5

A STORM OF HUMANITY

For a few months it may have seemed that Network was a true collaboration, the result of a cast and crew, a director and a screenwriter, working in tandem, if not always in harmony. But once the film was shot, edited, and in the can, the actors, artisans, and crew members moved on to their next projects and their next paychecks. And when all the moviemaking apparatus was stripped away, there remained one man who would receive the praise and bear the blame for the film, who had fought from its inception to make sure the final product was his vision and that all who saw it knew it was his creation. As the opening-credit sequence for Network declared, after announcing the names of its lead performers, its own title, and the studios that made it, but before acknowledging its director, producer, or any other contributor, this was a film by Paddy Chayefsky.

In the spring of 1976, with several months still to go before Network was released in theaters, the time had come to start pulling back the curtain on a movie whose true intentions were largely mysterious to the people who had helped make it and to the media that had begun to cover it, and to decide how it should be positioned in the public eye. And the angle that was seized upon in promoting Network was controversy. As a poster for the film prominently warned audiences, “Prepare yourself for a perfectly outrageous motion picture,” adding that “Television will never be the same again.” The poster’s design was the handiwork of Stephen Frankfurt, the former Young and Rubicam advertising executive who had created enduring marketing campaigns for Rosemary’s Baby (“Pray for Rosemary’s baby”) and Lay’s Potato Chips (“Betcha can’t eat just one”), and the stark and deceptively childlike opening title sequence of To Kill a Mockingbird. The central image of his Network campaign, evoking the rainstorm that rages as Howard Beale makes his “Mad as hell” speech, was a jagged bolt of lightning descending from a cloud and striking the letter W in the film’s title.

Similarly ominous images were swirling in the imagination of Paddy Chayefsky, for whom Network had thus far been only a phenomenon observed at point-blank range—words in his mind and on a page, and scenes acted out for him where he sat—but who quickly seemed to grasp how this promotional strategy was going to reflect on the film and on him. As he wrote around this time to his friend Calder Willingham, the author and screenwriter, “I know I am in for a storm of humanity.”

MGM and United Artists scheduled the release of Network in the final weeks of the year, seeking to capitalize on any political fervor that remained after the 1976 presidential election. The studios committed to a marketing campaign budgeted at nearly $3 million, almost as much as the cost of the film itself, and hired Howard Newman, a veteran New York publicist who had worked on films such as West Side Story, The Godfather, and The Exorcist, to assist with the promotion. One of the earliest dispatches to come from his office was a set of production notes dated April 12 that trumpeted “the provocative theme of Paddy Chayefsky’s NETWORK and the calibre of its collaborative creators,” which combined to make it “one of the most important films of the year,” and describing it as “a frightening story told in comedic terms.”

Chayefsky’s name was always listed in these materials ahead of those of Sidney Lumet, Faye Dunaway, William Holden, Peter Finch, and Robert Duvall. If the ultimate goal of such a document or the campaign in which it was being deployed was at all ambiguous, the production notes made clear in their second paragraph that “virtually everyone connected with NETWORK has won the esteem of their peers by Academy nominations or awards,” including Chayefsky, who “carried away the coveted little golden statuette for his screenplay Marty in 1955 and The Hospital in 1971.”

This compilation of personal biographies, cast and crew rosters, and character summaries would be distributed to any reporter, critic, feature writer, or broadcaster with an inclination to say anything about Network, and it was not shy about indulging in histrionics. Dunaway’s character of Diana Christensen, it said, “should lay to rest the prevailing cliche that ‘good roles aren’t written for women anymore,’” breathlessly adding that Diana was “undoubtedly the strongest role written for an actress since Tennessee Williams created Blanche DuBois.” Its description of anchorman Howard Beale compared the character to Walter Cronkite, John Chancellor, and Eric Sevareid, while declaring that Finch “emanates the very aura of dignified authority, articulate, well-educated, completely informed on everything from the inner politics of the Arab Emirate to kitty litter. Even the agonies of his disintegration are overlaid with respectful admiration for a giant brought down by an unkind destiny.”

