8

IT’S ALL GOING TO HAPPEN

Speaking from his comfortably shabby office at 850 Seventh Avenue in the spring of 1981, Paddy Chayefsky offered his vision for what he expected the network news would look like someday—not as it might be depicted in Network, but as he believed it would appear on actual television sets as watched by people across the country. “There will be soothsayers soon,” he asserted. Network, he said, “wasn’t even a satire. I wrote a realistic drama. The industry satirizes itself.”

Pointing to the rise of so-called happy news programs on ABC, Chayefsky asked, was this “much different from what I said was going to happen?” Instead of turning its news division over to a made-up figure such as Diana Christensen and her programming department, hadn’t this network instead simply placed it under the direction of her real-life equivalent Roone Arledge, its young and innovative head of sports? “What’s the difference?” Chayefsky grumbled. “It’s all going to happen.”

It is not hard to imagine readers in 1981 laughing to themselves at Chayefsky’s remarks and the thought of this funny, fussy curmudgeon having fallen down the rabbit hole of his own prophecy. Certainly, Network was a passionate and sometimes wildly visionary movie. But it was just a movie. Even its most ardent admirers knew that it was an outrageous, over-the-top send-up of what could happen to television if all the wrong choices were made, not a step-by-step proposal for its eventual undoing. Anyone who was overly troubled by Network or who received its twisted wisdom with a straight face was a person not to be trusted entirely—even if that person was its own author.

Paddy Chayefsky lived and died in a world of three monolithic television broadcasters, invincible in their hegemony, transmitting their content to hundreds of millions of American viewers. There was only one way for them to present the news: stoic and serious, and read by a white man; the information offered by each network was generally identical to what the others provided, and its overall accuracy was regarded as unimpeachable. The only widely available means of instantaneous, two-way communication was the telephone, and keyboards were for typewriters, which were used to write letters, or possibly novels or screenplays, if you believed that you inhabited a world of ideas and were strong and single-minded enough to think that your thoughts and feelings could reshape it.

Yet to look at the American media landscape some three decades later is to see an environment that is unmistakably Chayefskyian. It is a realm where the oligarchy of the three networks has been assailed by a fourth rival and by a fifth, and overwhelmed by a hundred-pronged attack from cable, a metastasizing organism perpetually subdividing itself into smaller and narrower niches. Where nationally televised news had been a once-nightly ritual, it has since grown into a twenty-four-hour-a-day habit, available on channels devoted entirely and ceaselessly to its dissemination. The people who dispense these versions of the news seem to take their direction straight from the playbook of Howard Beale: they emote, they inveigh, and they instruct their audiences how to act and how to feel; some of them even cry on camera.

There is no longer one holistic system of news for audiences of every stripe, size, color, and creed: there is news for early-morning risers and news for late-night insomniacs; news for liberals and news for conservatives; sports news for men and feel-good news for women; news delivered in comedic voices and even, for a time, news for viewers who preferred to receive it from a Spanish-speaking puppet. Information is instantaneous and perilously subjective in an era when every man or woman can potentially be his or her own broadcaster. But when this array of apparently endless choice is untangled, and every cable wire and satellite beam is followed back to its source, what is revealed is a decidedly finite roster of media companies with the power to decide what is said and who is saying it: a college of corporations providing all necessities, tranquilizing all anxieties, amusing all boredoms.

Such a world may sound like the wildest dream of the Network corporate chief, Arthur Jensen, but it reverberates with the prophetic echoes of Howard Beale, who preached that television was “the ultimate revelation”: “This tube is the most awesome goddam force in the whole godless world! And woe is us if it ever falls in the hands of the wrong people.” And deeper still, one can hear the voice of Paddy Chayefsky, who warned without irony or tongue in cheek, “It’s all going to happen.”

In fact, it has already happened. And it is with only the slightest exaggeration that a contemporary screenwriter such as Aaron Sorkin can say, “No predictor of the future—not even Orwell—has ever been as right as Chayefsky was when he wrote Network.”

