Mad as Hell: The Making of Network and the Fateful Vision of the Angriest Man in Movies by Itzkoff Dave

Author:Itzkoff, Dave [Itzkoff, Dave]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 2014-02-18T00:00:00+00:00

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.

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