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Sunday, January 23, 2011

Network (film)

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Network is a 1976 American satirical film released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer about a fictionaltelevision network, Union Broadcasting System (UBS), and its struggle with poor ratings. The film was written by Paddy Chayefsky and directed by Sidney Lumet, and stars Faye Dunaway,William Holden, Peter Finch and Robert Duvall and features Wesley Addy, Ned Beatty, andBeatrice Straight.
Network has continued to receive recognition, decades after its initial release. 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."[1] In 2006, Chayefsky's script was voted one of the top ten movie scripts by the Writers Guild of America, East. In 2007, the film was 64th among the Top 100 Greatest U.S. American Films as chosen by the American Film Institute, a ranking slightly higher than the one AFI gave it ten years earlier.

Plot

Howard Beale (Peter Finch), the longtime anchor of the UBS Evening News, learns he has just two more weeks on the air because of declining ratings. The following night, he announces on live television that he will commit suicide by shooting himself in the head during next Tuesday's broadcast.[2] UBS fires him after this incident, but — after some persuasion from UBS News'old guard president and Beale's best friend, Max Schumacher (William Holden) — lets him back on the air, ostensibly for a dignified farewell. Beale promises he will apologize for his outburst. However, once on the air, he launches into a rant claiming that life is "bullshit". Beale's outburst causes the newscast's ratings to soar.
Much to Schumacher's dismay, the upper echelons of UBS decide to exploit Beale's antics rather than pulling him off the air. In one impassioned diatribe, Beale galvanizes the nation with his rant, "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!" and persuades Americans to shout out their windows during a lightning storm. Soon Beale is hosting a new program called "The Howard Beale Show", top-billed as a "mad prophet." Ultimately, the show becomes the highest 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."
Howard Beale (Peter Finch) delivering his "mad as hell" speech
Beginning as a producer of entertainment programming, Diana Christensen's (Faye Dunaway) desire to produce a hit show for the network results in her cutting a deal with a group of radical left-wing terrorists (a parody of the Symbionese Liberation Army, called the "Ecumenical Liberation Army") who film themselves robbing banks, footage to be used as the cold-opening for a new series based on terrorists for the network that she wants developed for the upcoming fall season. When Beale's nervous breakdown–fueled rants bring in high ratings, Christensen approaches Schumacher and offers to help him "develop" the 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 she can produce it; Hackett fires Schumacher at the same time. The romance withers as the show flourishes, but in the flush of high ratings, the two ultimately find their ways back together, leading to Schumacher leaving his wife of over 25 years for Christensen. But Christensen's fanatical devotion to her job and emotional emptiness ultimately drives Max back to his wife, warning his former lover that she will self-destruct at the pace she was 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."
Meanwhile, another crisis looms for UBS. 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 it, encouraging viewers to send telegrams to the White Housetelling 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. Beale is then taken 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's world view ultimately persuades Beale to abandon his populist messages. However, television audiences find his new views on the dehumanization of society to be depressing, and ratings begin to slide. Despite this, Jensen will not allow executives to fire Beale as he spreads the new 'evangel.' 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 arrange for Beale's on-air assassination by the same group of urban terrorists whom she discovered earlier and who now have their own UBS show, The Mao Tse-Tung Hour. It is, the voice-over assures, "the first known instance of a man who was killed because he had lousy ratings."

[edit]Cast

Cast notes

[edit]Production

The script was written by Paddy Chayefsky, and the producer was Howard Gottfried. The two 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 recently settling this lawsuit, Chayefsky and Gottfried agreed to allow UA to finance the film. But after reading the script, 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 rights.
The film premiered in New York City on November 27, 1976, with a wide release following shortly afterward.

[edit]Critical response

The film became one of the big hits of 1976 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."[3]
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."[4] Seen a quarter-century later, Ebert 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."[5]
Not all reviews were positive; Pauline Kael in The New Yorker slammed the movie's abundance of long, preachy speeches; Chayefsky's self-righteous contempt for not only television itself but also TV viewers; and the fact that almost everyone in the movie has a screaming rant at some point—pointing out that Robert Duvall screams the loudest. (Her review was subtitled "Hot Air.")

[edit]Awards and honors

[edit]Academy Awards

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
Finch died before the 1977 Academy Awards ceremony and was the only performer to win a posthumous Academy Award until Heath Ledgerwon 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.
Beatrice 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 2010.
Nominated

[edit]Golden Globes

Won
Nominated

[edit]BAFTA Awards

Won
Nominated

[edit]American Film Institute

[edit]Rights

Text document with red question mark.svg
This section includes a list of references, but its sources remain unclear because it has insufficient inline citations.
Please help to improve this article by introducing more precise citations where appropriate. (October 2010)
The feature film was originaly an MGM/United Artists joint release. In the US, MGM distributed the film. United Artists was the international distributor.
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 international rights to Network.
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 rights to Network, but international rights remained with MGM, which retained UA library from 1952 on, plus a few pre-1952 features, as other libraries which had been acquired by UA — such as the pre-1950[6][7] Warner Bros. library — were retained by Turner. 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.
In 1996, Turner merged with Time Warner. Consequently, Warner Bros. assumed TV and theatrical distribution rights to the Turner library, with video rights being added in 1999.
As of 2010, Warner Bros./Turner owns the US rights to Network, while international ancillary rights remain with MGM - which was bought by a consortium led by Sony and Comcast in 2005. MGM has also assigned international video distribution rights to 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, while theatrical rights are co-held by Columbia Pictures.

[edit]Legacy




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

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