Network (film)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

(Redirected from Network (movie))
Jump to: navigation, search
Network

Network
This image is a candidate for speedy deletion. It will be deleted after seven days from the date of nomination.
Directed by Sidney Lumet
Produced by Howard Gottfried
Written by Paddy Chayefsky
Starring Faye Dunaway
William Holden
Peter Finch
Robert Duvall
Ned Beatty
Music by Elliot Lawrence
Cinematography Owen Roizman
Distributed by USA: MGM (theatrical), Warner Bros. (DVD)
non-USA: United Artists (theatrical), MGM (DVD)
Release date(s) November 27, 1976 (premiere)
Running time 121 min.
Language English
Budget USD$ 3,800,000 (estimated)
IMDb profile

Network is a 1976 satirical New Hollywood film about a fictional television network, Union Broadcasting System (UBS), and its struggle with poor ratings. It was written by Paddy Chayefsky and directed by Sidney Lumet, and stars Faye Dunaway, William Holden, Peter Finch, Robert Duvall, Wesley Addy, Ned Beatty and Beatrice Straight. The film won four Academy Awards, including both Best Actor and Best Actress.

Network has continued to receive recognition, decades after its initial release. In 2000 the United States Library of Congress deemed the film "culturally significant" and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry. In 2002, the film was inducted into the Producers Guild of America Hall of Fame as a film that has "set an enduring standard for American entertainment."[1] In 2006, Chayefsky's script was voted one of the top ten movie scripts of all-time by the Writers Guild of America. In 2007, the film was 64th among the Top 100 Greatest American Films as chosen by the American Film Institute, a ranking slightly higher than the one AFI gave it ten years earlier.

Contents

The story opens with long-time "UBS Evening News" anchor Howard Beale (played by Peter Finch) being fired because of the show's low ratings. The following night, Beale announces on the air that he will commit suicide during an upcoming live broadcast.[2]

UBS immediately fires him after this incident, but they let him back on the air, ostensibly for a dignified farewell, with persuasion from Beale's producer and best friend, Max Schumacher (played by William Holden), the network's old guard news editor. Beale promises that he will apologize for his outburst, but instead rants about how life is "bullshit." While there are serious repercussions, the program's ratings skyrocket and, much to Schumacher's dismay, the upper echelons of UBS decide to exploit Beale's antics rather than pulling him off the air.

Howard Beale (Peter Finch) delivering his "mad as hell" speech. This image is a candidate for speedy deletion. It will be deleted after seven days from the date of nomination.
Howard Beale (Peter Finch) delivering his "mad as hell" speech.
This image is a candidate for speedy deletion. It will be deleted after seven days from the date of nomination.

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 spectacular lightning storm. Soon Beale is hosting a new program called The Howard Beale Show, top-billed as a "mad prophet of the airways." Ultimately, the show becomes the highest rated (Duvall's character calls it "a big fat, ... big-titted hit!") on television, and Beale finds new celebrity preaching his angry message in front of a live audience that, on cue, repeats the Beale's marketed catchphrase en masse. His new set is lit by blue spotlights and an enormous stained-glass window, supplanted with segments featuring polls and astrology.

Parallel to the story of Beale is the tale of the rise within UBS of Diana Christensen (played by Faye Dunaway). Beginning as a producer of entertainment programming, Diana acquires footage of terrorists robbing banks for a new television series, charms other executives, and ends up controlling a merged news and entertainment division. To advance this, Christensen has an affair with the long-married Schumacher, but remains obsessed with the success of the network, even in bed.

Upon discovering that the conglomerate that owns UBS will be bought out by an even larger Saudi Arabian conglomerate, Beale launches an on-screen tirade against the two corporations, encouraging the audience to telegram the White House with the message, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take this any more" in the hopes of stopping the merger. The chairman of the company that owns UBS then explicates his own "corporate cosmology" to the now nearly delusional Beale, ultimately persuading Beale to abandon his populist messages. However, audiences find his new views on the dehumanization of society to be depressing, and ratings begin to slide.

And although Beale's ratings plummet, the chairman will not allow executives to fire Beale as he spreads the new gospel. Obsessed as ever with UBS' ratings, Christensen arranges for Beale's on-air murder by a group of urban terrorists who now have their own UBS show, "The Mao-Tse Tung Hour," a dynamite addition to the new fall line-up.

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]

Network won three of the four acting awards, tying the record of 1951's A Streetcar Named Desire.

Won:

Finch died before the Academy Awards ceremony was held, and as of 2007 is the only performer ever to receive his award posthumously. Straight's performance as the wife of Holden's character featured only five minutes and 40 seconds of screen time, making it the shortest performance to win an Oscar as of 2007.

