At a time when “another civil war” has become a familiar phrase in American news reports, how do we grasp the prescience of a 46-year-old movie in which the protagonist proclaims that “at the bottom of all our terrified souls, we know that democracy is a dying giant, a sick, sick, dying, decaying political concept, writhing in its final pain”?
The speaker is, of course, Howard Beale (Peter Finch), news anchor of the fictional UBS-TV in Network. The ostensible target of screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky’s excoriating 1976 satire was the monolithic broadcasters bastardizing the news in their rabid pursuit of ratings and market share, but it was their corporate overlords, oblivious to basic human values, who most enraged Chayefsky. After rejuvenating his nightly show by threatening to blow his brains out on camera, Howard morphs into the demagogue who encourages viewers to shout, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!” Not that he or anyone else in the movie with a beef actually does anything, as its director, Sidney Lumet, wryly acknowledged.
Network won four Oscars and spawned a school of softer films and series about the ethos and excitement of TV news production, including Broadcast News, The Newsroom, Back to You, and The Morning Show. Current Oscar contender Don’t Look Up, a thinly veiled storm warning about climate change, spoofs cable news shows as glib purveyors of fake showbiz news anxious not to trouble their viewers with the imminent destruction of the planet. Network also bequeathed its critique of power and its most ingenious plot device to a movie in a completely different genre, last summer’s crime caper No Sudden Move.
The same way Bruce Springsteen’s rueful “Born in the USA” lyrics were jingoistically referenced by Ronald Reagan, Beale’s cri de coeur has most frequently been co-opted by conservative figures like Mitt Romney and Monica Crowley and their braying media champions. “You can watch poorly performed knockoff versions of Howard Beale’s ‘mad as hell’ speech every night nowadays on any number of cable networks,” says CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “Except I believed Howard Beale’s emotion when he gave that speech. I don’t believe those who now attempt to stir anger and outrage every night. Because it is popular, it becomes shtick, which is what happened to Beale’s outrage as well.”
Chayefsky’s target wasn’t Howard or his boss, Max Schumacher (William Holden), respected Murrow-era newsmen and worn-down cornerstones at UBS, but the blithe corruptors of journalistic integrity. The film’s pioneering sponsor of fake news is Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway), the hotshot program exec who beds married Max while usurping his news division. Power-crazed Diana enlists the news-forecasting psychic Sybil the Soothsayer for Beale’s program, as well as the Black radicals of the “Ecumenical Liberation Army” (ELA) for her proto–reality show The Mao Tse-Tung Hour. “The movie is far more applicable to television news today than it was at the time, no question,” says Cooper. “When Network was made, it was seen as a dark satire, but many of its characters and events don’t seem that far-fetched anymore. There were only three [commercial] broadcast networks in 1976. Their news divisions and the content they put on air is unrecognizable to what it once was.”
When playwright Lee Hall’s Network adaptation ran for six months on Broadway (2018–19), Bryan Cranston’s Tony-winning portrayal of Howard seared the play’s message into audience’s minds. “He was allowing himself to operate on emptiness and his foundation was cracking,” Cranston says. “The William Holden character is worried for his friend and is strongly saying, ‘He needs help’—and instead of helping him, we’re letting him fester even further and spew this bile until he collapses.”
“There’s a reason we have traffic lights. Otherwise, it’s chaos,” Cranston adds. In the past, “every network had an incredibly powerful division of standards and practices, and you had to fight like hell to get anything past them. They were too rigid in many cases, as the movie Being the Ricardos shows. We laugh because it’s so odd, but there were other standards that [the networks] held to, such as the insistence that something is factually based and that you have sources, and that you are able to provide those sources when called upon.”
Being the Ricardos writer-director Aaron Sorkin has demonstrated a career-long fascination with the inner workings of television production. His series The Newsroom depicted a fictional cable-news team that passionately defends its journalistic integrity from the wolves upstairs.
