Mad as Hell: The Making of Network and the Fateful Vision of the Angriest Man in Movies (19 page)

Finch, who had become the latest member of the ensemble to succumb to the flu and was presently having his facial reactions filmed while tucked into a bed that had been propped up on its side, vouched for Chayefsky between takes. “He has a very strict rhythm, like George Bernard Shaw, and you can never break that rhythm,” Finch said of the screenwriter. “He’s one of the few writers in film who has a rhythmic quality all his own.”

Holden, when he was not poring over the latest issue of
Popular Mechanics
, compared the making of
Network
to his time on the 1954 MGM ensemble drama
Executive Suite
—he meant this as a favorable parallel—and suggested that Chayefsky was a willing if wily collaborator when it came to changes in the screenplay. “I asked Paddy’s permission and he said that it was all right,” Holden claimed. “Four weeks later you suddenly find out your changes are no good. And you go to him again, and tell him you want to go back to the original script and he says, ‘I was waiting for you.’”

Chayefsky’s counterresponse to the reporter politely implied that Holden’s account had simply been a bit of well-intentioned public relations. “All the rewrites were done in advance,” he said. “There’s enough hysteria-making in films without that.”

“If there’s anything worse than a bullying director,” Chayefsky acknowledged, “it’s a defensive writer. A writer should be available to make improvements all the time.” And yet he had to admit that things on this picture were generally going right; for all the stress he placed upon himself, trying to prepare for every possible mistake or complication, perhaps the greater anxiety was realizing that he wasn’t truly needed here. “A couple of the scenes in the film play better than they were written,” he said. “In the end that is what’s up there—it’s the actor and the audience and the actor has to feel comfortable. We have a helluva cast—a beautiful company.”

*   *   *

Chayefsky had never spent time among the radical groups that flourished in the 1960s and ’70s and, for all he knew, had now staked out a permanent place in the national political discourse. There was no discernible difference, as far as he was concerned, between an organization such as Students for a Democratic Society and a group such as the Symbionese Liberation Army. Whatever their stated goals, all that interested these groups was the destabilization of the country, the sowing of discord, and the spreading of violence. Whereas the SLA had been operating from safe houses dotted across the San Francisco Bay Area, he set the command center of his fictitious Ecumenical Liberation Army in the sleepy suburb of Encino and, in his acerbic stage directions, described it as a “shambles of cartons, crates, scraps of food and litter”; in its dining room, “tattered sleeping bags and newspapers cover the floor, and the walls are bare except for various militant posters of the likes of Mao and Marlon Brando.”

Lumet did not go even as far as the West Coast; on Monday, March 15, for the second time in nearly two months, he brought the
Network
shoot to Rockland County, New York. There, on about seventy acres of apple orchards and vegetable gardens in the northern hamlet of Congers, his production designer, Philip Rosenberg, had found the Dr. Davies Farm, the site of a 140-year-old farmhouse that, in 1891, became the home of Arthur B. Davies and his wife, Dr. Lucy Virginia Meriwether Davies. He was the president of the Association of American Painters and Sculptors, which organized the controversial 1913 Armory Show that introduced America to avant-garde modern art; she was one of the nation’s first female doctors, a relative of the explorer Meriwether Lewis, and a cousin of Mildred and Patty Hill, the composers of “Happy Birthday to You.” Now their estate would provide the unlikely home for an opportunistic gang that fought the “increasingly desperate, imperialist ruling clique” and “the entire apparatus of the bourgeois-democratic state.”

The farmhouse shoot was among the rare production days that did not involve Holden, Dunaway, Finch, or any of the other principal members of the cast, and instead focused on the business negotiations between the Ecumenicals and various representatives of ICM and the William Morris Agency. Prior to filming, Chayefsky had substantially reduced the role of a character named Heywood, described in drafts of the
Network
screenplay as “an old union lawyer, given to peroration,” and who, on behalf of the Ecumenicals, was supposed to have told Diana, “Well, we’re not going to sell out, baby! You can take your fascist teevee and shove it right up your paramilitary ass!” (In his notes on the script, Daniel Melnick of MGM wrote simply, “This scene should come out,” and it did.) That left only a handful of supporting players, including Kathy Cronkite, who was playing the group’s resident heiress, Mary Ann Gifford (“a fire-eating militant with a bandolier of cartridges across her torn shirt”); Marlene Warfield as Laureen Hobbs, a fictionalized version of radicals such as Angela Davis; and Arthur Burghardt as the Great Ahmed Kahn, Chayefsky’s big, brooding gloss on latter-day revolutionaries such as the SLA’s Field Marshal Cinque—and who, the script said, is first seen wearing “a hussar’s shako and the crescent moon of the Midianites hangs around his neck.”