These words, of course, were not Chayefsky’s, and where the author offered his feedback on the Network publicity materials, his comments were limited to remarks such as “Note: I never won an Emmy” and “!!! NOTE—DO NOT EVER refer to this film NETWORK as a ‘black’ comedy!!! I can’t think of anything less likely to induce people to see it.” But where he felt fully invested in matters that were even tangentially related to the presentation of the movie, Chayefsky remained fiercely protective of his intellectual property.

Among the ancillary projects prepared to coincide with the release of Network was a paperback novelization of the movie, written by Burton Wohl, the screenwriter of films such as Rio Lobo, and published by the Pocket Books imprint of Simon and Schuster. But in a letter offering his thanks for the assignment, Wohl did not endear himself to Chayefsky. Addressing his words to “Dear Mr. Chayevsky [sic],” Wohl wrote that he found Network to be “an intelligent, literate and highly dramatic script.” Nonetheless, he added, “I hope you’ll indulge my need to change a bit of your dialogue from time to time, dialogue which I found uniformly excellent but which, for the purposes of the novel, is sometimes insufficient. I haven’t embroidered much, only now and then … most of the stuff is yours and it worked beautifully.”

Taking no chances, Chayefsky laid out a series of strict guidelines in a letter to Pocket Books editor Agnes Birnbaum, and which he expected to be obeyed completely. To begin with, he said:

The adaptor must remain entirely outside the telling of the story, invisible and as inaudible as possible. That means, the adaptor (storyteller, author, novelizer, whatever) must never introduce his own comments, insights, impressions, opinions. He simply tells the story, adding only what is desperately necessary to let the audience see and hear what is happening. The storyteller in our instance is simply that, and no more—a storyteller; and his attitude is that of a man telling a story that might seem occasionally hard to believe but did in fact actually happen.

In his further, increasingly rigid decrees, Chayefsky added that the author should never say “what the characters are thinking, remembering, reflecting upon, speculating about, mentally associating with or subconsciously imagining,” but simply “what the characters say and do”; that this writer’s prose style is to be “spare, lean and economical” and should avoid similes and metaphors. (“If somebody’s hair is green, you have to say it is green, but you do not have to say it is as green as grass. Green hair is a sufficiently startling image in itself.”) Finally, Chayefsky suggested, “The adaptor should not try to be funny. Writers who try to be funny are not funny. On the other hand, he shouldn’t try to be sad either. He shouldn’t try to be anything except the teller of the story.”

When the edited pages of the Network novelization were delivered to him, Chayefsky was unmistakably disappointed with the results and ruthless in his notes back to the publisher. Across its very first page, he left untouched only its opening sentence—“This story is about Howard Beale, network news anchorman on UBS-TV”—and slashed away entire paragraphs that described the character as “dignified without being pompous, serious without being solemn, humorous without being silly” and a lengthy discourse about the difference between being a “hero” and being “heroic.” In the right-hand margin, a perplexed Chayefsky wrote, “What’s this shit got to do with anything?”

In another edit, Chayefsky struck out a passage that said Beale had been giving “more and more of himself to booze and casual cooze until his prostate grew to the size and texture of a hummingbird’s nest and his audience rating dropped to 8.” (His note on this particular embellishment was “rubbish.”) His additional comments on the manuscript included “shit and not funny”; “how to butcher a joke”; “neither of these men is a dirty old goat, which is what we’ve got here”; “are these banal interpolations being presented as necessary novelistic improvements?”; “what is this shit?”; “no comment”; and “not everybody spends every waking moment thinking about getting fucked.”

When the Network novel was published, its author was given as Sam Hedrin, a pseudonym that evoked the word Sanhedrin, the title given to the council of judges that governed ancient Israel and that, among other duties, passed judgment on Jesus before turning him over to Pontius Pilate.

*   *   *

The July 29 edition of Women’s Wear Daily recorded the enthusiastic reaction to a sneak preview of Network, held at the Regent Theatre in the well-to-do Westwood neighborhood of Los Angeles and attended by such VIPs as Dustin Hoffman, David Geffen, and his girlfriend Marlo Thomas. The screening, it said, was “frequently interrupted by sustained bursts of applause,” with the most spirited approval coming after “Bill Holden’s impassioned speech to Faye Dunaway about the prurient nature of TV itself.” “On the way out,” the article said, “Hoffman was slapping MGM’s Dan Melnick on the back, and Geffen was cheering, ‘It’s dynamite.’”

