Right now, the Arabs have screwed us out of enough American dollars to come right back and with our own money buy General Moters, IBM, ITT, AT&T, DuPont, US Steel, and 20 other American companies. Hell, they already own half of England! So, listen to me. Listen to me, God damn it. The Arabs are simply buying us! There’s only one thing that can stop them. You! You!I want you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the phone. I want you to get up from your chairs, go to the phone and get in your cars, drive into the Western Union offices in town. I want you to send a telegram to the White House… By midnight tonight, I want a million telegrams at the White House. I want them wading, knee-deep in telegrams at the White House. I want you to get up right now and write a telegram to President Ford saying, “I’m as mad as Hell and I’m not gonna take this anymore! I don’t want the banks selling my country to the Arabs. I want the CCA deal stopped! Now! I want the CCA deal stopped! Now!”
– Howard Beale, from Sidney Lumet’s Network (1976); screenplay by Paddy Chayefsky
Last night [President Trump] motorcaded over to a dinner hosted by Paramount, which is awaiting Trump administration approval for its bid to buy CNN’s parent Warner Bros. Discovery. The dinner invite said Paramount would be “honoring the Trump White House and CBS White House correspondents.” Anti-Trump and anti-Paramount protesters held signs and wore costumes outside, some ridiculing David Ellison by name.” “Block the Trump-Ellison merger,” one of the signs said.
For purposes of the president’s travel, the dinner was deemed “closed press,” which meant the TV press pool representative (who happened to be from CBS!) and other pool journalists were not allowed inside. Some of my CBS sources are still being tight-lipped this morning. But I’m told that editor in chief Bari Weiss and president Tom Cibrowski were both there, along with a handful of CBS correspondents from the DC bureau who were invited and attended in an off the record capacity.
Yesterday underscored how much Paramount-WBD has become a political football. The day began with an anti-merger protest outside WBD’s headquarters in NYC. The city’s mayor Zohran Mamdani also added his name to the list of opponents.
Then the virtual WBD shareholder vote took place and, as expected, the deal was “overwhelmingly” approved. Trump allies like Jason Miller, who reportedly advised an investor on Paramount’s side, celebrated on social media.
Democrats like Sen. Elizabeth Warren quickly came out and said “the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger isn’t a done deal. State attorneys general across the country are stepping up to stop this antitrust disaster. We need to keep up this fight.”
California AG Rob Bonta, appearing on MeidasTouch with Scott MacFarlane, strongly suggested that his office will sue to block the deal in the coming weeks. There are “red flags everywhere,” he said. But he also noted that “we haven’t decided yet our formal position.”
The day concluded with Trump and Ellison breaking bread together off-camera. Paramount execs continue to project confidence that they’ll receive all the necessary regulatory sign-offs between now and September…
Spooky, isn’t it? Right down to the Arab investors:
Other questions of political influence [regarding the pending Warner-Paramount merger] have piled up. The Justice Department and company leadership have maintained that politics will not play a role in the regulatory process. But Trump himself has publicly waded into Warner’s future at times, despite backpedalling on what he once suggested his personal role would be.
Trump also has a close relationship with the Ellison family, particularly billionaire Oracle founder Larry Ellison, who is putting billions of dollars on the table to back the bid for his son’s company.
Meanwhile, Paramount has secured money from several sovereign investment funds — including Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, as well as funds from the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, per regulatory filings. But such investors will not have voting rights in a future Paramount-Warner combo, the filings noted. Paramount has not publicly specified how much they’re contributing.
Other countries, including European regulators, are scrutinizing the deal.
Shares of Paramount fell nearly 6 per cent on after Thursday’s vote, and Warner Bros. slipped as well.
Writing, as I do, about the movies, I am prone to frequently quote from them. And if there is one film I am prone to quote from more often than most these days (well, Dr. Strangelove aside), it is Network.
Back in 1976, this satire made us chuckle with its outrageous conceit-the story of a “fictional” TV network who hits the ratings g-spot with a nightly newscast turned variety hour, anchored by a self-proclaimed “angry prophet denouncing the hypocrisy of our time”.
50 years later, the film plays like a documentary (denouncing the hypocrisy of our time). The prescience of the infinitely quotable Paddy Chayefsky screenplay goes deeper than prophesying the onslaught of news-as-entertainment (and “reality” television)-it’s a blueprint for our age. As I wrote in a 2015 piece:
I love it. Suicides, assassinations, mad bombers, Mafia hitmen, automobile smash-ups: “The Death Hour”. A great Sunday night show for the whole family.
-from Network, screenplay by Paddy Chayefsky
There is an oft-repeated lament that Hollywood and/or television has “run out of original ideas”. Which is (mostly) true, but not necessarily indicative of a dearth of talent or creativity in the business. The blame for this particular writer’s block, I believe, can be laid fairly and squarely at the feet of…Reality.
Short of plundering Middle Earth or the comic book universe for ideas, it’s getting harder to dream up a scenario as “outlandish” as, say, having to undergo a security check before taking your seat at a movie theater, or as “unthinkable” as switching on the local TV news and witnessing the horror of what happened to the 2 WDBJ reporters and the interviewee while live on air last Wednesday.