So how did it happen?

“Chayefsky’s warning was made to people who knew everything he said was true, but they felt powerless to stop it,” said Peggy Noonan, the Wall Street Journal columnist and former speechwriter to presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, who in the late 1970s was a producer for CBS Radio. “It was as if a young doctor came into a great teaching hospital in nineteenth-century France and announced, ‘I’ve figured it out, if we wash our hands before operating there will be fewer infections!’ And the other doctors look at him and say, ‘Yes, but we’re not going to start washing our hands for a long time.’ We’re on an irrevocable slide in that department.”

To a generation of television news professionals who came of age in the post-Network era, the film does not play as a radical comedy so much as a straightforward, that’s-the-way-it-is statement of fact. Short of witnessing the assassination of an on-air personality, “I have seen everything in that movie come true, or it’s happened to me,” said Keith Olbermann, the former anchor of ESPN’s SportsCenter and MSNBC’s Countdown. “There have been enough broadcasters killed—it’s just that we haven’t gotten around to any of them being killed for bad ratings.”

To Olbermann and many of his peers, whatever sanctity their industry still possessed was lost only a few years after Chayefsky’s death. First came the 1986 maneuvering by the sibling corporate titans Robert Preston Tisch and Laurence A. Tisch that gave their Loews Corporation a substantial stake in CBS—at the time, the nation’s second-place network, behind NBC—and helped put Laurence Tisch in charge of a broadcasting company saddled with $1 billion in debt. Next came the dark day in March 1987 when CBS fired 215 employees from its news department, despite an offer by CBS anchor Dan Rather and others to reduce their own salaries if it would save the jobs of some colleagues.

Before that day, the notion that news divisions were supposed to be self-supporting profit centers for their networks was broadcasting heresy. “They lost thirty million dollars a year,” said Olbermann, “when thirty million dollars a year was not the price of the highest-paid baseball player—thirty million dollars bought you maybe sixty Walter Cronkites. It was essentially the charitable contribution that those three networks paid to be allowed to dump everything else on TV in the audience’s mind.” But, he added, “once news got out from under the sacrosanct umbrella of public service, of a commitment that the FCC demanded of the individual stations, it would become part of entertainment.”

There is a self-admitted tendency in the news business to remember the broadcast industry’s golden age as more pristine and objective than it actually was: even in its formative days, even before television was the dominant medium, Edward R. Murrow was delivering radio broadcasts from the London Blitz that, in their stark factuality, were also meant to encourage American intervention in World War II; later, on TV, he was making his “urbane small talk” with Samuel Goldwyn, Eva Gabor, and Groucho Marx on Person to Person while addressing the impact of McCarthyism on See It Now. Walter Cronkite wiped his watery eyes as he reported the assassination of John F. Kennedy and cheered the moon landing and editorialized against the Vietnam War, but he jostled privately with colleagues, chased ratings fervently, and made no secret of his liberal leanings. “God Almighty,” he declared at a 1988 dinner honoring the Democratic congresswoman Barbara Jordan, “we’ve got to shout these truths in which we believe from the rooftops, like that scene in the movie Network. We’ve got to throw open our windows and shout these truths to the streets and to the heavens.”

But something changed forever in the 1980s, as the networks and their news divisions were absorbed into larger conglomerates and wrung for every penny they could produce; and those journalists who kept their lucrative jobs were left, as 60 Minutes creator Don Hewitt would later write, “in no position to join the chorus” of criticism against these troubling consolidations. “Why aren’t we broadcast journalists hollering about it?” Hewitt asked. “Because we want it both ways. We want the companies we work for to put back the wall the pioneers erected to separate news from entertainment, but we are not above climbing over the rubble each week to take an entertainment-size paycheck for broadcasting news.”

In that same era, the Federal Communications Commission in 1987 abolished its long-standing Fairness Doctrine, which was supposed to ensure that broadcasters covered crucial public issues with impartiality and balance, and rules were relaxed that had prevented the concentration and cross-ownership of media companies in the hands of only a few parent corporations. When journalists entered the industry after this point, they joined up accepting certain fundamental truths that would have horrified previous generations.