But a full-color press circular sent out by the studios a few weeks later emphasized a different strain of reactions that Network was starting to elicit. This promotional material focused less on the positive passions the film was stirring up and more on the ways in which it seemed to be indicting the television industry, the corporations that controlled the American media conglomerates, and the men who sat atop those corporations. Opening on the lightning bolt image from the movie poster and the assurance that “the excitement builds for a perfectly outrageous motion picture,” the circular reprinted portions of two recent news articles, the first one also from Women’s Wear Daily, but not as welcoming as that publication’s earlier report on the film.

“Network, Sidney Lumet’s new movie,” this latest article said, “is the bitterest attack yet on television. The Bluhdorns and Paleys of this world might well run for cover when they see news commentator Peter Finch, programmer Faye Dunaway and news director William Holden (all superb) acting it out in the TV jungle. The writer of the Network script, Paddy Chayefsky, is telling us TV is a menacing monster and together with the business world ‘they’ are trying to control all. No wonder ABC-CBS-NBC would not let Lumet’s cameras near their studios. Instead, Lumet filmed inside TV newsrooms in Canada.” In a comparison that was both fortuitous and portentous, it continued that Network, “to be released in November, is as big a shock, and as powerful entertainment, as All the President’s Men.”

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.

Its closing read, “My very best.”

That same day, Chayefsky wrote a similar letter to a recipient named John—almost certainly the NBC anchor John Chancellor, whom he did not know as intimately, but whom he felt was owed an apology.

I read a piece in the Washington Post which indicates my movie “Network” has aroused resentment among some people in television. Has this caused you any embarrassment or professional discomfort? If so, John, please know I never dreamed television people would be angry about the film. I figured there were always a few stuffed shirts in every business, but that most television people would love the film. In fact, all the television people I’ve spoken to loved it. Anyway, I would never have asked you for help if I had thought the net result would embarrass you. If you have been put in an awkward spot, please let me know if there is anything I can do to make amends.

*   *   *

Whether or not Chayefsky realized it, Network was having an impact at the highest echelons of the television news industry, affecting the lives of people he had never known or encountered. For Barbara Walters, the film’s release was the culmination of several deeply uncomfortable months in her career—an annus horribilis that began when she was named coanchor of ABC’s Evening News and became the first woman ever to hold a network anchor position.

For the fifteen years prior, Walters had been a staff member at NBC’s Today Show, where she had been named cohost in 1974 only after exploiting a loophole in her contract when the program’s longtime host, Frank McGee, died unexpectedly. Two years later, she was recruited by William Sheehan, the president of ABC News, to join Harry Reasoner at the anchor desk of the network’s national evening news broadcast; eager to make history and fulfill her potential, Walters readily accepted the offer. It was only years later, reflecting on this decision, that she said, “I should have had my head examined. Because the whole attitude was still so very anti-female.”

Walters’s troubles began at the moment the terms of her deal with ABC were announced, on April 23, 1976. The New York Times, in the very first sentence of its front-page story, revealed that she was to be paid $1 million a year over the next five years for her employment. It hardly mattered that half her annual salary represented the actual amount she would be paid for her Evening News anchor duties, and the other half would pay for the four hour-long entertainment news specials she would host each year. The total sum was far more than any of her male counterparts, at ABC or elsewhere, was currently being paid, and it set tongues clucking.

That was strike one against Walters; strike two was ABC’s announcement, simultaneous with her hiring, that the network would expand its national newscast from thirty minutes to forty-five, and that its local affiliates were expected to do the same with their regional news broadcasts, thus creating a ninety-minute block of news each night. Instead, the affiliate stations, which did not want to yield lucrative airtime when they could be selling commercials for syndicated sitcoms, dramas, or game shows, rebelled against this plan and it was never implemented.

Then, strike three: NBC, which still had Walters under contract until September of that year, would not release her to its competitor, and for the entire summer of 1976 she was exiled from TV screens, unable to report on major news events such as the U.S. bicentennial or the presidential conventions. Even the date when she finally took her coanchor post at ABC proved inauspicious. “I went on the night of Yom Kippur,” Walters later said, “and I felt that God never forgave me.”