By now, Cronkite had reconciled herself to the possibility that her being cast in
Network
had less to do with any particular acting talent than the lifelong friendship between Lumet and her father. Still, the role epitomized a personal struggle that she had been waging, at least since she had moved to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career, to establish an identity that was separate from her father’s name; that struggle was now reignited as she found herself once again living under her parents’ roof while she worked on the film. “It was a time of my life when there was so much challenge to my individuality from Dad,” Cronkite said. “Just going out to L.A., it was hard to be my own person, with everybody assuming that every part I got was because of Dad.”

It did not help matters that the fictional circumstances of Mary Ann Gifford so closely resembled events in the life of Patty Hearst, offering Cronkite an unpleasant reminder that her own connections to wealth, fame, power, and the platform of the media put her at risk, too. “I had friends joking about kidnapping me, and it was so not funny, and scary,” she said. “Because Patty Hearst got kidnapped, I could be kidnapped. These were slightly unsavory friends, and I think the reason it was so scary was that I didn’t really know how much they were kidding.”

Cronkite’s big moment at the farmhouse occurred as the radicals and the agents were battling over the contractual details of
The Mao Tse Tung Hour
, during which Gifford was to come charging down a rickety flight of stairs, bellowing about the value of her contribution to the show. Her line, as given in the screenplay, is “Fugginfascist! Have you seen the movies we took at the San Marino jail break-out demonstrating the rising up of a seminal prisoner-class infrastructure?!”

Like so many of her costars before her, Cronkite found it trying to say even this much. “I’m coming down the stairs screaming this line of propaganda that was so rich in politics and so convoluted, and not that accessible to me,” she recalled. “This is not something that I identify with or empathize with. Particularly when I’m coming in with that passion. All I really want to say is, ‘F you, F you!’ I don’t want to be spouting multisyllabic propaganda. And it was very difficult to get the words out.”

Where the youthful and inexperienced actress differed from nearly everyone else was in boldly asking Chayefsky if her line could be altered to something more manageable. “I remember saying to Paddy, ‘Look, can we just say this instead?’” she said, laughing at the memory of her innocent blunder, adding that she will be haunted “for the rest of my life—‘How dare you, how dare you turn to Paddy Chayefsky and ask him to dumb down one of his lines?’ It’s just astonishing to me. My face is red as I’m even thinking it. It’s just astonishing that I would have the gall to do something like that. And naïveté. It didn’t occur to me that that wasn’t done, you know?”

Not that Chayefsky was offended by her request. “Oh, he was lovely, he and Sidney both,” said Cronkite. “They just said, ‘Well, no.’ But they didn’t make me feel dumb or embarrassed or out of line. They just basically said, ‘Well, let’s try it again the way it is.’ Sidney had an amazing way of saying, ‘You screwed up,’ so that you felt you were the greatest thing in the world. He had this amazing way of saying, ‘Oh my God, that was fabulous. How about if we try it again, and just tweak it a little?’”

A few days earlier, Marlene Warfield had filmed a scene with Dunaway where their characters were introduced to each other at what was supposed to be a UBS network conference room in Los Angeles (actually an office building in Melville, Long Island): Diana Christensen announced herself as “a racist lackey of the imperialist ruling circles,” and Laureen Hobbs identified in kind as “a bad-ass Commie nigger.” For Warfield, who had already played numerous roles in Manhattan theater, on Broadway, on television, and in film, this language was blunt but hardly bothersome to her.