“It was everyone’s basic understanding—and never necessarily even spoken of as a problem, just a basic, tacit understanding—that the information business was a business,” said Bill Wolff, the vice president of programming at MSNBC and executive producer of The Rachel Maddow Show, who began his career at ESPN in 1989. “You were responsible to be profitable. It was true in sports in 1989, and it’s true across the board today.”

The proliferation of cable television channels, which barely registered a blip in Chayefsky’s day, has added hundreds of UBS-style networks to the programming grid, all scrambling to fill their airtime with content that will deliver maximum returns on minimum investments, including a whole new breed of channels reporting the news for increasingly narrow slivers of niche viewerships and aiming their coverage at partisan audiences.

“There’s a segment of the viewing population which likes to either have their opinion validated, or watch somebody they disagree with, and connect with them in that way,” said Anderson Cooper, CNN anchor and 60 Minutes correspondent.

And where these news channels have found devoted audiences, there has simultaneously arisen a new category of anchors who see it as their purpose to articulate their rage for them. “As a viewer, I watch some people and I think, is that person really angry, or is this just part of their shtick?” Cooper said. “Is this just what they do? They get their veins pulsating and they’re yelling. I can’t imagine they’re that angry all day long. They’ve got to be gearing themselves up for it and then putting on a show.”

The cable channels and their on-air talent do not necessarily consider themselves as having political biases or identifying with specific ideologies or parties. But the concern and the sense of immediacy they say they feel are real. “As far as I’m concerned,” said Bill O’Reilly, the Fox News personality and host of its top-rated show, The O’Reilly Factor, “I do my job, and I do it in an authentic way. If I’m mad as hell and not going to take it anymore, I’m going to say that. But it’s not because of the movie—it’s just because that’s the way I feel.”

O’Reilly sees himself as a successor to journalists such as John Chancellor, Eric Sevareid, and David Brinkley, who provided televised commentary and editorials but who “did it in a much more traditional, button-down way.” “Today,” O’Reilly said, “they’d never even get on the air. It’s a different society—you have to raise the level of urgency and the level of presentation so that people will watch. There’s just simply too many choices.”

With this hypercompetitive broadcasting environment, O’Reilly said, comes the mandate not only to inform viewers but also to entertain them, even if it comes at the cost of overlooking important stories of the day. “We think our mission is basically to look out for the folks, to be a watchdog crew, an ombudsman sometimes,” he said. “But to put on an entertaining program, it has to be entertaining, no doubt. I think Syria’s an important story, but I can’t cover it. Nobody’s going to watch, and I know that. That’s the limitations of my job.”

Other contemporary newscasters have made it a virtue to wear their passions and emotions on their sleeve and cite Network sincerely as an inspiration for their work. Glenn Beck, the former CNN Headline News and Fox News commentator who now oversees his own satellite and Internet TV service, TheBlaze, has claimed Howard Beale as an influence and said that he identifies with the character’s alienated, apocalyptic furor. “I think that’s the way people feel,” he has said. “That’s the way I feel.”

Popular frustration with events as well as with broadcasting—in both its traditional network mode and its excitable cable incarnations—has created opportunities for jesters such as Jon Stewart, who has become a reliable source of the news even as he mocks it on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show; and his 2.0 upgrade Stephen Colbert, who, as the host of The Colbert Report, has turned news satire into a full-time act of performance art, creating an on-air alter ego who emulates the theatrical style of a partisan cable host while simultaneously illuminating the hypocrisy, dishonesty, and ignorance of such personalities. After hearing Glenn Beck observe that his influences included not only Howard Beale but Jesus, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr., Colbert said, “I thought, wow, none of those stories end well.”

