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You know, Josh, I remember one of the first bonding experiences that producer Sam and I had was we were at a get together for a wedding. We were groomsmen, maybe I don't know, or we were just hanging out with friends. A friend of ours was getting married and we were hanging out with other people involved in the wedding, and we were like in the same canoe. And that meant we got to talk movies the whole time we
were young film spotting. Film spotting had just begun maybe or I don't know, film spotting had even begun at this point, and yeah.
It had.
And we started talking about our favorite movies. And Sam informed me that not only was he not a fan of Fay Done Away, he didn't really like the movie Network and you didn't. And yet now I came out of the canoe. I wanted to, and and yet I continued doing the show with him, and our our friendship has somehow stayed, It survived all of these years, and I was a little bit worried. I didn't know when
we got together. Later in twenty twenty one, did this seven from seventy six series looked at seven films from that great movie year. We were going to talk about network. I wondered, could history repeat itself? Could I sit down for a conversation with you, Josh, and you might tell me that you don't appreciate this movie one of my all time favorites, and was I was? I just gonna have to be crushed all over again.
Well, I don't want to spoil anything because listeners are about to hear it. But I think in this conversation, Faye Donaway gets her due.
I think that's fair. She got her due. Then I'm pretty sure a Best Actress nomine. The film was nominated for Best Picture. And we're playing this from the archive as we continue our Oscars theme leading up to the Academy Awards here in March. But we also want to acknowledge the passing last week of Robert Duvall who is part of this great ensemble? Featured in Sydney Lamette's Network. So here it is. It came to theaters fifty years ago this November. Our review of Network.
Last night, Howard Beale went on the air and yelled bullshit for two minutes, And I can tell you right now that Tonight's show will get a thirty share at least. I think we've lucked into something.
Oh, for God's sakes, Diane, you suggest we've put that lunatic.
Back on the air yelling bullshit.
Yes, I think we should put Bill back on the air tonight and keep him on. Did you see the news this morning? Did you see the times We've got PRISCE coverage on this You couldn't buy for a million dollars, Frank, that dumb show jumped five rating points in one night. Tonight's Show has got.
To be at least fifteen was released in the fall of seventy six. It went on to be nominated for ten Oscars, tied with Rocky for the most nominations. It included Best Picture and Director, winning four Beatrice Straight for Best Supporting Actress, Fae Dunaway for Best Actress, Patty Chaievsky for Best Original Screenplay, and Peter Finch won Best Actor posthumously. He died in January seventy seven, not long after the
movie was released. It received a total of five acting nominations, which actually hasn't happened since William Holden and Ned Batty also were nominated, and we'll probably talk about it at least a little bit. I'm gonna say Robert Duvall deserved a nomination as well, really really yeah, oh love him in this movie. Okay, how best to describe Network to the uninitiated.
There's the plot.
Finch's veteran news anchorman, Howard Beal, is forced to retire because his ratings have gone soft. He announces his firing on TV and then states that he's going to kill himself live on television and then in the world created by Chaievsky, Beal go on to become a rating sensation as the mad profit of the airwaves, thanks to his famous on air declaration that he's mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore.
The characters.
There's the ambitious young network executive Diana Christensen played by Dunaway, Holden's old school Newsigzec, who tries in vain to retain his own personal integrity and the integrity of the news division, Duval's money obsessed corporate hatchetman, and Baby's sinister board chair. And then there's a band of terrorists called the Ecumenical Liberation Army, who are given a series called The Mause Tungue Hour. The movie was critically acclaimed at the time,
though there were dissenters. Roger Ebert loved it, writing, so the movie's flawed, so it leaves us with loose ends and questions that finally doesn't bother me because what it does accomplish is done so well, is seen so sharply, is presented so unforgivingly, that Network will outlive a lot of tidier movies. Pauline Kale did not love it. The entire picture is Chaievsky sticking his head out the window and yelling. She wrote, here's my thought. They solely on
those conclusions. Anyway, they're both right now. Josh, you somehow weren't sure if you'd seen Network before. Let's answer that first, had you? I?
Yes, I had. It wasn't just the compilation of famous clips that had piled up in my mind that often show up during Oscar ceremonies. I think it was like a go to over the years, some of these scenes. No, I did indeed see this whole movie before, glad to see it again.
