Mad as Hell: The Making of Network and the Fateful Vision of the Angriest Man in Movies (11 page)

After serving in World War II, Lumet resumed acting and then focused on directing as the rapid expansion of television created new opportunities and mobility. Before he was thirty years old he was working seven-day weeks, splitting his time between two CBS programs:
Danger
, on which he shared directorial duties with Yul Brynner and which had been the venue for Chayefsky’s first produced teleplay; and
You Are There
, a weekly series of historical reenactments hosted by Walter Cronkite. A 1953 feature in
Life
magazine showed the spry, five-foot-five-and-a-half-inch bespectacled director clad in a dress shirt and a skinny tie as he threw himself, quite literally, into morning rehearsals for a
You Are There
episode about the Battle of the Alamo, demonstrating for a Texan defender how to fall over a wall and die; and inspecting a hug between Nina Foch and Stephen Elliott during afternoon scene work for
Danger
. “In this rat race I ought to be having a nervous breakdown every week,” Lumet said in an accompanying interview. “But I feel just great.”

In 1957, two years after Chayefsky’s successful leap from television to motion pictures, Lumet made his film-directing debut on a feature adaptation of
12 Angry Men
, Reginald Rose’s sweltering jury room drama, which had first been presented on the CBS anthology series
Westinghouse Studio One
in a live production directed by Franklin J. Schaffner. For the movie, which was budgeted at $350,000 and boasted a star-studded, cinema-ready cast led by its producer Henry Fonda, Lumet made the unusual if pragmatic decision to film its many speeches out of sequence and instead shoot juror by juror, chair by chair, as he worked his way around the deliberation table. In advance, he sketched out all the necessary camera angles and lines of sight and decided the amount of sweat that should appear on each actor as conditions grew increasingly heated.

“I spent nights puzzling the problem and my script became a maze of diagrams,” Lumet explained at the time. “We had arguments on the set as people tried to explain to me that I was crazy. But the diagrams came out right 396 times in 397 scenes. One we had to reshoot because I had the stockbroker looking the wrong way as he spoke to another actor.” Released by United Artists, as
Marty
was,
12 Angry Men
was a commercial disappointment but a critical success, earning Lumet an Academy Award nomination for best director and propelling him toward a full-time filmmaking career.

As he graduated from romantic trifles such as
Stage Struck
and
That Kind of Woman
to more assured and ambitious features such as
Long Day’s Journey into Night
and
The Pawnbroker
, Lumet lived as passionately as he worked. The director made front-page news in the summer of 1963 when, the day after his second wife, Gloria Vanderbilt, got a quickie divorce from him in Juárez, Mexico, firefighters were dispatched to his Manhattan apartment to revive him from an apparent overdose of sleeping pills. (Lumet later joked that what he’d indulged in that day “was only seven vodkas, a Miltown and idiocy.”) That November he married Gail Jones, a journalist and author who was the daughter of Lena Horne, though the couple would spend another month publicly denying that they’d wed before finally admitting to their nuptials in December.

In a lengthy
Life
magazine feature on the making of
The Group
, Lumet’s 1966 adaptation of the Mary McCarthy novel, Pauline Kael described the director as being “cheap, fast and reliable,” but also lacking in intellectual curiosity. Kael, who had been given extensive access to the production of the film, wrote that Lumet was “everybody’s second choice, the driving little guy who talked himself into jobs and then finished them before the producers even got to know him.”

But by the mid-1970s, Lumet had solidified a cinematic reputation for his quintessential depictions of claustrophobic urban angst and New York City in all its grimy, garbage-strewn glory. As he would later explain, he had shunned Hollywood to avoid the intrusion of studio bureaucrats, and discovered that living and working in New York offered further benefits. “I found that I was getting something back,” Lumet said. “For example: I think I’m a better director because I saw Jerry Robbins’s ballet last night. Why leave that? The city is always changing and always remains the same, and that’s what I hope about myself.” In movies such as
Serpico
and
Dog Day Afternoon
he was also developing a less mannered and more naturalistic, vérité approach to filmmaking, which appealed to Chayefsky and Gottfried as they narrowed the field for a director for
Network
. So, too, did his experience in television—as well as a certain resentment he carried with him after leaving the medium. Lumet was fond of saying, “I never left television; it left me.”