The real-life Colbert calls Network his favorite movie, though he does not consider the film to be a direct inspiration for his vainglorious Stephen Colbert character. Howard Beale, Colbert said, is “a hopeless character who ultimately does not succeed in what he wants to do, and is killed. He’s not a messianic figure.”

But having studied his share of modern-day Beales, Colbert said that what Network correctly anticipated was an attitude these broadcasters share, which is, he said, “‘I will tell you what to think.’ That’s what it prefigures most of all. ‘I will tell you what to think and how to feel.’” When Howard Beale is preaching to his flock, at least he “is doing it in a quasi-benevolent way—‘I’m going to remind you that you’re being anaesthetized right now.’” What Network got right, Colbert said, “is a great bulk of what happens with news now. And not just the nighttime people that I’m sort of a parody of, not just the opinion-making people. But even what is left of straight news, that a long time ago became about how to dramatize the situation.”

The fragmentation of the television news marketplace need not be an entirely negative development. One point on which broadcasters such as Bill O’Reilly and Anderson Cooper see eye to eye is that a wider array of choices has allowed more news, and more kinds of news presenters, to get on the air. “Back in Cronkite’s day,” Cooper said, “it was three white, middle-aged guys saying what the news was, and obviously there was a lot more going on. You didn’t see people of color, you didn’t see diversity on the screen, you didn’t see a great diversity of people and stories. It was not representative of the United States.” Today, O’Reilly concurred, “You have so many good options to get information and that’s very, very healthy. Whereas twenty, twenty-five years ago, you were being told, hey, this is the way you should think and this is the way we see it—because all the networks pretty much see it the same, even today.”

But not all their industry peers agree with the assessment that more avenues of information have created more diversity. “I don’t know what diversity there is,” said Gwen Ifill, senior correspondent of PBS’s NewsHour and the moderator and managing editor of Washington Week. “You mean, other than me? I think that’s where we’ve actually fallen down.”

Ifill added that true diversity in news broadcasting is not necessarily measured on-screen, by “the people reading the news,” but has to happen behind the scenes, based upon “who’s in the room making the decisions about the news that does and does not get covered.” “If you went and took a tour of most newsroom morning meetings, where the decisions are made,” she said, “you’d still find mostly white male faces, maybe white female if you’re lucky. And the higher you go in the news business, more Ivy League, more people who come from a pretty closed environment and upbringing. I think that’s actually one of our great failures, is that we haven’t figured out how to incorporate diversity of thinking—thought and experience and background.”

She cautioned that trends in cable news did not reflect the state of play at the broadcast networks or on public television. “I don’t see any sign that the cable networks are setting the tone,” Ifill said. “They’re functioning and thriving, to the extent that they thrive at all, on a completely different kind of journalism. To the extent that it is journalism.”

Yet even in their decline, the network news broadcasts still command audiences larger than their cable television counterparts. At the end of 2012, each of the three network programs drew between 6.9 million and 9.4 million viewers a night. These are numbers that the cable competition simply cannot touch: in a comparable period, The O’Reilly Factor was watched by an average of 3.52 million viewers, while The Rachel Maddow Show was seen by 1.69 million, and Anderson Cooper 360 drew 913,000.

What concerns broadcast journalists on both sides of the divide is that, as surely as the distinctions between the network news and entertainment have gradually eroded, the proverbial firewall between acceptably overheated cable news commentary and genteel network news objectivity will someday be annihilated—most likely when it makes good business sense for these channels’ parent companies.

In his tenure at MSNBC, Keith Olbermann—who was known to dress up in the soggy raincoat of Howard Beale and impersonate the character on his show from time to time—said he resisted efforts to make his pointed political commentaries a permanent element of his Countdown program, but went along with experiments to air his cable news show on its sibling broadcast network. “We ran Countdown several times on NBC, up against 60 Minutes, to see basically if the universe would melt,” he said. “And it didn’t.”