“It tasted very good,” Warfield later said of the line. “And it was satirical. But there’s a lot of facts, there’s a lot of truth to it. It’s throwing it back in the faces of people who looked down on it, and who misunderstood what it really meant.” In appropriating this racial slur, Warfield said Chayefsky and Lumet “didn’t mean to harm anyone. They just wanted to show the hypocrisy of the way people interpret things, when they hear something that they know is true.”

Lumet, in particular, helped Warfield understand this exchange in a way that Chayefsky probably never could have. Lumet told Warfield to think about it as similar to
The Blacks
, an avant-garde satire by Jean Genet whose traditionally all-black cast of characters includes a royal court and a queen dressed in white masks or whiteface makeup. Recalling the director’s instructions to her, Warfield said, “‘You are the black queen, and there is the white queen.’ He hit it, man, he hit it right on the button when he said that’s what this is about. And from then on, we did the scene. That’s all he had to say. Whoa!”

It was never clear to Warfield whether Lumet knew she was one of the actors who had performed in
The Blacks
during an East Village run in the 1960s. “I’m saying, ‘Damn, did you see me in that, too?’” she said. “I guess he did. It was on my résumé. But that was a stroke of genius, to cough that up.”

But not all her costars at the farmhouse felt the same way. At the bottom of its staircase, seated against decrepit curtains and decaying window blinds and surrounded by a phalanx of actors playing agents, managers, and lawyers, was Burghardt, in sunglasses and his ceremonial military dress, a prop pistol concealed at his side. To him, the decision to play the Great Ahmed Kahn was a perilous bargain that had to be weighed against the political battle for which he had sacrificed much of his adult life.

Only two years earlier, on February 15, 1974, at the age of twenty-six, Burghardt—then known as Arthur Banks—had been released from a federal penitentiary in Sandstone, Minnesota, after serving almost twenty-eight months of a five-year sentence for draft evasion. This was the third such institution where he had been incarcerated after his conviction, having started his term in 1971 at a medium-security prison in Danbury, Connecticut. The next year, he was transferred to a maximum-security prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, where he was involved in a peaceful protest for which he was sprayed with mace and brutalized in his cell, then placed in solitary confinement for the next fifteen months. In December 1972 he was charged with having assaulted an officer during the protest, and an Indiana judge ruled that his lawyer, William Kunstler, could not represent him in the case because of public statements of support Kunstler had made that violated court rules. The U.S. Supreme Court was about to review the case when the actor was released on a $10,000 bond.

When Burghardt read the role of the Great Ahmed Kahn in Chayefsky’s screenplay, he saw the character as “a tyrant, a punk, a criminal”—and a cartoonish reduction of a far more complicated political spectrum that he knew firsthand. “I knew that black people were far more relevant to the world, and there were more important black leaders than these cowards, punks, and petty dictators who emerged out of the back eddies of the civil rights movement,” Burghardt said.

But the larger message of
Network
—about a man who is severely punished for enunciating some necessary and uncomfortable truths—was one that the actor could not walk away from. “I realized that this was a black comedy,” he said, “and I had to be part of it.” The question, Burghardt said with a sardonic laugh, was whether his own community would punish him for accepting a part he knew to be a caricature—“whether or not I was going to be considered a traitor.”

If his character had to be an archetype, Burghardt said, “I decided I’d play the archetype to the hilt.” Earlier that day at the farmhouse, he had filmed a scene with Cronkite and Warfield in which Kahn is surprised by the news that his group is being considered for a television show. By his own decision, Burghardt said, “I wanted my mouth to be filled with fried chicken and shit. There had been a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken there. And in one take, I said, ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’ And some chicken came out and it got Kathy on the side of the head. Lumet said he liked it. I was very embarrassed. I said, ‘Tell you what, we’re getting low on fried chicken. Give me some toilet paper and I’ll stuff my jaw full of toilet paper.’ I smeared some of the chicken grease over my mouth.”

When it came time for him, as Kahn, to interrupt the bickering of the Hollywood power brokers and chic radicals by firing his gun into the air and announcing, “Man, give her the fucking overhead clause,” Burghardt said, “I realized I had to go deep inside of me to be somebody that I did not want to be, whom I actually loathed inside. Yes, there was a part of me that didn’t want to do this. There was another major part of me that realized that I had to do it, and I had to tell myself, literally, shut up. Be in the moment.”