At ABC, Walters found herself frozen out by Reasoner, her coanchor, who resented the fact that he had to share his program with anyone—let alone a woman, and let alone a woman whose background was solely in broadcast journalism, rather than print. In the wider world, she was excoriated for not having an impact on the ratings of Evening News commensurate with her substantial salary. Crossing paths at a party with Clay Felker, the editor of New York magazine, which had recently rendered its judgment on Walters in an article titled “She’s a Flop,” Walters recalled, “I said, ‘That was so hurtful.’ And he looked me in the eye and said, ‘Well, you are a flop.’”

Into this volatile mix of professional rivalries, personal animus, and gender politics came Network, which had presciently placed a bold female character in the highest ranks of its fictional hierarchy and made sure hers was always the loudest voice in the room. (In the words of one feminist critic, Diana Christensen was the “Great American Bitch,” who had “moved out of the house and into the corporate structure” and who “embodies not only the fabled bloodlessness of TV executives but also the frightening impersonality of the medium itself.”) Already burdened with battling the prejudices being directed against her personally, Walters now found it her weary and unwanted responsibility to have to answer for the satirical and stereotypical portrait of a working woman that the movie put forth.

“What troubled me,” she told the Washington Post soon after seeing the film, “is that it gives such an exaggerated picture of television news. Obviously it’s the result of Paddy Chayefsky’s bitterness toward what happened to him in television.… People will think they’re getting the inside story, and they’re not.”

In the Christian Science Monitor, Walters said that Network was ultimately “very good” as “an entertainment,” and that “there is some truth in it—for instance, the holier-than-thou atmosphere that network news executives take at the same time that all they are worrying about is ratings.” But in its overall depiction of television news, Walters worried that it was misleading. “If people accept the film as reality,” she said, “it will be dreadful because it is an unfair, exaggerated portrayal.”

Walters said later that Network “was not on the top of my list of things to worry about in those days.” The film imagined that in order for a woman to succeed in TV news, she said, “you had to be tough as nails. That’s changed—you don’t, any more than a man has to be tough as nails. But the leading woman had to be a bitch. And that was typecasting of a woman working.” The problem she faced at ABC was simpler and more insidious: “Not that I was considered tough as nails, but ‘You don’t belong. You’re not one of us.’” Whether she was hard or soft, stubborn or accommodating, there was no right way for a woman to present herself, she said, “not at that point.”

*   *   *

Richard Wald, the NBC News president who had given Chayefsky access to his department while he researched the Network screenplay, said his corporate superiors had a blunt reaction to the film: “They hated it. Oh my God. And I got flak later because I had allowed him free rein of the news division. The news division is a tiny part of the movie, but it was the only one they could really nail to me.” Wald himself took no offense at the film or how Chayefsky had used his access at NBC; he did not know the author personally and had only been acting on the recommendation of NBC’s entertainment division when he served as the author’s chaperone that past spring. “But,” he said, “I got a call from the entertainment department, and they knew him. Apparently they felt bitten by this thing. Not apparently—they felt bitten by this thing.”

Wald did not see Chayefsky again after the scriptwriter’s preliminary visits to NBC, but the author had promised to send Wald a copy of the screenplay if he used his name in it, and he made good on this vow. “Ultimately,” Wald said, “I got two pages of a script, and I was all excited: William Holden is fired, he goes downstairs, and he says to his secretary, ‘Get me Dick Wald; he’ll know what to do.’ And oh boy, big deal.” When Wald and his wife were invited to an early screening of Network in New York, Wald said he was looking forward to his nominal film debut: “We dress up and we go to the New York premiere, and William Holden gets fired and we’re watching the movie and I’m waiting for my big moment. And nothing! Absolutely nothing.” Dismayed, Wald contacted Chayefsky after the screening to ask why he hadn’t been mentioned. “I sent him a note and I said, ‘Hey, where am I?’” he recalled. “And the answer came back: ‘Welcome to Hollywood. You’re on the cutting room floor.’ And that’s the last I ever had anything to do with Paddy Chayefsky.”