What such trials inevitably portend, Olbermann said, is the broadcast networks’ gradual incorporation of more partisan content and entertainment-style formats first developed in the laboratories of their cable channels. “If you told the heads of ABC, CBS, and NBC News,” he said, “that they could prolong the life of these cash cows at six thirty”—that is, their evening news shows—“by adding Keith Olbermann commentary every night or Bill O’Reilly commentary every night or Glenn Beck commentary every night, I don’t know what the outcome would be. But eventually one of them would say yes. And certainly there’d be people saying yes right now.”

Even without adding politically polarized commentary to its flagship evening news show, a network such as NBC already undermines its own integrity by simultaneously operating news shows, hard and soft, neutral and partisan, all under the same corporate banner. “What do you do,” Olbermann asked, “when your brand is on so-called pure news, and on something like The Today Show and on MSNBC? Can you have that logo represented by Brian Williams, Katie Couric, and Keith Olbermann? It becomes a juggling act.”

Bill Wolff of MSNBC said he expected that cable-style news would continue to coexist with its rival media and would not cannibalize traditional print, radio, and network television offerings. But to the extent that such news outlets continue to exist, he said, they validated a blunt Chayefskyian lesson in capitalist economics. “There is still a tremendous appetite for straight, sober information,” said Wolff. “The reason it’s there is that there is demand for it.”

It is a lesson that Wolff said applies in his corner of the industry, too. “If no one were watching Rachel Maddow, there wouldn’t be a Rachel Maddow Show,” he said. “But people are, because there’s demand for it. She’s intellectually rigorous and she’s extremely ethical, so she’s to the good. And the reason she gets to be on TV is that a big company makes a lot of money because people watch her.”

But when such a responsibility is taken away from broadcasters themselves and yielded to the phantom forces of the market, what remains is the reality that it is up to viewers to decide for themselves who is truthful and reliable and who is providing them with information that is accurate—a conclusion that O’Reilly said is the moral he took away from Network.

“The movie, I thought, was about the audience more than the presenters,” he said. “And that the audience was demanding more and more craziness and stimulation from the news presentation.” A careful viewing of Network, O’Reilly said, shows that “Chayefsky is chiding the audience more than he is chiding the people like Howard Beale, and that, I think, is a legitimate concern. The audience, in many, many cases, is going for the lowest common denominator.”

Still, even broadcast journalists have their guilty viewing pleasures. For Anderson Cooper it is Walter Mercado, the astrologer who gave daily readings on the Univision news show Primer Impacto. “He looks like Liberace, in capes and everything, and he would have two cameras,” Cooper said. “And he’d look at one camera and he’d be like, ‘Tauro,’ and then he’d give the horoscope for Taurus; then he’d do a very dramatic turn on the other camera and be, ‘Gemini,’ and then he would give the Gemini forecast for the day.”

There won’t be soothsayers soon; they are already here.

*   *   *

Network is ultimately just a movie. But it is a movie that accomplished something truly remarkable and even radical: it used the money and the means of production of the Hollywood motion picture industry to criticize not only a rival medium but the entire field of mass communication, the vast system of corporations nested within corporations that contained it, and a distinctly American way of life that these institutions dictated. The film starred several of the top actors of its era and was made with one of its most celebrated directors at the helm; it was designed to reach the widest possible swath of moviegoers, and it succeeded in selling tickets by the millions, gaining critical acclaim, and winning approbation at the Academy Awards. It did this all while awakening its viewers to ugly and unflattering truths about their lives and the world they inhabited, and it did not communicate its messages in a subtle or soft-spoken manner: it put its most urgent and passionate ideas in the mouth of a man who at times is literally screaming them at his audience, commanding them to go to their windows and scream their dissatisfaction themselves.

These qualities can make Network seem like a onetime occurrence: the result of a rare confluence of an author with a mission to make his voice heard, a movie business that cared more about being taken seriously than (or at least as much as) about turning profits, and audiences eager to be engaged by challenging ideas. In an age when all the major broadcast networks are now either owned by or affiliated with a motion picture and entertainment conglomerate, and when their empires have grown to include cable TV channels and home video distribution services that exploit and repurpose the content they create, it is hard to imagine a studio turning its guns on itself in the same way, let alone providing one angry man with the ammunition to satirize them so savagely.