Then, what of Ebert's point that Network will outlive a lot of tidier movies. Neither of us can speak to what it was like to watch it in the seventies or the eighties, but I can tell you that it resonated differently watching it in twenty twenty one versus when I saw it originally, which would have been around nineteen ninety three or ninety four. A listener voicemail will provide some further provocation on that front.
Hey, Adam and Josh. It's Josh Weinhold from South Bend sharing some thoughts on Network, which has been one of my all time favorites since I first saw it late one night in the college newspaper office more than fifteen years ago. At the time, I was transfixed by the pression depiction of the entertainmentification of news and of corporate interest putting the almighty dollar ahead of the public good.
Returning to it this week, though, I was left wondering whether we've now gone far beyond anything Patty Shayefsky could have predicted. I was struck by how unifying Howard Beale's rage is. His ratings only grow larger as he embodies the public's collective anger and frustration, but his only agenda is to punch up. He never seeks to turn his
audience against one another. Our cultural landscape now is littered with figures who are mad as hell and not going to take it anymore, but they rile up their audiences in an effort to divide. When the primal forces of nature begin reshaping Beale's message, his audience falls away. But in the twenty first century, those primal forces have mastered tactics that drive their audiences to channel their rage at
each other. So, guys, I'm wondering whether you find Network's social satire as sharp as ever, or if, like me, you worry that society has collectively jumped the shark, which, come to think of it, sounds like a show Diana Christiansen might pitch for next year's Fall lineup.
As long as that show culminated with losers getting fed to sharks, Diana christian Sid would undoubtedly green light it. Josh Chicago, how do you respond to Ebert and to Josh from South Bend.
Well, I do think Network captured what we're a wash in today as well. I don't think what we see in the movie we're pretty much living in. I think the movie captures that. Essentially, we add reality television, right, it was just kind of on the forefront. Now we have reality television, which is the major development i'd say since Network came out. So I don't know. I think it was ahead of its time and still, you know,
very much of its own time. I guess my quibble maybe with Josh is that I don't see Howard Beale as this champion of the everyman who's always punching up. I think there are moments when he's a true prophet in that sense, right, that would be a true prophet, But there's also moments where he's a false prophet. There's moments where he's he's a lot like our current Fox News hosts, and ultimately, to me rewatching this, he's more of a convenient prophet, which I think is a little
different than maybe how Josh sees him. But I'll get to that maybe those distinctions a little bit later. To his point about Network as a satire and This speaks to the longevity that Ebert predicted as well. Undeniably, that's the strength of this film. That is where it's clicking, where its points are most effectively made and taken, where we can see the wisdom of this movie. Dunaway probably the other strength of the film. I would say, I'm sure we'll get to her. Partly this is because the
satire is still dead on still applies. Also because think of all the really good films Network has inspired, these movies that diagnose the great American illness. Now, they all do it in different ways. I'm thinking of something like Idiocracy, I'm thinking of Bamboozled, I'm thinking of Sorry to Bother You. In recent years, these are all movies that tweak our enslavement to screens and the way that allows us to
be manipulated, mostly as consumers. You know, Network wrote that script first, and I think that's why it's great now about that script though, about Chefski's script this time, I gotta say it's maybe where Oscar winning. I know I had a few issues just in terms of basic structure, but also when it comes to that profit element. But back to you first, Adam and what you kind of make of Josh's question.
Well, there's so much to get to. First.
I do think we see a difference to Josh's point in the pre Arthur Jensen sermon Howard Beale and the post Arthur Jensen sermon Howard Beale, and it largely lies in that populist ethos. He's talking first about rising up against oppressors, corporate oppressors. He's talking about individualism, and then after Arthur Jensen, he's saying, you know what, corporations, they really do run everything. There's no hope. The individual is dead.
He's saying, everything we've ever come to believe, whether it's t who are not about America is dead and you should forget it. So I think I do understand where Josh is coming from.
There.
Another thing I'll say that just occurred to me is we've been watching these seventy six movies out of order, pretty random. We started with all the President's Men, then we went to Taxi Driver, and now to this. And it's an interesting progression, isn't it. Because in Network they're talking about this malaise. Certainly Howard Beale is tapping into how disillusioned everyone in the country seems to feel. He
even references watergates. So when all the president's men, we see the making of this, the making of the country's undoing. And then in Taxi Driver you see someone like Travis Bickel, and you wonder, how would he react to Howard Beale if he wasn't just watching Soul Train or whatever is on, including like an old detective show or a soap opera or something. Maybe he'd be watching the news and he'd be the guy who would go to the window and yell.