Nominated:

Won:

Nominated:

Won:

Nominated:

  • The film spawned the popular phrase "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore," though the actual quote in the film, as uttered by Howard Beale, is "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!" However, "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore" was uttered by some of Beale's viewers. It is frequently parodied, and used by the New York Mets and the Florida Marlins to rev up the crowd. It placed 19th on the American Film Institute's list of the 100 greatest American movie quotes.
  • In October 2005, actor George Clooney was said to be planning to produce a live made-for-television remake of the film, just as he did with Fail Safe.[6] As of 2007 the remake has not yet been produced.
  • The pseudonymous correspondent who covered television network skulduggery in "The Webs" column of Spy Magazine was named "Laureen Hobbs," after the radical black activist who is corrupted by television in the film.
  • William Holden only received the full text of his famous long speech the day before it was shot.
  • The television show Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip referred to this film in the pilot episode, having a similar on-air breakdown on the show-within-a-show in this episode. The opening scene involved the executive producer having an on-air rant regarding television, leading to his firing. Network executives explicitly referred to Network as they discussed this outburst.
  • The first issue of the The Nightly News, a comic similarly themed on the subject of media abuse, is entitled I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore.
  • Alternative metal act System of a Down re-enacted a part of the movie in the opening of the music video for their song "Sugar".
v • d • e
Films directed by Sidney Lumet

12 Angry Men (1957) • Stage Struck (1958) • That Kind of Woman (1959) • The Fugitive Kind (1959) • A View from the Bridge (1961) • Long Day's Journey Into Night (1962) • The Pawnbroker (1964) • Fail-Safe (1964) • The Hill (1965) • The Group (1966) • The Deadly Affair (1967) • Bye Bye Braverman (1968) • The Sea Gull (1968) • The Appointment (1969) • King: A Filmed Record... Montgomery to Memphis (1970) • Last of the Mobile Hot Shots (1970) • The Anderson Tapes (1971) • Child's Play (1972) • The Offence (1972)• Serpico (1973) • Lovin' Molly (1974)• Murder on the Orient Express (1974) • Dog Day Afternoon (1975) • Network (1976) • Equus (1977) • The Wiz (1978) • Just Tell Me What You Want (1980) • Prince of the City (1981) • Deathtrap (1982) • The Verdict (1982) • Daniel (1983) • Garbo Talks (1984) • Power (1986) • The Morning After (1986) • Running on Empty (1988) • Family Business (1989) • Q & A (1990) • A Stranger Among Us (1992) • Guilty as Sin (1993) • Night Falls on Manhattan (1997)• Critical Care (1997) • Gloria (1999) • Strip Search (2004) • Find Me Guilty (2006) • Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (2007)

  1. ^ Producers Guild Hall of Fame - Past Inductees from the PGA website
  2. ^ Because Chayefsky started writing the screenplay during the same month that newscaster Christine Chubbuck committed on-air suicide, some, including Matthew C. Ehrlich in Journalism in the Movies (ISBN 0252029348), have speculated (p. 122) that the scene was inspired by Chubbuck's manner of death.
  3. ^ Review of Network from the November 15, 1976 edition of The New York Times
  4. ^ Review of Network by Roger Ebert from the 1970s
  5. ^ Review of Network by Roger Ebert from October 2000
  6. ^ Clooney Breaks His Own Big Story, A Live Network, an October 6, 2005 article from The Washington Post

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_%28film%29"
Advanced Search
Included Web Search Engines


Safe Search

close

Top Matching Results

Occasionally Search.com will highlight specialized results that are based on the context of your query. Examples of specialized results include specific links to news, images, or video.

Top Matching Results may highlight information from other Search.com pages, content from the CNET Network of sites, or third party content. The listings are based purely on relevance. Search.com does not receive payment for listings in this section but our partners that provide this data may get paid for listing these products.

Sponsored Links

This section contains paid listings which have been purchased by companies that want to have their sites appear for specific search terms and related content. These listings are administered, sorted and maintained by a third party and are not endorsed by Search.com.

Search Results

Search.com sends your search query to several search engines at one time and integrates the results into one list which has been sorted by relevance using Search.com's proprietary algorithm. You can customize the list of search engines included in your metasearch from the preferences.

The search engines that are used in your metasearch may allow companies to pay to have their Web sites included within the results. To view the Paid Inclusion policy for a specific search engine, please visit their Web site. Search.com does not accept payment or share revenue with any search engine partner for listings in this section.