"While the goal of all movies is to entertain, the kind of film is which I believe goes one step further. It compels the spectator to examine one facet or another of his own conscience. " ~ Sidney Lumet

Sidney Lumet and Paddy Chayefsky cut their creative teeth in the first era of The Golden Age of Television in the 1950s. Television was in its infancy and Chayefsky made his name with his play Marty, starring Rod Steiger in the live TV version directed by Delbert Mann. The subsequent success of the piece on film and the Academy Award for screenwriting gave Chayefsky his entrée into cinema. Lumet broke into film after nearly a decade in TV by directing a film version of his CBS TV play, 12 Angry Men, and never looked back - by the mid-70s he was one of the finest directors in world cinema. Chayefsky had been brooding on a satire of network TV studios since the highly charged political environment of 1968 and teamed up with Lumet to finally deliver it in 1976.

Howard Beale (Peter Finch) is an ageing network news anchor for UBS and is given two weeks’ notice that he’s being retired because of bad ratings. He promptly announces on air that he will commit suicide live several days hence and the network executives have a scandal to deal with. Max Schumacher (William Holden), an old school and honourable media veteran tries to support his old friend as company power brokers like Frank Hackett (Robert Duvall) want Beale immediately removed. Beale delivers a rant live to air about the ‘bullshit’ in the world and his ratings skyrocket. His catch cry of 'I'm mad as hell and I'm not gonna take this anymore' becomes a rallying point for a disaffected public. Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway) is an ambitious producer who sees the Beale controversy as a way to push UBS to number one in the overall ratings and draws Max into her schemes both professionally and personally.

The most common word found in any sentence to describe Network is ‘prescient.’ And so it is. Chayefsky penned a satire that seemed like a stretch in 1976 but now feels like a truthful depiction of ratings mad companies desperate for eyeballs and clicks. If he was outlining an environment that predated social media and internet, then the universality that remains is in the venality and ambition of the people chasing power and money via the media powerhouse of the time, TV. It’s entirely possible to imagine Duvall’s hard edged executive and Dunaway’s scheming producer having the same urgent back and forth over a Reality TV star or Tik Tok influencer scandal in the 2020s – the media issues are the same even if some of the delivery mechanisms have morphed.

The personal relationships that weave through the story also maintain a currency for modern perspectives. The dark power of the shady ‘men at the top’ represented by Ned Beatty might easily equate to the Kings of Silicon Valley who seem to shape both media and politics in recent times. Dunaway’s Christensen may no longer be an outlier as a woman with influence, but in the 1970s she was the product of Second Wave Feminism where women had to out tough the men to survive – maybe some of that has changed, maybe not, but Chayefsky gives her the blood and guts of the piece as she plays the male executives as hard as she can to cover her own insecurities. In a system where star power covers a multitude of sin, it’s a seismic event to sack a news anchor on a major network, so insecurity ripples through the company like a cancer and Christensen is not alone. Those who feed by the ratings starve by the ratings.

Lumet was a dab hand at working with his actors and the ensemble cast of Network all get moments to shine under his watchful eye. Peter Finch was superb as the troubled anchor, a veteran whose use-by-date has arrived but who is sly enough to use what celebrity is left to him. Bill Holden is excellent as the almost decent man caught in the crosshairs of his friends descent into madness and the craziness of the system that at once must control and exploit his situation. The supports of Duvall, Beatty, Beatrice Straight are all wonderful but (Finch histrionics aside) the film belongs to Dunaway who is riveting as the manipulative Christensen. Dunaway was at the top of her game in this, well matched to a director at the top of his form - coming off the triumph of Dog Day Afternoon, and she provides the grit and drive of the piece through her naked ambition and ruthless desire for leverage and power.

Chayefsky adds a political dimension to the satire with the addition of the ELA (Ecumenical Liberation Army) to the mix, where Christensen wants film of their terrorist activities in exchange for prime time airing. In an era where the Black Panthers and Patty Hearst were hogging headlines and the Weathermen were wreaking havoc it’s rich fodder to fold them into a mass media organisation, with the extreme outcome that nobody saw coming, combining greed, delusion and murder.

Sidney Lumet keeps everything moving and in focus, finding depth and nuance in unlikely places but never losing Chayefsky’s narrative drive. Diana is the classic ‘ball buster’ in the argot of the era and Lumet shows the emasculation of Max (who thought he was the alpha player in the relationship) as he takes the ‘housewife’ role after their affair ruined Max’s marriage to the long suffering Louise (Beatrice Straight). Beatty is compelling as the head of the network who tells Howard how the world really works. Beatty and Straight both won Oscars for the small but pivotal support roles, with Straight’s holding the record for the least amount of screen time for an Oscar winner at just over 5 minutes.  

The political backdrop for Network was of course the fresh national scar of Vietnam and the implosion and disgrace (what an old-fashioned word it is now) of Nixon. What Chayefsky and Lumet understood was that beyond the bread and circuses of the bright lights of the TV set there lurked dark rooms where dark money called the dance. Marshall McLuhan may have caught hold of the nascent issue is his pity ‘the medium is the message’ but the money men knew what mattered more was who controlled the message. Beatty’s money man told Beale what to say when he needed to wield his stick. Just as Rupert Murdoch pushed for the dismantling of the Fairness Doctrine (and Reagan duly complied) allowing him to turn news into ‘infotainment’ and eventually ‘angertainment’ - thus Fox news was born with the Orwellian slogan of Fair and Balanced attached. In the second quarter of the 21^st century it is this selling out of news media’s responsibility for posting ‘truth’ that sees dubious AI slop now competing for eyeballs and clicks with facts and verification distant considerations and all information is suddenly equal. Alternative facts indeed. 

If Chayefsky couldn’t have predicted all of that, at least he knew that whoever controlled the information would be human (until the AI robots take over) and that they would be prone to the same conditions that flesh is heir to. Greed, venality, corruption and grift appear wherever there is big money to be made and that was true in the 1970s, true in the current era and no doubt will be true in the future. Network neatly fits in a tradition that stems from as far back as Welles’ Citizen Kane, through Kazan’s A Face In The Crowd and remains a swingeing and potent satire of media power in action. Sidney Lumet would continue to make superb cinema for decades although Chayefsky died relatively young at age 58 some half a dozen years later and Network remains the pinnacle of his fine career and one of the most lauded screenplays in history.

* Hollywood (of course) knows all about money ruling the game. A John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion story of writing Up Close and Personal and dealing with Disney who wanted changes from their hard hitting, biting story of the life of a groundbreaking lesbian newswoman, to make it more mainstream. When the writers baulked at the direction the Disney boys wanted them to take the story, a Disney exec replied, ‘Don’t make us bring out the monster,’ Dunne said, ‘Okay, I’ll bite, what is the monster?’  the Disney exec smirked, ‘The monster… is our money.’
Same as it ever was.