And some of these revolutionaries that we see. We talked about this with Bickel being this man of isolation, God's lonely man, and what we see just a few years later here in Network is a group of people coming together to rise up, maybe with a little bit more political purpose than Travis Bickel actually has. But anyway, I thought that I thought that progression was at least notable. I don't know if you were thinking about it too well.
Bickel is absolutely in the audience for Beelle's false prophet phase, you know, where he is just telling folks to get angry. And I think it's very telling, and I love that you brought it around to Bickle because what does he do. Even in one scene where he tells them to express their rage, he even says something I can't remember the line exactly, but something like I don't know what you should do. After that, he gives them no direction. There's
no like target, even good target. So if you think about you know, it's a limited truth that Beale is preaching when he's that false prophet and just telling people to express their rage. I think even that late night scene where he has this visitation, he hears this voice. The voice even says, we're not talking about eternal truth or absolute truth or ultimate truth. We're talking about impermanent, transient, human truth. So that's a limited truth. That is just
the rage. He doesn't give them any direction, he doesn't give them any hope. It's unchanneled, unfocused rage. And what does that result in? It results in Travis Bickel, It's exploited by people like Diana, by other media outlets, It's exploited by corporations, as we'll see. You know, that last phase of Beal is tricky because he is being manipulated by ned Bades corporate over lord, even as he's sort of speaking his own truth at the same time, right,
So he's this false prophet who's being manipulated. And then you know, we've lived through politicians recently doing this, garnering populist rage, not directing it anywhere truthful, just telling it to be vented. And that's where that's where the profit thing is tricky, because he doesn't really become a true prophet to me until those sequences you were talking about Adam where he he starts to bite the hand that has created him.
Well, that's how you really see it.
Yes, absolutely, And I guess I will just say this, and I don't know if we're really splitting hairs or not. I think that sense of truth not being transient and being limited and just at least trying to get people to not be apathetic but to actually be angry, that's enough. Isn't that actually more honest than suggesting that he does
know what should take right now? And so that's my thing with Beale is that I do at least think that he is never really a false prophet, or at least this is what I'm kicking around, Josh, the idea that he's not false, because even if what he is saying or the underlying message, we could quibble with or say isn't clear sighted enough or actually productive in any way. He believes it, unlike a prophet who knowingly is spreading falsity. I believe what he's tapping into. I believe that he
believes it. And even this is where the contradiction comes in. And I think the complexity of the script and what I love about it so much is that even when he's then completely contradicting himself a few nights later, after meeting with Ned Badies Arthur Jensen, he's still saying the truth. In fact, he might actually be saying what's more of an actual truth. It's just not what the people want to hear. It's not what any of us would want to hear.
The time has come to say, is the humanization is such a bad word.
Look it's good or bad, that's what is.
So the whole world is becoming humanoid creatures that look human, but art the whole world, not just us.
We're just the most advanced country, so we're getting there first.
The whole worlds.
People are becoming mass produced, program numbered in sense things.
Yeah. I think that's the tricky thing with Feel as a character is he was he was more of a tool for me. This time around, I didn't ever really get a sense of, you know fully, what he did believe, where he was losing control of his senses legitimately becoming mentally ill, and where it was this existential force actually speaking to him. Those things got mixed because I felt like he kept being used depending on how the screenplay
wanted him to be used. And I guess, you know, yes, he's not a false prophet in the sense of like you know, Robert Mitcham in The Night of the Hunter, where he's you know, he's preaching this false gospel, but he's not a true prophet, because true prophets speak truth to power, and and he becomes one, as I was saying, when he does start telling the audience that you are slaves, and he starts hinting about the corporate machinations going on
in the background that get him into trouble. That's the power he's he's rousing at that point, and that's why ned Batty brings him into the into the boardroom for that amazing scene and you know, gives him that booming speech. So it's but he starts talking truth to power, he
does become a true prophet. But I still think at the end of the day, he registered mostly for me this time around, as this convenient prophet because he's a tool of Chaievsky's screenplay, which is, you know, this is didactic cinema, and I'm trying to come around on that. You know, I've always been a little bit hesitant to it, even though one of my favorite struggle even though one of my favorite filmmakers, Spike Lee, is you know, maybe
the king of didactic cinema. Okay, and so like the message here, I totally as we've talked about, is pressient on point needed necessary. But in watching Beale this time around, I did feel like this was just this figure. We didn't get to really know him as a character or what, especially how the movie begins with just these two guys going out for a drink and really rooted in their shared past together. Eventually we no longer really the movie
doesn't seem that interested in Beale as a person. He becomes this this figure that can be used depending on what points the screenplay wants to make. They're great points, they're fascinating points. This Finch is amazing and delivering them. I love the transition he makes from this morose older guy to the televangelist to the guy who's really likely lost his mind. I mean the performance is good, yes, but it's a convenient figure for the screenplay. Is how it struck me.
