30 Days of Screenplays, Day 10: “Network”
Why 30 screenplays in 30 days?
Why 30 screenplays in 30 days?
Because whether you are a novice just starting to learn the craft of screenwriting or someone who has been writing for many years, you should be reading scripts.
There is a certain type of knowledge and understanding about screenwriting you can only get from reading scripts, giving you an innate sense of pace, feel, tone, style, how to approach writing scenes, how create flow, and so forth.
So each day this month, I will provide background on and access to a notable movie script.
Today is Day 10 and the featured screenplay is for the movie Network (1976). You may download a PDF of the script here.
Background: The screenplay was written by Paddy Chayefsky.
Plot summary: A TV network cynically exploits a deranged ex-TV anchor’s ravings and revelations about the media for their own profit.
Tagline: Not since the dawn of time has America experienced a man like Howard Beale!
Awards: Won an Academy Award and WGA Award for Best Original Screenplay.
Trivia: Chayefsky had such power at this point in his career, his credit on the movie was not “written by,” rather it was simply “by”. The height of a writer’s power in a period of time dominated by the director as auteur.
Paddy Chayefsky wrote Network and he is one of the renowned writers of the modern era. Go here to check out his remarkable list of writing credits. He is so revered that the WGA annually gives a writer The Paddy Chayefsky Laurel Award for Television. You can go here and see the list of recipients.
What makes Chayefsky’s writing so noteworthy? A good question to ask yourself as you read Network. After you’re done, check this out:
That’s Chayefsky accepting an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for the movie Network.
After reading Network again, I was struck by the similarity between Howard Beale’s live TV rants and those of the Old Testament prophets. Compare this:
All I know is first you got to get mad. You’ve to to say: “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this any more.”
To this:
See, the day of the LORD is coming — a cruel day, with wrath and fierce anger — to make the land desolate and destroy the sinners within it. — Isaiah 13:9
Or this:
Therefore I will make the heavens tremble; and the earth will shake from its place at the wrath of the LORD Almighty, in the day of his burning anger. — Isaiah 13:13
It got me thinking about prophets, not the kind who make prophecies, rather the type who stand up against society, and decry its wrongdoings. Like R.P. McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Jefferson Smith (James Stewart) in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and Mahatma Ghandi (Ben Kingsley) in Ghandi. Each one a different shade of this character type, but each one a powerful figure in their own right.
And when you have a powerful figure in a script, the one against the many, the fighter of a good fight, that can be a role over which any actor would froth — and audience members respond to.
Two more things, both of them from the Go Into The Story archives.
In this post [December 23, 2008], I recount an anecdote from a conversation I had with Howard Gottfried, who was Chayefsky’s producer. It provides some insight into Chayefsky’s process:
“This producer [Howard Gottfried] told me that Chayefsky had the same work schedule every day… went into his dank, dark little office from twelve to four. And he pounded out pages. [Gottfried] told me that one time, during the writing of Network, Chayefsky was stuck on one sequence of events, a couple of scenes. He wrote, then re-wrote them every day for a month. In that time, he had amassed almost a hundred pages of different dialogue, action, etc. Finally came the catharsis. He [Chayefsky] understood what he needed to do… then proceeded to write the problematic sequence… in twenty minutes. But he never would have gotten to that point without writing what he did for a month. It was the process of writing which enabled him to come to understand the characters more clearly, to ‘hear’ their voices.”
Then this post [May 19, 2011]:
This is one of the single coolest things to emerge about screenwriting since I don’t know when: A typewritten set of notes written by Paddy Chayefsky to himself as he was working on what would become his Academy Award winning screenplay Network. From the NYT:
LAMENTING the lack of “satirical clarity” in the screenplay he was laboring on in the early 1970s, Paddy Chayefsky was mad at himself and American television viewers at large. He was seeing the venomous spirit of the era of Watergate and the Vietnam War infiltrate every program the broadcast networks offered, from their news shows to their sitcoms, and he concluded in a typewritten note to himself that the American people “don’t want jolly, happy family type shows like Eye Witness News”; no, he wrote, “the American people are angry and want angry shows.” He had set out to write a comedy, but if his film script was funny at all, he said, “the only joke we have going for us is the idea of ANGER.”
In the following months, Chayefsky channeled that fury and his intense frustration with television — the medium he described in another note as “an indestructible and terrifying giant that is stronger than the government” — into the screenplay for “Network,” his dark satire about an unstable news anchor and a broadcasting company and a viewing public all too happy to follow him over the brink of sanity.
But what about Chayefsky’s typewritten notes?
These papers were acquired by the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts in 2001 but not examined much after their cataloging in the library’s Billy Rose Theater Division was completed in 2006. The rarely seen documents on “Network” speak loudly for their absent author, documenting the angst and animus that consumed him on this highly personal project.
Working in an era of paper, pencils and typewriters, Chayefsky seemingly committed to print every observation and self-criticism that he thought of. His “Network” archives provide a road map of the paths taken and not taken in its narrative, but they also reveal a visceral rawness that is scarce in today’s age of digital files and screenwriting by committee. They tell the story of an author’s struggles to determine what he wanted to say about a medium that would do anything for an audience’s attention.
And here’s the deal: You can read much of Chayefsky’s notes here. Amazing!
By an early “Network” treatment dated Dec. 5, 1973, Chayefsky had decided the story would be set into motion by a scene in which a news anchor character — one he variously referred to as Munro, Holbein or simply Kronkite (among other spellings) — would “crack up on the air at 7:00 p.m.” Maybe he would decry “some item of corruption in the Nixon administration,” put his employers “in a position where they have to make true some totally demented news story” or get “into a fistfight with Eric Sevareid,” the CBS commentator. The end result would be the same: “In Act II, crazy Walter becomes the hottest television sensation in the country.”
So he had the spine of his story from early on. But his process was a tortured one:
In a long handwritten note, across the top of which Chayefsky wrote, “THE SHOW LACKS A POINT OF VIEW,” he confessed to himself, “I guess what bothers me is that the picture seems to have no ultimate statement beyond the idea that a network would kill for ratings, and even that doesn’t mesh with the love story.”
With disappointment, he added: “I’m not taking a stand — I’m not for anything or anyone. If we give Howard a speech at the end of the show, what would he say? I think I would like to say something against the destructiveness of absolute beliefs. That the only total commitment any of us can have is to other human beings.”
So for any of you who get down on yourself when your story doesn’t readily come together — which is all of us! — take solace: Even the great Paddy Chayefsky had his own doubts.
For some great resources related to the script and Chayefsky, visit Cinephilia which is just an amazing site.
What’s your take on Network? Stop by comments and post your thoughts.
To see all of the posts in the 30 Days of Screenplays series, go here.
This series and use of screenplays is for educational purposes only!