Was Paddy Chayefsky the last member of a class of dramatists who would grab you by the lapels and shout in your face if that was what it took to get you to pay attention? And when he correctly predicted the conditions that would lead to the diminishment of television news and the networks that broadcast it, was he also anticipating the circumstances that would spell the demise of the confrontationally consciousness-raising style of moviemaking he purveyed? Or does his rabble-rousing, mad-as-hell spirit live on in some part of mainstream Hollywood entertainment?

Some filmmakers who hit their stride in the period following Chayefsky’s argue that there is a retrospective tendency to romanticize the 1970s as a decade when it was somehow easier to make studio movies with strong points of view. “It’s never easy,” said Oliver Stone, who became enamored of The Hospital soon after he graduated from New York University’s film school in 1971. “It wasn’t easy back in the seventies, and it’s certainly not easy now. People complain about that, but if you do it, you do it. It gets done.”

Stone first wrote some of his best-known scripts in the late 1970s, including Platoon (which would later win him an Oscar for best director and a nomination for best screenplay), in 1976, the year of Network’s release, and Born on the Fourth of July (which would eventually earn him another Oscar for best director), in 1979, but both were considered too risky—“too downbeat, too realistic”—to get made at the time, and would remain on hold for at least a decade.

Network, for all of its fire and brimstone, was nonetheless propelled along by the part of Chayefsky that knew how to keep audiences amused even as he was exhorting them. “You’ve got to make it entertaining enough as a whole,” Stone said. “Sometimes you need that soapy advertising line. ‘I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore’—whoever thought that line would go down? He wrote so many brilliant lines; that’s not his best. But that line for some reason caught on.”

But what made the difference in getting Network produced was Chayefsky’s single-minded drive to see it brought to the screen. “He sweated buckets to do what he did,” Stone said, “and sometimes I guess you’ve got to be a little bit tougher, because you’re going to get your heart broken.”

Even if the modern-day movie studios could countenance a film as volatile as Network, Stone said the economics of such a movie would likely make it untenable, with no way to satisfy their needs for mammoth opening-weekend grosses and ongoing franchises. “They had to make bigger and bigger tent poles in order to attract attention,” he said. “The occasional blockbuster became the ordinary event. You have to open on a Friday with numbers that are essentially the old blockbuster numbers, and no one can rub the wheel that way and not get ground up at the end of the day.”

James L. Brooks, who revisited the scene of the cutthroat television newsroom for his 1987 romantic comedy Broadcast News, said he could still envision a category of studio filmmaking that Network would fit into today. “It was great,” said Brooks. “Could I imagine a great movie getting made today? Yeah. That’s the genre. The genre is: great.”

Brooks, who was himself a thoroughly accomplished television writer and producer before he turned to writing and directing his own films, knew Chayefsky casually in his career and attended the author’s funeral. But while Broadcast News explores some of the same issues as Network (albeit with a gentler, more humanistic approach)—the moral responsibility of mass communication and the toll it exacts from the people who produce it—Brooks said his film was not inspired by Chayefsky’s. Rather, Brooks was looking to tell a story about a certain kind of woman who defined the moment—and not Diana Christensen. At that time in the mid-1980s, Brooks said, “Every picture was a feminist picture, every picture was saying the same thing. And I just felt, really, in my gut, that there was a different kind of woman happening, and to try to find her.”

The preliminary research that Brooks, a self-described “news junkie,” did for his Broadcast News characters at the 1984 Republican and Democratic national conventions revealed attitudes that were far less respectful to the news media than when Chayefsky undertook his own similar investigations a decade prior. Brooks said of one TV journalist (whom he declined to identify), “He had gotten a job because he was a pretty face, and I had this pissy attitude toward him. Then, during the course of the interview, I realized he knew they were laughing at him; he knew they were feeling superior to him.” As surely as he saw in this person the recognition that his own viewers regarded him as inadequate, Brooks said he saw the inverse in himself: “feeling like an asshole that I had been one of those smug people.”