“Chayefsky wrote more cynically and probably more realistically about the news than I did,” Sorkin says. “The first time I saw Network was a 2 p.m. screening when I was 15. The second time I saw it was the 5 p.m. screening. I probably didn’t even understand what I’d just seen, but I was thrilled by it. What hit me the hardest was the power of Chayefsky’s language. His dialogue in Network is like a fleet of Apache attack helicopters appearing over the horizon and coming right at you. I guess the most prophetic thing about the film is that many news organizations have stopped making journalistic decisions and have gone all in on commercial decisions.”
Are they accountable to the truth? “It depends. MSNBC leans left, but they don’t lie and neither does The New York Times. But Fox News?”
Writer Kate Cronkite was a professional actor when Lumet cast her in Network as a Patty Hearst–like heiress kidnapped by the ELU. That no one or nothing in politics was sacred to Chayefsky—except the truth—is indicated by the fury with which Cronkite’s character vents at her Angela Davis–like captor (Marlene Warfield) for kvetching about her fees and distribution costs as a UBS star. Cronkite is the daughter of the late Walter Cronkite. The problem with identifying what’s true in TV news “has escalated and escalated,” she says. “I’m sure you can guess how many times people have said to me, ‘Your father must be rolling over in his grave. Don’t you wish we had your father here now?’ All of which is true, because he was certainly a critic of the influence of corporate interests on news gathering.”
In Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up, astronomers Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawence) and Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio) learn that a comet is hurtling to Earth and will destroy it in six months. After the president (Meryl Streep) latches on to the crisis to boost her popularity, Kate and Randall turn for help to panacea-dispensing cable-news anchors Brie (Cate Blanchett) and Jack (Tyler Perry). They dismiss Kate as a crank, while Randall succumbs to Brie’s worldly glamour and leaves his wife (Melanie Lynskey). He eventually comes to his senses and reads the riot act to the anchors during a show.
When it’s suggested to McKay that Randall’s tirade has a “mad as hell” quality and that Randall and Brie’s affair recalls Network, the filmmaker says, “I wasn’t directly thinking of Network, but it’s impossible to deal with the ideas of truth and media without immediately living in its shadow. Don’t Look Up is obviously more of a comedy with a capital C. So the affair with Brie is played fairly heightened. But yes, Dr. Mindy is hit with the spotlight, enjoys it, and quickly loses his way like thousands before him. As comedic as our [movie] is, it is surprising to read early reviews of Network and realize just how absurd and oversized it must have been to an audience of that time. The news was still sacred and kept away from the entertainment division of networks, and we had the fairness doctrine in place, so opinion news would have been a totally oxymoronic idea to a 1976 audience.”
It seems unlikely that Network would be instructive for an organized-crime film set in 1950s Detroit. But when director Steven Soderbergh was seeking a way to introduce the corrupt auto tycoon (Matt Damon) who calls the shots in No Sudden Move, he and screenwriter Ed Solomon looked to Howard Beale’s dressing down by the belligerent corporate “god” Arthur Jensen (Ned Beatty). “I had the full script beaten out,” Solomon says of the movie, which stars Don Cheadle and Benicio Del Toro. “And Steven says, ‘You know what we should do? We should have a new character [like Ned Beatty’s in Network] who suddenly shows up and delivers a seven-page monologue that changes the entire context of the story.’ I walked away and thought, Do I watch Network now? Because if I do, I’ll spend six months frozen at my desk because of how great that movie is.”
Solomon marvels at how prophetic Network was. Chayefsky predicted Alex Jones, Trumpism, YouTube, and reality TV, he says. “And he gets away with something you really can’t get away with in the movies now, which is a polemic in which characters are mouthpieces for his ideology. There are two times where Faye Dunaway delivers these real mouthfuls and then”—because she’s just gotten through these monologues—“she exhales before she can move on to the next moment.” Solomon laughs. “But Sidney Lumet kept those takes in the movie because they worked, and they’re amazing to watch.”
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