*   *   *

Chayefsky emerged in November to give his first interviews on Network, sounding somewhat chastened by the criticism the film had taken from the broadcasting industry, even as he pushed back against it. Speaking alongside Gottfried to the New York Post, Chayefsky said he was “upset to hell” that so many prominent television personalities thought the movie was attacking them. As Earl Wilson recounted the scene in his It Happened Last Night column, a “very innocent” Chayefsky declared Network to be “a fond, affectionate satire.” Then, “smiling mischievously,” he added: “I’m not the only one who thinks so.”

Gottfried was quick to contradict his partner. “It’s not affectionate,” he said. “It says basically that TV tends to corrupt the people in it to get ratings.”

Chayefsky, puffing on a small cigar, replied, “If we were in charge of a network, we wouldn’t be different.”

“Then,” Gottfried observed, “we’d be equally corrupted.”

Addressing an audience of high school and college students attending a preview screening of Network at the Sutton Theater, Chayefsky said that the film “was not written out of rancor.” “My rage isn’t against television,” he said. “It is a rage against the dehumanization of people.” Nor, he said, was the character of Diana Christensen, or Dunaway’s portrayal of her, a commentary on women in the business: “That part is me. She is a man.” The film, he said, was about Marshall McLuhan and “the illusion we sell as truth. It’s about how to protect ourselves. We have to avoid the bullshit.”

But over several more minutes of sustained inquiry, Chayefsky gradually reverted to a familiar, cynical form, holding forth on the evils of foreign investments in the U.S. economy (“The Saudis have bought $200 million worth of AT&T stock. That’s what I mean by too much. There is so much information in the movie, you can get a headache”); the inferiority of TV news to its print counterpart (“You put a camera in front of a cop and suddenly the crook becomes a perpetrator—a newspaper reporter can just go over and ask what the fuck happened”); Gene Shalit of the Today Show (“The man is a professional clown”); and why he had generally given up watching television journalism in favor of Knicks games. Speculating on how Network was going to be received by critics, Chayefsky said, “We’re going to get murdered,” as Gottfried and an MGM publicity executive winced at the remarks.

Chayefsky (who was described by Women’s Wear Daily as possessing “the look of a satyr who has retired from active duty”) sounded prematurely defeated, in one breath dismissing television as “an industry built on hysteria,” while complaining in the next that cinema was “not a writer’s medium.” “Most films are too tidy,” he said. “They’re predictable little packages.” Were it up to MGM, he said with some overdramatization, Network would have concluded at the moment Schumacher breaks up with Diana and returns to his wife—had he not stuck up for the version of the screenplay he had written: “That’s the picture, I told them.”

In an interview with the New York Times, Chayefsky struck his most contrarian note, stating, “Television is democracy at its ugliest.”

“The conception of Network is a farce,” he said, “but once the idea is there, it’s all real, every bit. I don’t attack; I just tell the truth. Television will do anything for a rating. Anything!”

This article concluded by noting that Chayefsky and Gottfried had broken up their friendly poker games some time ago, as Gottfried now preferred to go to Vegas and Chayefsky preferred to stay home. Rather than waste his time on the contemporary TV programs he so clearly despised, Chayefsky said he had recently watched an old kinescope of “Catch My Boy on Sunday,” a teleplay he wrote for The Philco-Goodyear Television Playhouse in 1954, and decided that it had held up well in the years since it was broadcast.

The day before Network’s official New York premiere, the principal members of its creative team gathered for a 10:00 A.M. press conference at Shepheard’s, the small downstairs nightclub of the Drake Hotel on Park Avenue, and everyone was in character: Sidney Lumet waxed philosophical, asserting that the aim of the film “is to stretch realism past its limit, but never to violate the truth,” and repeated his familiar credo that while he, Chayefsky, and Gottfried all had their professional origins in television, “we never left it—it left us.” William Holden reminisced about having been a classmate of Jackie Robinson’s when the two attended Pasadena City College in the late 1930s. (“I would have failed biology class if it hadn’t been for Jackie Robinson. I sat and cribbed from his notes.”) Peter Finch, attending with his wife, Eletha, touted the new home he had recently purchased in Beverly Hills and hailed Network as “a cautionary tale about our lives today—we’re becoming computerized, deodorized, whiter-than-white lambs.” Faye Dunaway arrived an hour late and dismissed the notion that any feminist ideals had influenced her portrayal of a character that Lumet described as “a ruthless, remorseless killer.” “Lady Macbeth will do,” she replied through a smile.