You’re television incarnate, Diana. Indifferent to suffering, insensitive to joy. All of life is reduced to the common rubble of banality. War, murder, death are all the same to you as bottles of beer.
-from Network, screenplay by Paddy Chayefsky
While just as horrified and empathetic as anyone in their right mind should be when the WDBY story broke, I’m sad to report that I wasn’t necessarily surprised. It was only a matter of time. The on-camera assassination of two TV reporters filing an innocuous story about a mall seemed a relatively tiny jump from the random murders of two theater patrons in Lafayette earlier this month…who likely assumed they weren’t risking violent death by seeking out 2 hours of escapism at the matinee showing of a romantic comedy.
In the opening scene of Network, drunken buddies Peter Finch (as Howard Beale, respected news anchor about to suffer a mental breakdown on-air and morph into “the mad prophet of the airwaves”) and William Holden (as Max Shumacher, head of the news division for the “UBS” network) riff on an imaginary pitch for a news rating booster-“Real live suicides, murders, executions-we’ll call it The Death Hour.”
Soon afterwards, Beale shocks colleagues and viewers by going off-script during one of his nightly newscasts and soberly announcing:
“I would like at this moment to announce that I will be retiring from this program in two weeks’ time because of poor ratings. Since this show is the only thing I had going for me in my life, I’ve decided to kill myself. I’m going to blow my brains out right on this program a week from today. So tune in next Tuesday. That should give the public relations people a week to promote the show. You ought to get a hell of a rating out of that. 50 share, easy.”
The network’s initial impulse is, of course, to take Beale off the air for an indeterminate hiatus; but Howard begs Max to give him one more chance, if only to publicly apologize for what he essentially describes as a momentary lapse of reason. Reluctantly, Max acquiesces.
When the following evening’s newscast (during which Beale once again goes off the rails) attracts an unprecedented number of viewers, some of the more unscrupulous programmers and marketers at the network smell a potential cash cow, and decide to let Beale rant away in front of the cameras to his heart’s content, reinventing him as a “mad prophet of the airwaves” and giving him a nightly prime time slot. The “show” (as it can really no longer be described as a “newscast”) becomes a smashing success.
Eventually, some of the truthiness in his nightly “news sermons” hits too close to home with network brass when Beale outs a pending business deal the network has made with shadowy Arab investors, and it is decided that his show needs to be cancelled (with extreme prejudice). Besides, his ratings are slipping.
The most famous scene in the film is Beale’s “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore” tirade, a call to arms (borne from a “cleansing moment of clarity”) for viewers to turn off the tube, break the spell of their collective stupor, literally stick their heads out the window and make their voices heard. It’s a memorable and inspired set piece.
For me, the most defining scene is between Beale and Arthur Jensen (CEO of “CCA”-wonderfully played by Ned Beatty). Jensen is calling Beale on the carpet for publicly exposing a potential buyout of CCA by shadowy Arab investors. Cognizant that Beale is crazy as a loon, yet still a cash cow for the network, Jensen hands him a new set of stone tablets from which to preach-the “corporate cosmology of Arthur Jensen”. I think it is screenwriter Chayefsky’s finest monologue.
Beatty picked up a Best Actor in a Supporting Role Oscar (just for that one scene!). The entire cast is superb. Faye Dunaway, who won a Best Actress statue for her performance, steals all of her scenes as Diana Christenson, the soulless, ratings obsessed head of development who schemes to turn Beale’s mental illness into revenue (“You’re television incarnate, Diana,” Max tells her at one point.) William Holden was nominated for Best Actor, for scenes like this:
Holden lost to fellow cast member Peter Finch, who was awarded with a Best Actor Oscar posthumously (sadly, he passed away shortly after filming wrapped). I have to say, that particular monologue about “primal doubts” is much more resonant to me at age 70 than it was the first time I saw Network during its first theatrical run in 1976 at age 20.
Another well-deserved Oscar went to Beatrice Straight. She had a bit more screen time than Ned Beatty, but likewise earned her statue for one particular scene (and it’s a doozy).
Robert Duvall was curiously overlooked for his indelible performance as corporate “hatchet man” Frank Hackett; but the Academy did award a statue to Paddy Chayefsky for Best Writing, Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen. Sidney Lumet was nominated for Best Director, and the film nominated for Best Picture, but lost to Rocky in both categories.
Fans of the film will be happy to learn that it has (finally!) been given the Criterion treatment. The package features a new 4K digital restoration, which is a noticeable picture upgrade from all previous editions (I’ve owned them all), and a crisp uncompressed monaural soundtrack.
Extras include an archival audio commentary by the late director, Paddy Chayefsky: Collector of Words (2025), an excellent feature-length documentary about the screenwriter by Matthew Miele (it premiered last year on TCM), a six-part “making of” documentary from 2006, and an insightful written essay by writer and New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie.
Previous posts with related themes:
One scene to the next: RIP Robert Duvall
Explore the review archives at Den of Cinema
— Dennis Hartley
