Sidney Lumet's "Network"

Note: Not Sidney Lumet.

 
Sidney Lumet, the director of Network and a bunch of other fantastic films, died on Saturday. His resume will knock you out – there’s Network, Dog Day Afternoon, Murder on the Orient Express, 12 Angry Men, Serpico, The Verdict, even The Wiz, people. The Wiz. The guy who did Network also did The Wiz. Process that.

We’ve done two of Lumet’s movies in our movie group – Network and 12 Angry Men. I’m going to talk about Network today because when I read the news about Lumet’s death, I immediately wanted to see that movie again. 

We screened this one quite a while ago – my evite history doesn’t even go back far enough, actually. My Netflix history tells me I rented this in September 2007, so I’m going to go with that. Oddly enough, I do remember that I hosted, and that I served sandwiches (why? Why do I remember that? Why do I remember that I made a special point to get awesome bread from this little bakery in Prairie Village?).

Screenwriter Paddy Chayevsky

God, I love this movie. It’s easily a top 10 for me. I am naturally inclined toward movies with incredible scripts – every one of my top 5 movies either won the best screenplay Oscar or was nominated – and Network has one of the best you’ll ever see. It’s a really speechy movie, but because those speeches were written by Paddy Chayevsky, they totally work. And the actors just dug into those scenes and knocked them out of the park. 

Whenever screenwriters write about writers in movies or TV, they tend to portray these sad sacks who have almost no importance on the movie set, but that apparently wasn’t the case for Network. Lumet said that Paddy was on set to oversee his direction, which Lumet didn’t mind because Paddy had better comedic instinct than he did.   

The Oscars

The 1976 Oscars had an embarrassment of riches in terms of nominees. Look what was nominated for Best Picture:

• Rocky
• All the President's Men
• Bound for Glory
• Network
• Taxi Driver

And Rocky won because it's the feel-good, underdog-wins-it-all movie. Traditionally, the Oscars prefer it that way. They don't award films that show the protagonist assassinated in the last scene because of low ratings. 

Network is also notable in Oscar history for a few interesting (and wonderfully trivial) reasons:

• It's only the second movie to win three acting Oscars - plenty of films have won two, but only A Streetcar Named Desire and this one won three.
• Peter Finch (who played Howard Beale) was the first person to win a posthumous acting Oscar - he died a couple of months before the ceremony. The second to do so? Heath Ledger in The Dark Night (who, just like Finch, was Australian).
• It's only the second movie to receive five acting nominations (two for best actor, one best actress and both the supporting categories).
• Two of its nominees have remarkably small roles. Beatrice Straight played the wife of William Holden's character. She's on screen for just 5 minutes, 40 seconds, and she won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar. Similarly, Ned Beatty was nominated for Best Support Actor for exactly one day of work in Network (he lost to somebody in Rocky).

I firmly believe that while all the actors in Network were remarkable, they won their Oscars (or were nominated) because script did the heavy lifting. Just look at their most famous scenes – particularly those one-shot wonders of Straight and Beatty.

Here’s why Beatrice Straight won her Oscar: 

Recognize her? Also in Poltergeist.

Then get out, go anywhere you want, go to a hotel, go live with her, and don't come back. Because, after 25 years of building a home and raising a family and all the senseless pain that we have inflicted on each other, I'm damned if I'm going to stand here and have you tell me you're in love with somebody else. Because this isn't a convention weekend with your secretary, is it? Or - or some broad that you picked up after three belts of booze. This is your great winter romance, isn't it? Your last roar of passion before you settle into your emeritus years. Is that what's left for me? Is that my share? She gets the winter passion, and I get the dotage? What am I supposed to do? Am I supposed to sit at home knitting and purling while you slink back like some penitent drunk? I'm your wife, damn it. And, if you can't work up a winter passion for me, the least I require is respect and allegiance. I hurt. Don't you understand that? I hurt badly.

And here’s why Ned Beatty was nominated for his Oscar. Also Lumet’s choice of camera angles and lighting in this scene helped accentuate the surreal nature of the speech:

You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won't have it! Is that clear? You think you've merely stopped a business deal. That is not the case! The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back! It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity! It is ecological balance! You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels. It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and YOU... WILL... ATONE! Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale? You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM, and ITT, and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state, Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that... perfect world... in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality. One vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock. All necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused. And I have chosen you, Mr. Beale, to preach this evangel.

And here’s why Peter Finch and Paddy Chayefsky won their Oscars (forgive the French subtitles):

It’s hard to imagine anyone else in this role because Finch is so indelible, but lots of people were approached for this part first. Henry Fonda thought the script was “too hysterical” (and I don’t think he meant funny); George C. Scott was pissed at Sidney Lumet, so he turned it down; Walter Cronkite and John Chancellor were even asked to do this role. In the end Finch lobbied for the role and got it by recording his voice in a perfect American accent to show his Australian one wouldn’t ruin things.

And that speech? The one with the No. 19 greatest movie quote in history? Finch did it in one and a half takes. Halfway through his second take, he stopped in exhaustion (his heart was already failing by this point). So what you see in the movie is cobbled together from those takes – the first half of his speech comes from the second take, and the most famous part – the “mad as hell” part – all comes from his first take. Amazing. 

Parallels and premonition

Network is as old as I am – it was filmed in 1975, just as I was making my debut – and given that it’s about media and trends, which change and age quicker than you can blink, it’s easy to assume that this movie might have aged in amusing ways.

Oh, hell no.

It’s eerie to watch Network today and see exactly how many of the issues they’re talking about still apply to us today. Take this line from Beale’s famous speech:

I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's worth, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TV's while some local newscaster tells us that today we had 15 homicides and 63 violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be.

Um, yep. That’s 2011.

And then there’s Faye Dunaway’s character – the fresh face of UBS News who wants counterculture, anti-establishment programming, who’s willing to fuck around with the concept of documentary television to make it more sensational and get better ratings. Does this start to sound familiar? In 1987, Fox became the fourth TV network (just as UBS is in the movie) and started breaking ground with TV that nobody else wanted – Married with Children, The Tracey Ullman Show, and then Cops, which is the grandfather of reality TV.

Another parallel: Glenn Beck. Now, admittedly, I don’t watch Crazy McNutjob (or anything on Fox News, for that matter) and all I know about the man comes filtered through The Daily Show. But I do read about media a lot, and from what I can glean, Beck has been descending into Howard Beale-like crazy talk for months now – apparently, absolutely everything that happens every day is a harbinger for End Times on Beck’s show. But for the longest time, Fox couldn’t do anything to tone him down because his ratings were so high (just like with The Howard Beale Show in the second half of Network). And then, his ratings started to decline. But instead of hiring an assassin, Fox just got Beck to leave and, presumably, continue his Crazy McNutjob routine on some other street corner.

One last fun thing. Faye Dunaway won her first Oscar for this movie, and her fiancé met her the morning after the ceremony for a photo shoot at 6:30 a.m. She was exhausted, having not slept at all the night before, and he set up this now famous photo of her, which he titled, of course, “The Morning After.”