Chayefsky made one more attempt to plead his case that Network actually treated the television news business with respect: “There are many people in television, especially in the various news departments, that I consider incorruptible,” he said. “Many of these people are my friends and have been since the early days of television. I consider them decent, respectable, sensitive people. I’m not talking about these people in my film. I’m talking about the executives who run the industry, those decision makers who are part of a larger corporation. I’m talking about what happens to a network when it’s taken over, made into a cash-flow industry and becomes part of a larger corporation, which is exactly what is happening to networks in America right now.”

In a similar spirit, he argued that Network was in fact a satirical send-up of what could someday be, not a criticism of things as they were. “The American tradition of journalism is objectivity,” Chayefsky said. “We have an editorial page. We have a comic page. There is nothing valuable about a journalist—or anybody for that matter—getting up and comicalizing the news. The news should not—must not—become part of the entertainment scheduling. To make a gag out of the news is disreputable and extremely destructive.”

*   *   *

The first major review of Network to see print was published in the New York Times on November 15, one day after the film’s premiere. It was a rave. Tweaking its sensationalized promotional campaign, Vincent Canby wrote that the film was, “as its ads proclaim, outrageous. It’s also brilliantly, cruelly funny, a topical American comedy that confirms Paddy Chayefsky’s position as a major new American satirist. Paddy Chayefsky? Major? New? A satirist? Exactly.”

As astounded as he expected his audience to be that the observant dramatist and common-man champion of Marty had matured into the withering ironist of The Hospital and now Network, Canby wrote of Chayefsky, “His humor is not gentle or generous. It’s about as stern and apocalyptic as it’s possible to be without alienating the very audience for which it was intended.” But to dismiss the absurdities of Network as scenarios that could never happen was to miss the point: “These wickedly distorted views of the way television looks, sounds and, indeed, is, are the satirist’s cardiogram of the hidden heart, not just of television but also of the society that supports it and is, in turn, supported.” Praising the performances of Finch, Holden, and Dunaway (who was “touching and funny” as “a woman of psychopathic ambition and lack of feeling”), the supporting turns of Duvall and Beatty, and the direction of Lumet, Canby concluded, “As the crazy prophet within the film says of himself, Network is vivid and flashing. It’s connected into life.”

In the Saturday Review, Judith Crist declared Network “a ruthless exploration of the ‘aesthetics’ and ‘art’ of television that goes beyond its present-day realities to forecast the brave new world of the medium’s tomorrow, let alone some innovations of this very season,” adding that “Chayefsky’s drama is rooted in the realities of life in those Sixth Avenue monoliths that house the networks, its near-roman à clef personalities identifiable to anyone familiar with the industry.” The Daily News gave it two thumbs-up as well, with film critic Rex Reed deeming Network “a blazing, blistering indictment of television by the brilliant probing mind of Paddy Chayefsky,” while television editor Kay Gardella wrote that it “sustains an artistic perception of network television that is both outrageously funny and, with a good stretch of the imagination, quite believable.”

A few days later, Canby was back in the pages of the New York Times praising Network in a follow-up essay as “a satiric send-up of commercial television that contains only one decent, upstanding, honorable, moral fellow of recognizable strength in the cast of characters—that is, Chayefsky, who doesn’t appear on the screen at all but is the dominant presence in the film.”

“Though Sidney Lumet has directed it as if we were there and it was happening now,” Canby wrote, “Network is not meant to be realistic, a movie-à-clef. It’s a roller coaster ride through Chayefsky’s fantasies as he imagines what television might do if given the opportunity.” This, he realized, was not going to be everyone’s cup of tea.

