Mad as Hell: The Making of Network and the Fateful Vision of the Angriest Man in Movies (15 page)

The second week of rehearsals resumed at the Hotel Diplomat the following Tuesday, and the final rehearsal day, Friday, January 16, focused partly on Beatrice Straight and her wrenching confrontation with Holden, in which Louise Schumacher sorrowfully interrogates her husband about his “great winter romance.” “She gave a printable performance,” Kay Chapin observed, “tears and all, a marvelous actress.” But Chapin also noticed a brewing disagreement between Chayefsky and Lumet over the work of Roberts Blossom, the gaunt and goggle-eyed character actor playing the thunderous CCA executive Arthur Jensen. Where the screenplay seemed to call for a confident pitchman who could sway Howard Beale to his doctrine of an “interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars,” Chapin noted that the author and his director “don’t seem to be in perfect agreement on that role”:

Paddy wants it less theatrical, more like a Rotarian, Mr. Congenial, whereas Sidney appears to like Blossom’s performance that is very theatrical. Sidney toned him down a bit, otherwise it would be like two maniacs together which throws the intent of the speech out the window. Blossom came back later with a rework of the speech and everyone seemed to like it.

Before the company was dismissed, Finch regaled some listeners with a story from his early days in the London theater. While playing a scene with Dame Edith Evans, Finch said he found himself overcome by a cough and unable to speak; his clever costar created a distraction with a coffee cup, got the audience to laugh, and underneath the murmur said to him, sotto voce, “All right, love: have a good cough now.” The tale was hopefully some consolation to Roberts Blossom, who, unknown to most of the staff, was about to be quietly let go from the cast.

*   *   *

“With Sidney, you never traveled very far away from New York City,” said Lumet’s production designer, Philip Rosenberg. But in the case of
Network
, the director found it necessary to cross international borders to produce the portions of the film that were set within a working television studio and that depicted the oracular on-camera speechifying of Howard Beale. Prior to shooting, Lumet had arranged for Rosenberg to receive a tour of CBS operations in New York from his friend Walter Cronkite and to get a crash course in television news production. But it was instead decided that the television sequences would be filmed at the CFTO-TV facility in Toronto, for several reasons. In New York, it was simply not practical or affordable to build a working replica of a television control room and studio, and the existing spaces offered to the production did not allow for the needed interplay between the control room and the stage. Union rules, which would have required the paid presence of members from both the television and motion picture guilds during studio filming, created further financial complications.

There was also a growing sense among the
Network
crew that the American television industry wanted nothing to do with the movie and would make no effort to assist in its creation. “Because of the volatile nature of the screenplay, we couldn’t get cooperation from any of the networks,” said Owen Roizman, the film’s director of photography. “We couldn’t get anything in New York; nobody would cooperate. They didn’t want that coming out, even if it was true. Especially because it was true.”

Rather than risk any further estrangement, MGM and United Artists executives stated in a January 9 memo that Chayefsky and Gottfried had “placed an embargo on the showing of NETWORK scripts to all media contacts—whether they be visiting the set for interview purposes or requesting it for background/information on the picture. In addition, under no circumstances are we to reveal the ending of the picture in any publicity material, or in discussions with the media.” The benign explanation provided in the memo was that “we all strongly feel that to do so would dissipate the element of surprise which Chayefsky strived so hard to achieve.”

The Toronto studio offered several benefits, including an ample soundstage that would provide the setting for the expanded UBS
Network News Hour
, its live audience, and cohosts such as Miss Mata Hari and Sybil the Soothsayer. Less conveniently, the upper portion of a spiral staircase visible in its TV control room required that its lower portion be replicated on the
Network
newsroom set—which was being built in New York—to avoid continuity errors. “It took a lot of work for the script girl and Sidney to remember when they were in Canada and when they were in New York,” Rosenberg said.

All
Network
talent and personnel were put up at the Hotel Toronto on University Avenue, where a little intermingling between nobility and commoners was not out of the question. On the evening of January 18, the night before filming began, Roizman headed down to the hotel restaurant, expecting to eat by himself.