I don't see it that way.
I definitely see it as more ambiguous by design. And actually one of the strengths, as I was mentioning earlier, in that there's a moment. For example, it's when he's giving the I'm attis Hell's speech and we cut to Diana fade unaway reacting like this over zealous, proud mother who knows that she can milk this for whatever she wants, and we as viewers, I think most of us look at that character and say, Okay, she's on the wrong side of this. So if she's reacting positively, well that's
not necessarily a good thing. Well then you've got on the other side William Holden's character, who's scoffing at it and who thinks it's an embarrassment and can't believe anyone would be weighed by it. And the reality is is that as a viewer, I'm right in the middle where I'm going, Well, he's kind of making a lot of sense. But he also is off his rocker and probably should be in a home or at least getting some kind of treatment, and he definitely shouldn't be getting more airtime.
And yet I like what he has to say. I find myself reacting viscerally to what he's saying. So I think that that is complexity that really draws me into Network. And in terms of the didacticism, definitely this time first time I'd seen it. As I mentioned, since probably ninety three or ninety four. There are definitely parts that seem overwritten.
There are moments that seem overacted. There are parts where Chaiefski through Beal is perhaps not just attacking corporatism and capitalism runnam Uk, but relying on a little xenophobia to.
Unify his American audience.
There are problematic aspects of Network I see it, and none of it overrides I'll use that word again. It's prescience, its perceptiveness, its sense of humor, and the entire brilliant satirical DNA that is its foundation. And satire is a word that I think often gets used or misused to describe a lot of different types of art or content, if you will. But with Network, I'm talking about the pure stuff, the acute but outrageous, swiftly in let's solve
poverty by selling poor kids to the rich for food stuff. There, simply for me, isn't a better piece of cinematic satire that ending. I'm going to give people listening radio or podcast a chance here in a sackle, give you the cue to turn the radio off for fifteen seconds, or hit the jump ahead button on your phone if you haven't seen it, but here it is.
So what do we do about this beel son of a bitch?
I suppose we'll have to kill him.
I don't suppose you have any ideas on the Diana.
Well, what would your fellows say to an assassination? I think I can get the Mauzi tuned people to kill be for us.
It's one of the shows.
In fact, it'll make a hell of a kickoff show for the season. We're facing heavy opposition on the other network.
That ending is so incredible and chilling watching a group of TV execs deciding to murder one of their personalities live on TV with the same gravity and solemnity they'd give to ordering takeout. Is it realistic? Of course not. It's absurd, But is that Yes, I get it, that is the line it's walking, but it's also not something
we actually believe is probably taking place. But that's the entire point, is Diana Christensen being so consumed with her work and her ambition that she literally talks only about TV deals and ratings while on a Romean weekend get away with her lover, including during sex Realistic. No, it's absurd, but I do think that absurdity and that irony is why Network's message is so lucid and so potent. And
I mentioned that it resonated differently this time. When I saw it originally in the nineties, it felt sort of groundbreaking and clairvoyant enough in what it foretold about journalism and the media and infotainment about the unchecked power of corporations. But it's not like those things were new in the nineteen seventies. Chaievsky just envisioned the inevitable sad trajectory. What was amazing at that time was to see him predict the rise of reality TV, as you mentioned, which was
then flourishing in the nineties. Diana's obsession with taking real footage, real events and turning them into programming creating stars out of quote unquote real people. I do know that An American Family aired in nineteen seventy three on PBS, but I couldn't believe how right Chaievski was when I saw it back in the nineties. And now you watch it in twenty twenty one and you recognize that it's not
just reality TV, it's user generated content. It's reality as captured by the people experiencing the events in nineteen seventy six. In this movie, it's a terrorist group with one person shooting a bank robbery with a movie camera. Now right, we see insurrectionists storming the Capitol. Every single one of them has the phone in their hand and they're shooting video. They're streaming to Facebook or Twitch or whatever platform they choose.
