Mad as Hell: The Making of Network and the Fateful Vision of the Angriest Man in Movies (23 page)

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.”