Yet despite Chayefsky’s interest and the many times Lumet was mentioned as the presumptive director of
Network
, a delay preceded his officially signing on. “It had a somewhat tortured beginning,” said Philip Rosenberg of the project. Lumet’s longtime production designer, Rosenberg would serve in that same capacity on
Network
. Though Lumet had mentioned the project to him several months before work began on it, Rosenberg said, “There were some very tense waiting periods for it to actually start up, and Sidney seemed to be quite nervous about something. I wasn’t privy to what the difficulties were, but it was several weeks where Sidney was doing nothing but worrying and staying in his house and stripping the windows to pass the time while he was waiting for something to get settled.”

Lumet may simply have been waiting for the resolution of financial matters or other points relating to his
Network
deal. (His production company, Amjen Entertainment, would ultimately receive 12.5 percent of the film’s net profits.) Or he may have been contemplating just how much autonomy he was willing to concede on the film, knowing that he would not have final approval over the finished cut of the movie and that his wishes would have to be subordinate to Chayefsky’s. “Paddy is a tough writer and creator,” Rosenberg said. “He feels justifiably possessive of the entire work. So for a director to work for him is—I don’t know if anybody else could have directed this picture without it becoming a debacle.”

Other longtime colleagues said that Lumet was not overly concerned with final-cut approval. “Most of the directors who worked in New York basically did what they wanted,” said Alan Heim, who edited
Network
and numerous other Lumet features. “A good director—you make a good movie, nobody’s really going to meddle too much.”

For all the qualities he shared with Chayefsky, Lumet began to pick up on differences in their attitudes and approaches to their work once he formally came on board
Network
that summer. Lumet was known for his on-set charm and spirit of camaraderie, but he said of Chayefsky, “His cynicism was partly a pose, but a healthy dose of paranoia was also in his character.” More precisely, Lumet described the writer as “litigious”: “His answer to conflicts very often was, ‘Can I sue?’”

The arrival of Lumet meant that Chayefsky’s initial ideas for casting
Network
would have to be tempered with his director’s proposals, and the two men did not always see eye to eye. Recalling one brainstorming session with Chayefsky, Lumet said, “I suggested Vanessa Redgrave. He said he didn’t want her. I said, ‘She’s the best actress in the English-speaking world!’ He said, ‘She’s a PLO supporter.’ I said, ‘Paddy, that’s blacklisting!’ He said, ‘Not when a Jew does it to a Gentile.’” But they found common ground elsewhere, and with it the first major star of their film.

*   *   *

“I think of Faye Dunaway as an enchanted panther in a poem,” a person identified only as “an actor who admires her” told
People
magazine at the end of 1974. “She’s tawny and elegant, and her eyes are like big mysterious emeralds. I want to stroke her but I want bars between us when I do. She looks hungry and dangerous. Whatever there is to want, she wants it all.” Protected by a cloak of mystery, this unnamed enthusiast identified the essentially feline nature of the actress: Dunaway was alluring and graceful, with sharp features that, before she even expressed herself, could make her seem exotic or aloof. Underneath that simultaneously tantalizing and intimidating exterior lurked a curious intellect, boundless passion, and a mercurial mood. No one could question Dunaway’s talent or her devotion to her art. But as the anonymous author of this appraisal surely knew—why ask for anonymity otherwise?—when she felt she was cornered, she could pounce.

In a decade’s worth of motion pictures, Dunaway had won international fame, lost it, and then recaptured it.
Bonnie and Clyde
, the New Wave–inspired Arthur Penn drama that paired her and Warren Beatty as the doomed Depression-era bank robbers, had been a showcase for Dunaway, from her nearly naked but discreetly framed frolic at the start of the film to its bullet-riddled finale. Released in 1967, it was only her third movie role; it made her a sensation (along with her slightly anachronistic beret and midi-skirt look, created by the costume designer Theadora Van Runkle) and earned her the first Academy Award nomination of her career.