And that is what really struck me this time. When you hear Howard Beale talking about the madness of it all and talking about the illusion of television and trying to tell people to turn their TV sets off and saying this tube is the gospel. It can make or break presidents. And he has that great line where he says the tube is the most awesome, goddamn propaganda force in the whole godless world, and woe is us if
it ever falls into the hands of the wrong people. Well, today, Howard Beale wouldn't get anybody to go to the window because if they had the TV on at all to the news, it would just be background noise as they stared at their phones. You know, replaced turn off your television sets with turn off your phones. It's really no different except it's actually it's more ubiquitous, more dangerous, more desensitizing, and even more disconnected from reality.
Yeah, and that's why I said the American sickness is, you know, more screens than actually specifically television. And you bring up the insurrectionists, you know, that's an example of the unchanneled rage. How much of that footage that we saw was of these morons just like wandering around once they got in because they some of them had principal not principle, that's the wrong word, but specific reasons for being there. But how many others of them got in
there once their rage was vented. They didn't know what they were supposed to do. And I guess that's like those sequences of the people yelling out the windows, that's the kind that's the exact same kind of rage we're hearing there. I want to go back to that scene where they're talking about having beel murdered, the corporate execs,
the TV execs. The reason I said it's believable is and here we should probably give Lolumet some credit is just how that I can't remember exactly how many edits there are, but it's a very casually blocked scene where they transition so seamlessly from these boring corporate discussions of ratings points and so forth, into well, how are we
going to kill him? And like, their tones don't shift that nothing dramatic happens with the camera, it doesn't no music like it's now it's just evil is And that's
the satire. And the other satire that was so perfect that I had really forgot about was how much of the subplot involved this communist activist played by Marlene Warfield, who Diana recruits to find this footage you're talking about from other from extremist groups that she has connections with, and we get that great scene where Warfield is negotiating with the leader of this extremist group and some TV execs over I forget, I forget what the term is,
but it's something I don't even know what it means. I think it was something like a distribution charges or rights. And she's delivering this warfield as Laurene Hobbs is the character's name. She's delivering this like it's a fiery speech, a revolutionary speech. But they're talking about distribution charges.
I'm not giving this pseudo insurrectionary sectary and a piece of my show.
I'm not giving him script appooval and I'm sure actually ain't cutting him into my distribution charges and fascist.
Can you see the filling in the sand renal jail wake out demonstrating a rising up of the seminal prisoner class infrastructure. You can blow the seminole prison of class infrastructure out your ass. I'm not knocking down my goddamn distribution charges. Man, give her the fucking overhead clause.
That is the sort of like sorry to bother you, bamboozled idiocracy level satire that is so rich in network that I think is just great. Now, I do wanna. We mentioned Dunaway a couple of times, and I just love how she devours this movie.
Me too.
You know what I think she's doing here. We've characterized her. You know a couple of ways we could. You could call her driven, brazen, unscrupulous. She really made me wonder if she was a model for those sleazy business types that Michael Douglass would specialize in during the nineteen eighties,
because I got such vibes from her like that. And then there's great little moments she gives when her boss Duval is talking about his hesitancy about putting Bille this is early on on the air, and says something about how we're talking about putting a manifestly irresponsible man on television. As he's saying that, Lumette cuts to Dunaway and her eyebrows, her iconic eyebrows just go like higher and higher, like every word, yes, every word he uses to to argue
against this gets her more excited. That's about the possibility. So yeah, just the fact you mentioned the scene on the Romantic Getaway with Holden where she's just talking business. She's like this dead eyed, great white shark, just zeroing in on her career. It's the only thing she can think about. And it's just an amazing performance.
It really is.
