Network is a 1976 American satirical film released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and United Artists about a fictional television network, UBS, and its struggle with poor ratings. The film was written by Paddy Chayefsky and directed by Sidney Lumet. It stars Faye Dunaway, William Holden, Peter Finch and Robert Duvall and features Wesley Addy, Ned Beatty, and Beatrice Straight.

The film won four Academy Awards, in the categories of Best Actor (Finch), Best Actress (Dunaway), Best Supporting Actress (Straight), and Best Original Screenplay (Chayefsky).

In 2000, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". In 2002, it was inducted into the Producers Guild of America Hall of Fame as a film that has "set an enduring standard for U.S. American entertainment".^[2] In 2006, Chayefsky's script was voted one of the top-ten screenplays by the Writers Guild of America, East. In 2007, the film was 64th among the 100 greatest American films as chosen by the American Film Institute, a ranking slightly higher than the one AFI had given it ten years earlier.

Plot[link]

Howard Beale (Peter Finch), the longtime anchor of the UBS Evening News, learns from news division president Max Schumacher (William Holden) that he has just two more weeks on the air because of declining ratings. The two old friends get roaring drunk and lament the state of their industry. The following night, Beale announces on live television that he will commit suicide on next Tuesday's broadcast.^[3] UBS fires him after this incident, but Schumacher intervenes so that Beale can have a dignified farewell. Beale promises he will apologize for his outburst, but once on the air, he launches back into a rant claiming that life is "bullshit". Beale's outburst causes the newscast's ratings to spike, and much to Schumacher's dismay, the upper echelons of UBS decide to exploit Beale's antics rather than pull him off the air. In one impassioned diatribe, Beale galvanizes the nation, persuading his viewers to shout out of their windows "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!".

Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway) heads the network's programming department; seeking just one hit show, she cuts a deal with a band of radical terrorists (a parody of the Symbionese Liberation Army called the "Ecumenical Liberation Army") for a new docudrama series called the Mao-Tse Tung Hour for the upcoming fall season. When Beale's ratings seem to have topped out, Christensen approaches Schumacher and offers to help him "develop" the news show. He says no to the professional offer, but not to the personal one, and the two begin an affair. When Schumacher decides to end the "Howard as Angry Man" format, Christensen convinces her boss, Frank Hackett (Robert Duvall), to slot the evening news show under the entertainment division so that she can develop it. Hackett agrees, bullies the UBS executives to consent, and fires Schumacher at the same time. Soon Beale is hosting a new program called The Howard Beale Show, top-billed as "the mad prophet of the airwaves". Ultimately, the show becomes the most highly rated program on television, and Beale finds new celebrity preaching his angry message in front of a live studio audience that, on cue, chants Beale's signature catchphrase en masse: "We're as mad as hell, and we're not going to take this anymore." At first, Max's and Diana's romance withers as the show flourishes, but in the flush of high ratings, the two ultimately find their ways back together, and Schumacher leaves his wife of over 25 years for Christensen. But Christensen's fanatical devotion to her job and emotional emptiness ultimately drive Max back to his wife, and he warns his former lover that she will self-destruct at the pace she is running with her career. "You are television incarnate, Diana," he tells her, "indifferent to suffering, insensitive to joy. All of life is reduced to the common rubble of banality."

When Beale discovers that CCA, the conglomerate that owns UBS, will be bought out by an even larger Saudi Arabian conglomerate, he launches an on-screen tirade against the deal, encouraging viewers to send telegrams to the White House telling them, "I want the CCA deal stopped now!" This throws the top network brass into a state of panic because the company's debt load has made merger essential for survival. Hackett takes Beale to meet with CCA chairman Arthur Jensen (Ned Beatty), who explicates his own "corporate cosmology" to the attentive Beale. Jensen delivers a tirade of his own in an "appropriate setting," the dramatically darkened CCA boardroom, that suggests to the docile Beale that Jensen may himself be some higher power — describing the interrelatedness of the participants in the international economy, and the illusory nature of nationality distinctions. Jensen persuades Beale to abandon the populist messages and preach his new "evangel". But television audiences find his new sermons on the dehumanization of society to be depressing, and ratings begin to slide, yet Jensen will not allow UBS executives to fire Beale. Seeing its two-for-the-price-of-one value — solving the Beale problem plus sparking a boost in season-opener ratings — Christensen, Hackett, and the other executives decide to hire the Ecumenical Liberation Army to assassinate Beale on the air, putting an end to The Howard Beale Show and kicking off a second season of The Mao-Tse Tung Hour.

