The Movie TV Hates and Loves

In Los Angeles, network executives watching a screening of the movie were on the edge of their seats, almost clawing at the armrests with indignation. In New York City, the film was a three-martini lunch topic along Sixth Avenue --"Network Row"--and NBC angrily barred Director Sidney Lumet from a screening of one of its own TV movies. "It's a piece of crap," huffed an NBC vice president. "It had nothing to do with our business." ABC's Barbara Walters was more delicate. She said that while the movie was entertaining, she was afraid audiences would think the movie was not satire but the truth. Which is exactly what many audiences did think about Paddy Chayefsky's Network as they stamped their feet, howled and hooted at the most controversial movie of 1976.

Sensitive Nerve. Nowhere was the reaction stronger than among those who actually work in TV's cotton fields. "I heard the movie was supposed to be a satire on the television business," deadpans George Schlatter, who originated Laugh In, one of the most innovative shows of the '60s. "But to me it was almost a documentary." Says Novelist Gore Vidal, a TV playwright in the '50s: "I've heard every line from that film in real life." Norman Lear, the comedy pioneer of the '70s, declares categorically that Network is "a brilliant film."

Judging from the reactions of both those who make TV and those who watch it, Network, which opens in 15 cities on Dec. 17, has drilled into a sensitive national nerve. Overlong and preachy, exaggerated even within the bounds of satire, the movie nonetheless has the power of a frightening revelation (TIME, Nov. 29). Like the Frank Capra films of the '30s and '40s (particularly Meet John Doe), it is half entertainment and half message, a populist plea for the individual against inhuman institutions. But unlike the movies of those optimistic days, there is no happy ending.

The movie's message is simple enough: Howard Beale (Peter Finch), the once popular anchorman of a national newscast, falls victim to the twin evils of booze and declining ratings, and Max Schumacher (William Holden), the head of UBS News, tells him he has to go. Suffering a momentary nervous breakdown, Beale goes on air to announce that in a week's time he will shoot himself on-camera. He has, he says, run out of the "bullshit" that kept him going.

Schumacher wants to yank Beale off the air, but Diana Christenson (Faye Dunaway), the network's head of programming, senses enough viewer interest in a nutty anchorman to boost the ailing network into Nielsen heaven. The news department becomes part of Christenson's entertainment empire, and, as the "mad prophet" of the air waves, Beale gains 60% of the audience and puts the double-whammy on such stolid, sane types as Walter Cronkite and John Chancellor. "Howard Beale is processed instant God," Christenson gushes, "and right now it looks like he may just go over bigger than Mary Tyler Moore."

Once given her head--and the clout of rising ratings--Christenson cannot be stopped. She turns the news into a variety show, with a soothsayer and a gossip columnist and, for what she calls The Mao Tse-tung Hour, hires terrorists from the Ecumenical Liberation Army to rob banks and do other fun things for her cameras. Eventually, however, Beale becomes a bore and his ratings plummet. To save the show Christenson writes him out of the script--permanently: Her Mao Tse-tung terrorists calmly assassinate him on-camera.

Macabre Underlining. Half the TV world huffs and puffs and says such a takeover of TV news by the entertainment types cannot happen here. The other half says it not only can happen but often has. "People say there will never be such a show business approach to the news," declares George Schlatter. "But think back to the Symbionese Liberation Army Shootout in Los Angeles, where there was live camera coverage and a carnival atmosphere as a group of people were burning to death. Try to separate show business from broadcast journalism in that instance." In a macabre underlining of Schlatter's words, TV newsmen were already begging Utah prison officials last week to be allowed to film the execution of Convicted Killer Gary Gilmore. If prison authorities refuse, said a Salt Lake City TV man, seemingly desperate for blood, "we are considering using paragliders, long lenses, helicopters--maybe even a dirigible."

NBC Correspondent Douglas Kiker thinks the walls separating the news and entertainment have not yet been breached, but he sees them coming under ever heavier attack. Says he: "Right now we try to put on as good a news show as possible, without any effort to titillate the viewers. But our monster in the closet is the programmers, the Diana Christensons of this world." Adds CBS's Morley Safer: "The movie is a fantasy, but there is really not much of a step from the 'happy talk' news many local stations put on to the crazy talk of Network.'"

Indeed, with few exceptions local TV news shows have fallen under the ratings spell. Instead of letting their newsmen judge what is news, the stations have hired consultants to tell them what kinds of stories they should cover, how long they should be, how they should be presented and even what the anchormen should wear. The result has either been the fun and games of the "happy news," where the anchorman jokes with the weatherman, or the sensationalism of what is known in the broadcasting business as "blood, guts and orgasms."

At WNBC in New York, says former Executive News Editor Stuart Loory--now managing editor at the Chicago Sun-Times--"we watched all three monitors at night to see which station had the best fire footage and which had the best blood. If a man was stabbed in the subway and the cameraman was smart enough to track the blood, he got good marks." Five years ago, San Francisco's KGO, in its more sensationalist days, led off the news with the report that a human penis had been found in the Oakland railroad yards.

To test viewer reaction, some consultants have gone so far as to rig up human guinea pigs with electrodes to measure their physical reaction to what they see on the tube. In Los Angeles, Station KNXT Anchorman Pat Emory was fired when test viewers failed to tingle properly when he came on the air. "By that measurement," fumes Emory, now with St. Louis' KNBC, "Adolph Hitler should have been anchorman."

"Local news programs show what network news is going to become," predicts Network Director Lumet, who, like Chayefsky, fondly remembers TV's heyday in the '50s. "What the hell is going to happen when Walter Cronkite goes and the news gets turned over to those guys with Mark Spitz haircuts or Jerry Colonna mustaches?" At NBC and CBS, some newsmen feel the monster Kiker talked about has already peered out of the closet at ABC. Barbara Walters, they note, will not only continue to be a highly professional newswoman, she will also be an entertainer (she has a special with Barbra Streisand Dec. 14), and half her $1 million salary will be paid by the entertainment division.

Gloomy Prophet. Will Network cause TV executives to stop and think about where they are going? Chayefsky, as gloomy a prophet as Howard Beale, doubts that it will, at least for long. Lin Bolen, a former programming vice president at NBC--and a model for Faye Dunaway's characterization of Diana Christenson--agrees. Now an independent producer in Hollywood, Bolen says that "the rating game is at its zenith. The numbers have never meant more than they do this year. I hate to admit it, but many people who are in responsible network jobs today don't give a damn about quality. To them, it's only the ratings that matter. And that is what Network is all about, isn't it?"

It is indeed, and the irony is that the movie may eventually become a pawn in the game it deplores. If the film is a hit, the angry executives on Network Row will undoubtedly forget their pique and buy it for the tube. Chayefsky and his friends are prepared. Despite the author's professed distaste of superprofits (see box), a second, sanitized soundtrack of the movie is ready and waiting for TV distribution. That naughty, daring word bullshit, for example, has been changed to a resounding "bullsoup!"

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