“It was pretty empty,” he recalled. “I was one of the only ones there. And I sat down and put my order in. And just then, Paddy and Bill Holden came walking by. And they said, ‘Who are you eating with?’ I said, ‘Nobody. I’m alone.’ They said, ‘No, you’re not. Come on, you’re going to sit with us.’ And I said, ‘That’s okay. You don’t have to do that.’ And they said, ‘No, we want to,’ and they picked up my place settings and took it to their table and said, ‘You’re eating with us.’”

“Two big icons,” Roizman said, “and they treated me like royalty.”

*   *   *

Principal photography for
Network
began on Monday, January 19, with a call time of 7:30
A.M.
and cameras rolling at 9:45 on the first take of its first scene: executive producer Harry Hunter on the phone in the UBS News control room, assuring an unseen Max Schumacher that he believes Howard Beale is fine. The day’s aggressive schedule called for portions of six different scenes to be produced, but only two, depicting Harry Hunter and Diana Christensen in the control room, were shot on film. The remainder, recorded on videotape, were two sequences involving Beale’s fill-in anchor, Jack Snowden, played by Stanley Grover, and two that focused on Beale himself: a monologue known as “Last night I was awakened,” in which he describes a revelatory conversation with “a shrill, sibilant, faceless voice,” and the speech he would be seen delivering on the television sets and studio monitors in Scene 99, which was simply called “Mad as hell.”

Lumet, in preproduction conversations with Roizman, had determined that he wanted the visual look of
Network
to proceed in three distinct phases. “The first phase,” said Roizman, “should be ‘naturalistic,’ the second ‘realistic,’ and the third ‘commercial.’” (As Lumet himself put it, “The movie was about corruption. So we corrupted the camera.”) And as in rehearsals, the director arrived for each day of filming with a notebook in which, for every scene, he had already determined where his cameras would be placed and how his actors would move in front of them. Within his industry, Lumet was legendary for his speed and had a fairly earned reputation for shooting as few takes as he felt were necessary before moving on to the next camera angle or the next scene.

“If he only needed one shot for the scene, that was it, and he walked away,” said his camera operator Fred Schuler. “‘Cut, print, move on.’ That was his slogan. And when he said, ‘Cut,’ he was most of the time in my shot before I turned off the camera.”

“We used to joke about it,” said Roizman. “We’d say he would wear out a pair of sneakers in the course of a shoot.”

Watching Lumet reconnect with his roots while he directed scenes that were, in essence, live television broadcasts—snapping his fingers and pointing at cameras as he cued the performances of actors on screens within screens and instructed a console operator to switch from one shot to the next—could be dazzling to behold. “He was, like, in a frenzy,” said his camera operator Tom Priestley Jr. “‘Give me Camera A, give me Camera B, go back to Camera A.’ At the end of those two minutes, he was soaking wet.” Kay Chapin, in her diary, described Lumet as prowling “like a caged tiger; pacing, moving into everything, never rests.… When he runs out of directorial things to do he’ll tell the grips how to move the crane, wet down Finch, or schedule all the actors for the next day. He has incredible energy and knows everything.”

His rapidity had other advantages: if you were a member of his crew, you worked a consistent day, with lunch at noon or 1:00
P.M.
(during which the director usually took a nap), and finished at a civil hour, generally 5:00 or 6:00
P.M.
Additionally, Roizman said, “He wasn’t a fusspot when it came to technical things. They didn’t have to be perfect. He preferred them, I think, when they weren’t perfect, and he liked things to be just a little off, here and there.”

However, Lumet’s certainty of his choices could be a source of frustration to his collaborators. “He knew exactly what he wanted to do all the time,” said Roizman. “To a fault, I think, because very often on that film, there was no room for spontaneity. There was no improvisation. It was all planned ahead of time, and that bothered me. I always like to figure things out at the time, based on what I’m seeing in front of me. You just didn’t have that luxury with Sidney. He knew exactly what he wanted, and there was no wavering from that, and it’s too bad.”

Lumet was more graceful in wielding his power than Chayefsky, whose mandate to be present during filming often left him out of place, underfoot, or otherwise in the way. Chayefsky’s primary concern, more than seeing to it that
Network
was filmed imaginatively, or competently, or quickly, or on budget, was ensuring that all its dialogue was performed exactly as he had written it in the script. When it was not, he could be counted on to point out to his actors exactly where and how they had gone astray, often using Chapin, the script supervisor, as his emissary to dispense the corrections.