The film ends with the narrator stating:

This was the story of Howard Beale, the first known instance of a man who was killed because he had lousy ratings.

Cast[link]

Cast notes

• Kathy Cronkite (Walter Cronkite's daughter) appears as kidnapped heiress, Mary Ann Gifford
• Lance Henriksen has a small uncredited role as a network lawyer at Ahmet Khan's home
• Some sources, including IMDB, indicate that Tim Robbins has a small, non-speaking role at the end of the film as one of the assassins who kills Beale;^[4] however, Robbins has publicly stated that he did not appear in the film.^[5]

Production[link]

Part of the inspiration for Chayefsky's script came from the on-air suicide of television news reporter Christine Chubbuck in Sarasota, Florida two years earlier.^[6] The anchorwoman was suffering from depression and battles with her editors, and unable to keep going, she shot herself on camera as stunned viewers watched on July 15, 1974. Chayefsky used the incident to set up his film's focal point. As he would say later in an interview, "Television will do anything for a rating... anything!"

The character of network executive Diana Christiansen was based on NBC daytime television programming executive Lin Bolen,^[7] which Bolen disputed.^[8]

Chayefsky and producer Howard Gottfried had just come off a lawsuit against United Artists, challenging the studio's right to lease their previous film, The Hospital, to ABC in a package with a less successful film. Despite this recent lawsuit, Chayefsky and Gottfried signed a deal with UA to finance Network, until UA found the subject matter too controversial and backed out.

Undeterred, Chayefsky and Gottfried shopped the script around to other studios, and eventually found an interested party in MGM Soon afterward, UA reversed itself and looked to co-finance the film with MGM, which for the past several years had distributed through UA in the US. MGM agreed to let UA back on board, and gave it the international distribution rights, with MGM controlling North American/Caribbean rights.

The film premiered in New York City on November 27, 1976, and went into wide release shortly afterward.

Critical reception[link]

The film became one of the big hits of 1976-1977 and got big receipts and reviews. Vincent Canby, in his November 1976 review of the film for The New York Times, called the film "outrageous...brilliantly, cruelly funny, a topical American comedy that confirms Paddy Chayefsky's position as a major new American satirist" and a film whose "wickedly distorted views of the way television looks, sounds, and, indeed, is, are the satirist's cardiogram of the hidden heart, not just of television but also of the society that supports it and is, in turn, supported."^[9]

In a review of the film written after it received its Academy Awards, Roger Ebert called it a "supremely well-acted, intelligent film that tries for too much, that attacks not only television but also most of the other ills of the 1970s," though "what it does accomplish is done so well, is seen so sharply, is presented so unforgivingly, that Network will outlive a lot of tidier movies."^[10] Seen a quarter-century later, Ebert added the film to his "Great Movies" list and said the film was "like prophecy. When Chayefsky created Howard Beale, could he have imagined Jerry Springer, Howard Stern, and the World Wrestling Federation?"; he credits Lumet and Chayefsky for knowing "just when to pull out all the stops."^[11] The film also ranks at number 100 in Empire magazines list of the 500 Greatest Films of All Time.^[12]

Not all reviews were positive: Pauline Kael in The New Yorker, in a review subtitled "Hot Air", criticized the film's abundance of long, preachy speeches; Chayefsky's self-righteous contempt for not only television itself but also television viewers; and the fact that almost everyone in the movie, particularly Robert Duvall, has a screaming rant: "The cast of this messianic farce takes turns yelling at us soulless masses."^[13] Michael Billington wrote, "Too much of this film has the hectoring stridency of tabloid headlines",^[14] while Chris Petit in Time Out described it as "slick, 'adult', self-congratulatory, and almost entirely hollow", adding that "most of the interest comes in watching such a lavishly mounted vehicle leaving the rails so spectacularly."^[15]

Awards and honors[link]

Academy Awards[link]

Network won three of the four acting awards, tying the record of 1951's A Streetcar Named Desire. As of 2011, Network is the last film to have won three of the four Academy Awards for acting.

