a very reduced budget. To get their money back on a movie they had to sell the ancillary rights to television. And their network division said, ‘Forget this, it will never be shown on national TV.’” Warner Bros. was interested in Chayefsky’s screenplay as well, giving MGM the necessary encouragement to overcome its apprehension and pick up the project, if for no other reason than to keep it out of the hands of a competitor.
For Chayefsky and Gottfried there was an additional incentive to choose MGM. At that time, the studio’s own distribution muscle was so atrophied that for significant releases it often sought support from United Artists. If United Artists joined in as a production partner now, it would be doing so in supplication, on Chayefsky and Gottfried’s terms. And Gottfried was certain that Arthur B. Krim, the studio’s chairman, would make the case to his colleagues that they did not want to lose out on the same movie twice. “I don’t know Arthur’s exact words,” Gottfried said later, “but he made it plain that UA would look like assholes.”
On July 2, 1975, Variety reported that MGM and United Artists had made a deal to release Network as a coproduction. The announcement declared that the “television industry is the target” of the film, adding that “Few specifics are offered about Network but one is that it will be ‘a dramatic yet comedic view of the television medium.’” It would take more than a year for the movie to be made and released in theaters, at which time audiences could decide for themselves if that synopsis offered an adequate summary of what Chayefsky had wrought.