And in order to best observe the actors’ work, Chayefsky felt it was necessary to situate himself as close as he could to their performances. As Schuler recalled, “Paddy had this keen sense to always be in the front of the key light”—that is, the principal light used to illuminate the object of a camera—“because that’s where the person was best lit.” Eventually, he said, “it became a joke. ‘Where’s Paddy? Oh, look for the key light.’” Chayefsky’s small but bearish presence did not show up in the frame or affect the composition of shots, but it could interfere with the flow of communication (and people) in front of and behind the camera. So, said Schuler, an alternate arrangement was worked out: “At one point, they put a light up, a little soft light, and they called it the Paddy light. That’s where his place would be.”

This configuration did not prevent Chayefsky from turning around and offering instantaneous feedback to the director, but Lumet said he welcomed the input. For example, in a scene preceding Howard Beale’s “Mad as hell” speech, in which the rain-soaked anchor arrives at the UBS studio and announces to a security guard, “I have to make my witness,” there was disagreement over how the guard was to deliver his one-line reply: “Sure thing, Mr. Beale.”

“In my heavy-handed way,” Lumet said, “I told the guard to take in Peter Finch’s disheveled state, then humor him as he said the line. Paddy was at my ear in a second. ‘This is TV,’ he whispered. ‘He shouldn’t even notice him.’ He was right, of course. The line got the laugh it deserved. It wouldn’t have been funny delivered my way.”

Finch was the focal point for nearly all two weeks of the Canadian shoot, and he was happy for the challenge and for the attention. Before Howard Beale came into his life, he had been thinking of his migration to Jamaica as decidedly one-way. “In his mind, he wanted to retire,” his daughter Diana Finch-Braley would later recall. “He was like, ‘I found what I wanted, I had a baby, I’m raising a family so I think I’m going to settle down.’”

As had become his tradition when he traveled for his movies, Finch brought his wife, Eletha, and their young children, Christopher and Diana, with him on the road, and Eletha (with six-year-old Diana, whom he had nicknamed DiDinckles, in tow) became a familiar sight on the
Network
set. To some, Eletha’s presence called attention to the differences between her and her husband, while her absence brought out his weariness. “The physical transformation of Peter on the set was remarkable,” said production assistant Susan Landau. “He
was
Howard Beale. But slumped on a chair in the hotel lobby waiting for Eletha who was always late, he looked … well … he looked a lot older.”

Others saw the role reinvigorating Finch, and offering him cause to wonder if there might be one more act left in a career he had been ready to accept as finished. He immersed himself in Beale’s words and found himself connecting with the character’s prophetic sense of conviction. “He was what you’d call a Method actor, without ever studying the Method,” Diana Finch-Braley said. “He was the kind of person who would get so into character that he didn’t know if it was real or not real.” He was spiritual but not religiously observant, with a worldview shaped by Christianity, Buddhism, Theosophy, and the kaleidoscope of belief systems he’d encountered on his journeys.

But Finch believed that Howard Beale was doing something to his soul. One morning in their hotel room, he excitedly described to Eletha how, like his character, he, too, had been visited by a nebulous sacred presence. “I feel like I’ve had some kind of experience, I can’t explain it,” he told his wife. “Like Daniel and the burning bush.”

Eletha, who had grown up in the church and studied her Bible more carefully, laughed and corrected her husband’s errors: it was
Moses
and the burning bush,
Daniel
in the lion’s den.

The Toronto portion of the
Network
shoot would demand much of Finch’s body as well as his psyche. On the first day of filming, he was responsible for performing two of the character’s most challenging orations, including four videotaped takes of the “Mad as hell” speech, only three of which he was able to complete in their two-and-a-half-minute entirety. (According to the official shooting log, Take 3 was halted at the one-minute mark for an unspecified reason.) January 20, the second day of shooting, called for Finch to deliver Beale’s “Bullshit” speech—his on-air proclamation, during what is supposed to be his valedictory news broadcast, that he “just ran out of bullshit.” January 21 saw the filming of Beale’s introductory outburst, in which he tells his audience that he has been fired and plans to kill himself on next week’s show. On January 22, it was back to “Mad as hell”—not the videotaped feed that would show up fleetingly on TV screens in the living rooms and offices of other characters, but the filmed version that was his to carry alone.