I understand people simply not finding this sort of thing as funny as I do. It’s a bit masochistic, like sitting on the stern of the Titanic and giggling all the way until you finally slide under the water. But to be morally outraged by Chayefsky’s moral outrage, on the grounds that Chayefsky (1) offers no solutions, (2) finds no redeeming factors, or (3) sets himself up as judge and jury, seems to me to be missing the point of satire, which is to be as sweepingly stern as an Old Testament prophet, intelligently concerned and bitterly comic. Satirists have no obligation to be fair to the enemy, or especially accurate.… It would be reassuring if we could piously blame TV’s ills on a few isolated people. It might also be the same as blaming Patty Hearst for having had the poor form to allow herself to be kidnapped.

By this point Network was in need of a few ardent defenders. Reviewing the film for New York magazine, John Simon wrote that Network “inherits the Glib Piety Award direct from the hands of The Front, the previous winner. When it comes to sanctimonious smugness and holier-than-thou sententiousness, the new laureate is even more deserving of the unsavory prize. Network, moreover, is a further lap in Paddy Chayefsky’s, the scenarist’s, fascinating race against decrepitude and impotence.… The onscreen result is worse than a three-ring circus, however: verbal and intellectual Grand Guignol.” While impressed by Lumet’s direction and the work of the acting ensemble (though Holden, “alas, has not aged well”), Simon concluded that “this crude film really panders to whatever is smug and pseudosophisticated in an audience of self-appointed insiders; their smart-alecky laughter was not an inspiriting thing to hear.”

At the Nation, Robert Hatch asked rhetorically, “So this is a slashing comment on network television and therefore exceedingly bold? Not by a country mile. There is plenty wrong with television, plenty to satirize. But Network prudently misses the point, dishing up an outrageous razzle-dazzle stew that will ruffle no network feathers and delight a popular audience that enjoys being titillated by improbable threats.”

And in the New York Post, a young film critic named Frank Rich dismissed Network as “a mess of a movie” that “is drastically out of control—dramatically, cinematically and intellectually—and it treats its audience with more contempt than any other serious American movie this year.” With some economy and restraint, Rich wrote, Chayefsky “might have had a classic 15-minute sketch for Saturday Night Live.” Instead:

We begin to feel that Chayefsky is a cranky paranoid who’s overstacked his polemical deck, and we stop believing in his message. Since the script treats the mass public that watches TV as morons, too, Network at times seems to be saying that we deserve the TV we get—and that neutralizes the film’s point even further.… You begin to suspect that Chayefsky wrote Network not so much to attack TV as to attack a generation of American kids who frighten and baffle him.

Overall, Rich said that Network “contains so much extraneous material that it’s hard to believe Chayefsky ever wrote a second draft.” And he lambasted Dunaway’s performance (playing “the meanest woman to be seen in an American film since the Wicked Witch of the West”) as a living embodiment of the film’s flaws: “She’s so busy trying to outrage us that she doesn’t even notice that she’s drowning in her own bile.” But then again, he wrote, “In Network, everybody stinks—except Chayefsky.”

Perhaps the most scathing response to the film came as a one-two punch published in the December 6 issue of the New Yorker. Pauline Kael, in a film review unpromisingly entitled “Hot Air,” wrote, “In Network, Paddy Chayefsky blitzes you with one idea after another. The ideas don’t go together, but who knows which of them he believes, anyway? He’s like a Village crazy bellowing at you: blacks are taking over, revolutionaries are taking over, women are taking over. He’s got the New York City hatreds, and ranting makes him feel alive.”

Though the story of Howard Beale’s breakdown might contain “a fanciful, Frank Capra nuttiness that could be appealing,” and Finch’s “fuzzy mildness is likable,” Kael wrote that “Chayefsky is such a manic bard that I’m not sure if he ever decided whether Howard Beale’s epiphanies were the result of a nervous breakdown or were actually inspired by God.” And while Dunaway brings to her performance “a certain heaviness … that has made some people think her Garbo-esque,” her character ultimately isn’t “a woman with a drive to power, she’s just a dirty Mary Tyler Moore.”

Kael wrote that, for all of Network’s flaws, blame rested squarely on its author, for whom the film is “a ventriloquial harangue” that he spends thrashing around “in messianic God-love booziness, driving each scene to an emotional peak.”

What happened to his once much-vaunted gift for the vernacular? Nothing exposes his claims to be defending the older values so much as the way he uses four-letter words for chortles. It’s so cheap you may never want to say **** again. Chayefsky doesn’t come right out and tell us why he thinks TV is so goyish, but it must have something to do with his notion that all feeling is Jewish.