Won

• Best Actor in a Leading Role — Peter Finch
• Best Actress in a Leading Role — Faye Dunaway
• Best Actress in a Supporting Role — Beatrice Straight
• Best Writing, Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen — Paddy Chayefsky

Finch died before the 1977 Academy Awards ceremony and was the only performer to win a posthumous Academy Award until Heath Ledger won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar in 2009; coincidentally, both Finch and Ledger were Australian citizens. The statuette itself was collected by Finch's widow, Eletha Finch.

Straight's performance as Louise Schumacher occupied only five minutes and 40 seconds of screen time, making it the shortest performance to win an Oscar, as of 2012.^[16]

Nominated

• Best Actor in a Leading Role — William Holden
• Best Actor in a Supporting Role — Ned Beatty
• Best Cinematography — Owen Roizman
• Best Film Editing — Alan Heim
• Best Director — Sidney Lumet
• Best Picture

Golden Globes[link]

Won

• Best Motion Picture Actor-Drama - Peter Finch
• Best Motion Picture Actress-Drama - Faye Dunaway
• Best Director - Sidney Lumet
• Best Screenplay - Paddy Chayefsky

Nominated

• Best Motion Picture-Drama

BAFTA Awards[link]

Won

• Best Actor - Peter Finch

Nominated

• Best Film
• Best Actor - William Holden
• Best Actress - Faye Dunaway
• Best Supporting Actor - Robert Duvall
• Best Direction - Sidney Lumet
• Best Editing - Alan Heim
• Best Screenplay - Paddy Chayefsky
• Best Sound Track - Jack Fitzstephens, Marc Laub, Sanford Rackow, James Sabat and Dick Vorisek

American Film Institute[link]

• AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies - #66
• AFI's 100 Years...100 Laughs - Nominated
• AFI's 100 Years...100 Heroes and Villains:
  • Diana Christensen - Nominated Villain
• AFI's 100 Years...100 Movie Quotes:
  • "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!" - #19
• AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movies (10th Anniversary Edition) - #64

Rights[link]

The feature film was a co-production between MGM and United Artists;^[17] the latter distributor owned worldwide theatrical distribution rights. Both companies also shared the film's copyright.^[18]

In 1980, UA's then-parent, Transamerica Corporation, put the studio up for sale following the disastrous release of Heaven's Gate, which had been a major financial drain and public relations embarrassment. The next year, MGM purchased UA, and consequently gained UA's share of Network. UA's international operations were merged into MGM's share of Cinema International Corporation (the joint venture MGM was a partner since 1974 with Paramount Pictures and Universal Pictures), eventually becoming United International Pictures. The film was released to MGM/CBS Home Video in the United States as part of the original 24-title VHS/Betamax package in October 1980. Home video rights for the film outside the U.S. went to Warner Home Video, as UA distributed the film because it was a co-production.

Then, in 1986, media mogul Ted Turner purchased MGM/UA. Without any financial backers, Turner soon fell into debt and sold back most of MGM, but kept the library for his own company, Turner Entertainment. This included the US distribution rights to Network, but international distribution remained with MGM (with theatrical distribution by UIP), which retained UA's library from 1952 on. Home video rights outside the U.S. were still with WHV due to their deal with UA. Turner soon made a deal with MGM's video division for home distribution of most of Turner's library, allowing MGM to retain US video rights to Network for 13 more years. Home video rights to the MGM and UA titles were moved to Warner Home Video in 1990, using the MGM/UA Home Video label under license.

In 1996, Turner merged with Time Warner. Consequently, Warner Bros. assumed television and theatrical distribution rights to the Turner library, with video rights being added in 1999. The post-1952 UA library and the post-4/1986 MGM were assumed by themselves through MGM Home Entertainment after their worldwide deal with Warner Home Video expired in 2000.

Both Turner and MGM now share the film's copyright.^[18] As of 2011, Warner Bros./Turner owns the US and worldwide television distribution rights to Network, while international distribution rights remain with MGM. MGM has assigned international video distribution rights to 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, while international theatrical rights are co-held by Columbia Pictures (previously held by 20th Century Fox and UIP).

Legacy[link]

The film's quote "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore" and its derivatives are referenced in countless films and media.

The short-lived series Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip mentions the film and its writer Paddy Chayefsky multiple times after a character's outburst on live television. The show's creator Aaron Sorkin also mentioned the film and Chayefsky during his acceptance speech after winning the Academy Award for writing the film The Social Network.

References[link]

Notes

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Network (film)

• Network at the Internet Movie Database
• Network at the TCM Movie Database
• Network at AllRovi
• Network at Box Office Mojo