Broadcast News, which concludes with a wave of firings and corporate restructurings that scrambles the lives of its characters, arrived in theaters only a few months after the industry-altering bloodletting at CBS News. Brooks said he did not require any clairvoyance to see it coming. “I was chasing a movie that was happening in front of me, that’s basically it,” he said. “Everything about the movie was based on conversations and just really doing the homework.”

In spite of his optimism that a provocative film such as Network could still find favor in the studio system, Brooks wondered whether the uniquely nonconformist talent required to create it could still navigate contemporary Hollywood without being corrupted. “It’s very, very tricky, ’cause everybody’s been co-opted—almost everybody,” he said. “Somebody comes out here and they write a good screenplay, and all of a sudden they have a lawyer; all of a sudden they have a company name. Every man a salesman.”

Even if such a person could bring this idea to bear, Brooks wondered whether a movie studio would still be able to recognize its intrinsic value. “It used to be that the pursuit of excellence was part of the conversation,” Brooks said. “I did just have a studio head say to me, ‘My prayer is every day, don’t let me make something just because I like it’—saying it like it was a badge of honor.”

To a new class of filmmakers who idolize the movies of the 1970s—in many cases the decade when they first started going to the movies—features such as Three Days of the Condor and All the President’s Men represent a quintessence of cinematic realism and social consciousness combined with commercial success, yet something about Network exceeds them. “The difference between commerce and art is that in art there is a kind of insurgency,” said Ben Affleck, the actor and director. “And there’s a profound insurgency in Network.”

Affleck, who stylistically modeled his 2012 Iranian hostage thriller, Argo, on the hit dramas and suspense movies of the film’s turn-of-the-eighties setting, also included in his film the real-life news footage of a man who quotes Howard Beale’s “Mad as hell” speech to express his sense of helplessness about the hostage crisis. For Affleck, this moment was his tip of the hat to the enduring resonance of Chayefsky’s words, and how “society was still really informed by that perspective on the world—that sense of being beaten down and the game is rigged.”

“In Network,” Affleck said, “we’re straining against the confines of corporatism and complacency, and the other pernicious effects of society are starting to strangle us, and we want to break out of that—even if it’s through a kind of madness or illogical behavior. That’s a theme, an undercurrent in the era.”

If the twenty-first-century equivalents of Network seem harder to find on movie studios’ release schedules, Affleck said that may be partly the fault of directors preemptively talking themselves out of such projects. “There’s been a ghettoization of these kinds of films, and part of that’s self-conscious because people go, ‘Oh, no one’s going to see this, so I’m just going to make it for a few people,’” he said.

But other key dynamics of the entertainment industry, well known to Chayefsky and his peers, have not changed. “The studios then, like they are now, are influenced almost exclusively by the marketplace,” Affleck said. “If people are going to see superhero movies in huge numbers, that’s what they’re going to keep making. Then, it was cool to make interesting movies. Kramer vs. Kramer was a blockbuster and made people rich. Kramer vs. Kramer wouldn’t make people rich today. There’s a bunch of those movies that came out then that would now be vying, basically, for a slot at Sundance.”

To make a movie like Argo—a film that gives nearly equal consideration to Iran’s position in the events that precipitated the hostage crisis as it does to America’s—Affleck knew that he would have to trade in part on his celebrity and the desire of a studio to want to remain in business with him. But what such projects ultimately come down to is a filmmaker’s will. “It can get made, but you have to want to make it,” he said. “You’ve got to believe in that kind of film as something that is relevant and that can work to a broader audience. It’s definitely possible.”

The public’s eroding esteem for the news media, not to mention its progressively diminished expectations for an entertainment industry that can defy its expectations or speak to it intelligently, has not stopped dramatists from continuing to view the television newsroom as a tantalizing crucible of character and human conflict. “People become aware of very dramatic things first,” said MSNBC’s Bill Wolff. “We know about stuff first. And then there is a lot of drama in the decision making about how to report and what to report.” He continued, “Among the non-heroic, non-lifesaving professions, ours is pretty dramatic”—even if, he added, “we’re not nearly as important as we think we are.”