Elsewhere in that same issue, Michael J. Arlen, the magazine’s television critic, provided his own epitaph for the film. “As entertainment, it’s probably fair to say that Network is lively, slick, and highly professional, and combines the attention to background detail and the avoidance of interior complexity which more or less define the show-business ethos it was attempting to criticize,” he wrote. “As satire or as serious comment, the movie seemed oddly pious and heavy-handed. In other words, it was another typically overmounted, modishly topical, over obvious popular entertainment—good for a few laughs, and something to do after dinner.”

*   *   *

The polarizing responses to Network played right into the campaign devised for it by MGM and United Artists, which were busy producing thousands of buttons and bumper stickers that read, I’M MAD AS HELL AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE IT ANYMORE. The controversy surrounding the film merely suggested to audiences that it was something they needed to see for themselves and form an opinion about; and the harder it was attacked, the more bulletproof it became.

Propelled by some of the reviews that described Network as a roman à clef, an idea had taken hold in the media that each character in the film was an analog for a real-world figure who had somehow wronged or offended Chayefsky, and the screenplay was his mocking revenge on him. An item in New York magazine straightforwardly declared that Max Schumacher was based on Edward R. Murrow; that the UBS executives played by William Prince and Wesley Addy were William S. Paley and Frank Stanton of CBS; and Laureen Hobbs was Angela Davis. There was wide consensus, too, that Diana Christensen was a gloss on NBC’s female vice president of daytime programming, Lin Bolen, who had spoken briefly by phone with Dunaway while she was preparing for the role. “’Tis said Lin axed some of Paddy’s pet TV projects,” the gossip columnist Liz Smith wrote. Had anyone sought to confirm these claims with the author, he would have handily dismissed them.

As the year drew to a close, Time magazine published its own battlefield update from the ongoing skirmishes that continued to be waged around Network. Dubbing it “The Movie TV Hates and Loves,” the newsweekly reported that Lumet had recently been barred from a screening at NBC because of the film, while quoting an anonymous NBC vice president who said of the movie, “It’s a piece of crap. It had nothing to do with our business.” The article also cited supporters such as Norman Lear, who called it “a brilliant film,” and Gore Vidal, who said, “I’ve heard every line from that film in real life.”

In a sidebar to the Time article, Chayefsky did not address his supporters or attack his detractors, but took aim directly at the medium of television. In a treatise that could have come right from his Network screenplay, he wrote, “I think the American people deserve some truth—at least as much truth as we can give them—instead of pure entertainment or pure addiction.”

“Let’s at least show the country to ourselves for what it really is,” Chayefsky wrote.

It includes more than pimps, hustlers, junkies, murderers and hit men. All family life is not as coarse and brutalized as it is presented to us on TV. There is a substantial thing called America with a very complicated, pluralistic society that is worth honest presentation.… Television coarsens all the complexities of human relationships, brutalizes them, makes them insensitive. The point about violence is not so much that it breeds violence—though that is probably true—but that it totally desensitizes viciousness, brutality, murder, death so that we no longer actively feel the pains of the victim or suffer for the mourners or feel their grief.… We have become desensitized to things that are usually part of the human condition. This is the basic problem of television. We’ve lost our sense of shock, our sense of humanity.

Desperate as these words sounded, Chayefsky had not yet given up entirely on his fellow man. Amid the furious back-and-forth over the release of Network, he had received an unexpected note of support from an ABC employee named Barbara Gallagher, the assistant to the president of the network’s entertainment division, who sent him an appreciative fan letter. “Wow! What a movie!” Gallagher wrote. “I was caught up in ‘Network’ … I can’t tell you what an impact it had on me. It’s a classic, + absolutely the best picture I’ve seen in years. Bravo!” Then, beneath her signature, she informed him: “P.S. I’m quitting my job…”

Chayefsky gently mimicked Gallagher in his reply, writing, “Wow! What a note! You are terrific. You are also very sweet and kind to have taken the trouble to write me.”

He added: “Don’t quit yet. On the whole, ABC has been very kind to me.”