It is 50 years since Network (1976), our most prescient film about media, was made. It was written by Sidney “Paddy” Chayefsky, the only person to win three solo Academy Awards for best screenplay: for Marty (1955), The Hospital (1971) and Network. He is the Jewish genius of American screenwriting: Joseph L Mankiewicz won twice but only for adapted screenplay, even if it was for All About Eve (1950) as well as A Letter To Three Wives (1949). Much of Aaron Sorkin’s work is an homage to Chayefsky though, if you consider The West Wing a self-deceptive fairy tale, it is not enough of an homage. Even so, Chayefsky is relatively unsung and forgotten, though he had more to say than anyone. He was too angry, and realistic, for Hollywood to love: like Billy Wilder (Schmuel Vilr) with Sunset Boulevard (1950), he told it as it really was. I daren’t think what either would say to The Avengers franchise: no, forget that. I would love to know.
The first question is: why was the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants to America called Paddy? One morning, in the army, Chayefsky refused to do cooking duty: he had to go to mass. “Sure you do, Paddy,” was the reply. He had that relationship to authority all his life. Before he left the army he sat on a landmine. It did nothing for his mood.
An ugly, brilliant, angry Jew, he first worked in – and hated – television. Its executives tried to control him. Its viewers were stupefied. Its material was a race to the bottom. Network would be about television. It would tell us how television would destroy civilisation, using television – Network was often on television – as the medium. This bleakness was absolutely his Jewishness. Chayefsky was a veteran, and, like all American Jews, he was powerless as his European cousins were murdered.
He was lucky in his collaborator on Network, the director Sidney Lumet. He understood Chayefsky’s vulnerability, his shyness and brutality – Chayefsky’s biographer Shaun Considine thought there were two Chayefskys: grave, gifted Sidney, and swaggering, raging Paddy – and his need for control. Lumet let him go wild on set. He needed it.
They chose William Holden as the sane newsman Max Schumacher– the super-ego, the conscience. Peter Finch was the mad newsman Howard Beale – the Id. Both, of course, are Chayefsky, who always wrote about himself. Marty is about his shyness with women, and his loneliness. Network is about his need for civilisation, and his disgust.
The story is this: Howard Beale’s ratings are falling, and he is fired. In response, he says on air that he will kill himself, also on air, the following week. The scene is hyper-realistic, irresistible. Finch, handsome and battered (he died before he could collect his Oscar for Network), says he will do it: “Should get a hell of a rating”. In the production room they aren’t even listening.
Schumacher allows Beale back on air to say goodbye with dignity. It doesn’t happen. Rather Beale unleashes his fury. “We’ll tell you any shit you want to hear,” he rants. “We deal in illusions, man! None of it is true! But you people sit there, day after day, night after night, all ages, colours, creeds... We’re all you know. You’re beginning to believe the illusions we’re spinning here. You’re beginning to think that the tube [the TV] is reality, and that your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you! You dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube, you even think like the tube! This is mass madness, you maniacs! In God’s name, you people are the real thing! We are the illusion! So, turn off your television sets. Turn them off now. Turn them off right now. Turn them off and leave them off!”
As Beale predicted, his ratings soar, and the network allows him to stay on air: “the mad prophet of the airways”. His show is taken from news and given to drama – to entertainment! – under the control of Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway). If the theme of the present eating the past is not explicit enough, Christensen destroys what is left of Beale and seduces Schumacher. He sees through her – “I’m turning into one of your scripts” – and gives us the greatest break-up speech in cinema. “There’s nothing left in you that I can live with,” he tells her. “You’re one of Howard’s humanoids. If I stay with you, I’ll be destroyed. Like Howard Beale was destroyed. Like everything you and the institution of television touch is destroyed. You’re television incarnate, Diana: indifferent to suffering; insensitive to joy. All of life is reduced to the common rubble of banality. War, murder, death are all the same to you as bottles of beer. And the daily business of life is a corrupt comedy. You even shatter the sensations of time and space into split seconds and instant replays. You’re madness, Diana. Virulent madness. And everything you touch dies with you. But not me. Not as long as I can feel pleasure, and pain... and love”.
Network foretells reality TV, which is entertainment consuming news – consuming reality. It foretells Donald Trump. It foretells the hard left – when Diana asks Marxists to commit a terrorist act to inspire a film of the week, they segue from leftists to hyper-capitalists in seconds – the ebbing of liberal democracy and the rise of oligarchy. It foretells us.
If Chayefsky was a pessimist, he was also a Zionist. He considered Jews at constant risk from mass murder and wrote newspaper advertisements attacking the PLO for the Munich massacre of 1972. One of his smaller resentments – he had many - was towards United Artists for commissioning, then abandoning, his film about Palestinian terrorists, The Habakkuk Conspiracy.
He denied Vanessa Redgrave the part of Diana Christensen in Network because he hated her politics; when she denounced “Zionist hoodlums” at the Academy Awards in 1978 he rebuked her from the stage. “I would like to say that I am sick and tired of people exploiting the occasion of the Academy Awards for the propagation of their own political propaganda. I would like to suggest to Miss Redgrave that her winning an Academy Award is not a pivotal moment in history, does not require a proclamation and a simple, ‘thank you’ would have sufficed.” He was cheered then. Now he wouldn’t be.
He died in 1981, burnt out at 58. It is interesting that his closest friend was Bob Fosse, who made that other great and cynical film of the 1970s – Cabaret (1972). Fosse tap-danced at the funeral.
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