Nor have the years since Network’s release seen any appreciable reduction in the uneasiness we feel about the world around us. While there may be no way to determine if the number of existential threats we face on a daily basis has increased or decreased, we have more media than ever at our disposal to educate us about crises and catastrophes brewing anywhere on the globe, and we have become increasingly accustomed to having this information delivered to us instantly. “In the 1970s,” said Wolff, “mass communication was still in its infancy, and it had a greater effect on people’s level of anxiety. People are just used to it now. The choice was: become numb to the threats or become paralyzed by fear.”

So it was a bittersweet moment in 2011 when Aaron Sorkin took the stage of the Kodak Theatre to accept his Academy Award for the screenplay of The Social Network, a motion picture about the dizzying reach of mass media, the responsibility of wielding it, and the enmity it stirs up in the people who do. Sorkin, who in his television series Sports Night, The West Wing, and The Newsroom offers his own idealized visions of how information is transmitted to the American people, began his Oscar acceptance speech by saying, “It’s impossible to describe what it feels like to be handed the same award that was given to Paddy Chayefsky thirty-five years ago, for another movie with Network in the title.” As Sorkin said later, “The commoditization of the news and the devaluing of the truth are just a part of our way of life now. You wish Chayefsky could come back to life long enough to write The Internet.”

*   *   *

Paddy Chayefsky was an accidental prophet. For all the irascible, after-the-fact certainty he professed about Network and the specter of television’s future that it predicted, his ambitions in creating it were grander and more wide-reaching. He sought to do more than simply speculate on the fortunes of a medium he alternately regarded as past its prime and eternal, and whose true capacity for decadence would not come into view for many years after his death, in forms that even a wit as uncompromising as his had suggested only as jokes. He shared perhaps a little too much with his greatest creation, Howard Beale, a forecaster attuned to higher truths whose origins he could not pinpoint, and who, in his lifetime, would not see his divinations appreciated for their accuracy.

What Chayefsky understood best of all, better than television and better than the business behind it, was anger: omnipresent in his own life, in his frustrations and his failures as well as his successes, and how it had become an indivisible part of the American character. Rage fueled competition, put wind in sails, and powered that patriotic desire to succeed at all costs; it also offered cover from all the world’s unfairness and uncertainty, and protection from the elements that gave rise to what the uninitiated and naïve dismissed as paranoia but that an educated, attentive few knew were worthy and sensible fears. Sometimes it was the only way to get people’s attention. Chayefsky saw a country burning from the heat of its thwarted ambitions and the friction of running up against its own limitations, and no matter his life span, he knew that those fires would only grow stronger and hotter in time.

In Network, Chayefsky bequeathed to America more than a movie, more than its characters or their lasting speeches, even if it could all be distilled down to those few words that the author himself never gave any special credence. To declare for yourself that you were mad as hell and not going to take it anymore was not just a way to rally fans at sporting events, to protest the loss of your economic security, gun rights, or health care access, or to vent your desire to maintain a vegan diet in a world biased toward carnivores—although it would become the rallying cry in all these scenarios and many more like them. It was an act of acknowledging all the forms of anger that preceded it and the unknown expressions yet to come, a plea for basic dignity and a recognition that in anger there was power and there was community. It said that it was permissible to be angry, and if all you could do was be angry, it was enough.

As his friend the writer-director Joshua Logan said of Chayefsky, “You can’t build for the future with nice, polite people. They’re too round. What you need are concrete blocks like Paddy.” Thick, sturdy, stubborn, and unrelenting, Chayefsky could be a vessel to contain those flames, but he was also occasionally the great gust of air that stoked them. His only peace was in shouting ever more loudly. Nothing made him madder than voicelessness. And he shouted.