The next year, in
The Thomas Crown Affair
, Dunaway faced off against Steve McQueen in the sexiest chess scene ever committed to celluloid. But by 1970, gossipy newspaper columns and their readers were already asking, “Where Did Faye Fade To?”—the answer being that she had been working on challenging if not always widely seen films such as
Little Big Man
and
Puzzle of a Downfall Child
.

Then, just as abruptly, Dunaway was generating talk of a comeback for her performance as the enigmatic Evelyn Mulwray in the 1974 crime noir
Chinatown
, where her vintage looks made her a perfect fit for Roman Polanski’s vision of Southern California in the 1930s. Dunaway was once again called upon to shed her clothes, for a postcoital scene with costar Jack Nicholson, and she received her second Oscar nomination. (A
People
magazine profile from that year offered a poetically apt summation of the actress, calling her “a gossamer grenade.”) But in the process, she was also saddled with the most withering criticism of her career. In an interview with
Rolling Stone
, Polanski described an incident on the
Chinatown
set where Dunaway called filming to a halt so she could air her grievances to the director. Of the actress, he said, “You have, I guarantee, never seen such certifiable proof of craziness. Working with Faye, I might eventually have actually questioned my own methods had I not known that she has had the same confrontations with
all
her directors, and gained the reputation as a gigantic pain-in-the-ass.”

Years later, Dunaway responded to Polanski’s charges by suggesting that the world did not permit women to pursue perfection in their work in the same way that men were allowed to. “The fact is a man can be difficult and people applaud him for trying to do a superior job,” Dunaway said in a memoir called
Looking for Gatsby
. “People say, ‘Well, gosh, he’s got a lot of guts. He’s a real man.’ And a woman can try to get it right and she’s ‘a pain in the ass.’ It’s in my nature to do really good jobs, and I would never have been successful if I hadn’t.”

Dorothy Faye Dunaway was born in 1941 in a one-room frame house on the Florida farm where her father worked as a hand, located between the Panhandle community of Two Egg and the town of Bascom. She was raised primarily by her mother and extended family while her father worked odd jobs and was drafted into the army. He reenlisted after World War II and brought his wife and children with him to Germany, where in 1952 he disappeared from his base on a bender. Dunaway’s father was listed as AWOL, then found the next day and court-martialed. He would be convicted on charges of drunken driving and resisting arrest and sentenced to six months in a stockade, but before his trial his eleven-year-old daughter made herself a fateful promise to become a self-sufficient adult, requiring no one else’s help. “I determined that no matter what I did,” Dunaway vowed, “I would never allow myself to be in the position of needing financial support from a man.”

Dunaway graduated from a Tallahassee high school, and a teaching scholarship led her to Florida State University and some of her earliest stage roles, including Olivia in
Twelfth Night
and the title character in
Medea
; she then transferred to Boston University’s School of Fine and Applied Arts, portraying Hypatia in Shaw’s
Misalliance
for the Harvard Summer Players and Elizabeth Proctor in Miller’s
The Crucible
. In 1962 she passed up a Fulbright Scholarship to join the Lincoln Center Repertory Company, newly formed by Elia Kazan and Robert Whitehead, and two days after graduating college she signed a one-year contract to replace Olga Bellin in the role of Margaret More in Whitehead’s Broadway production of
A Man for All Seasons
.

To each of her screen characters Dunaway sought to bring careful reflection and confident choices, sometimes to the befuddlement of filmmakers who expected their instructions to be followed without question. In her eyes, Bonnie Parker was “a creature who wanted freedom, and a bra just didn’t fit”; Vicki Anderson, in
The Thomas Crown Affair
, was the archetype of “a woman pushing the envelope.” “These were women who found out who they were,” Dunaway said, “who expressed who they were, and who were able to function as complete human beings, the way men do in the world.” She also paid a financial price to get the recognition she felt she deserved: to share the over-the-title billing that Warren Beatty enjoyed in
Bonnie and Clyde
, she had to give back $25,000 of her $60,000 salary.