But as histrionic or as shrill as the performance sometimes is, and no matter how much we I think probably most viewers anyway loathe her as a character. There are these quieter moments, in these subtler moments, where she's really remarkable. I love the scene, for example, where she comes to Max Schumacher William Holden's office late at night and it's really their first encounter and she basically seduces him.
That's where I got the Douglas vibes.
There you go, right, it's all calculation, But at the same time, there's nothing here's that word again, there's nothing actually false about it. I believe every single word she's saying. And there's a self awareness to it and a self awareness to the performance that matches the overall self awareness of the movie, obviously, including the relationship between her and Schumacher and the way Chaievsky frames it in terms of this conceit of a TV melodrama and the way that
that plays out. And that brings us to near the end of the film, that last big scene, that last big throwdown with done Away and Holden. She's getting monologued at, she is getting destroyed. Chaievsky doesn't really give her anything to do. This is Holden as his mouthpiece getting to tell off the heartless cold television generation. And as you're watching it, I'm thinking, how do you, as Faye done Away, how do you play this scene without just being a
doormat or being a witch. And that delivery of her line where she says, then don't leave me, it's actually bracing, I think in that it's an expression of actual emotion, but it's subtle. It is really subtle. It feels like a real moment. And here again is the ambiguity. It's so real because I don't know that I actually believe that she means it. I don't think she knows means it. Is that the line where there's a thing come through? Does she have a little hiccup in that line where
there's a pause. If it's not that line, it's another one in that scene where she lets us know exactly what you're pointing at, Adam, is that she's either trying to convince herself or you know, she's not there yet herself, because one thing about Diana is she never lies right even in that that's early See she is in his office, she's telling him, this is what I want to have happened tonight. If you're interested, great, if you're not great.
This is what I want to do in terms of our business partnership, and throughout the movie she never lies to anyone, So there's something admirable there. And I do think she's great in that climactic scene between them, and I was having the same.
Thoughts as you. I think the scene overall as written, and you know, you can't hold it against Holden because it's the material he's given. I just don't think it works because I can forgive Beale becoming Shchewsky's mouthpiece because it is this sort of prophetic figures we've been discussing, but Holden is supposed to be more rooted down to earth, a character we can relate to, and he gradually transitions. Another scene is between he and his wife. We mentioned
Beatrice Strait, who won the Oscar. There's a scene between them as well where they start talking about, you know, how their life is resembling this melodrama script that Diana is writing. And you can just see the screenplay so much over those scenes. As good as the actors are, and so that climactic one between Holden and Dunaway, as good as she is in it, I don't think it.
I don't think their relationship overall works because it's kind of caught in between trying to bring some character, some real people into this story and still having it stand metaphorically for the larger points Chewski wants to make. And I think it can never quite manage those two things at once.
Your television and Karna Diana indifferent, suffering and sensitive to joy. All of life is reduced to the common rubble of banality or murder, death. All the same to you is bottles of beer, and the daily business of life is a corrupt comedy. You even shatter the sensations of time and space and two split seconds and instant replays.
Yeah, I definitely watching that scene this time. And this is where I mentioned some scenes maybe being overwritten in that last big showdown between them, when Holden says, after living with you for the last six months, I'm turning into one of your scripts. Well, this is not a script, Diana. There's some real, actual life going on here. I said, Okay, that's a mouthful for an actor to actually sell convincingly, and I'm going to say that for the most part,
Bill Holden does it. It works well enough for me, but it did stand out for me this time, Josh.
You know what is kind of the issue at the very beginning about their relationship is that Holden doesn't discover anything new about Diana that would lead him to either get that involved with her or to leave her. Everything he quote unquote comes to find out about her, he knows the second she walks into that office. So I don't think the whole like convention of having them give this arc to their relationship doesn't work because there is no ark to it. He knows anything about her already.
No, And I think that's completely accurate. And maybe because of that, I was paying even more attention to it this time and why I was invested in that relationship at all, or why I believed it in terms of the script, And I think this time I recognize that it can work if you see it in the scope of the whole script where Diana has no real genuine affection for him or sees this relationship as anything profound, but she does need to be tethered to reality in
some way. What he says as mousehole as it is, it is, it is accurate. I believe that anyway about her character, and I also believe exactly what he says to his wife that this is the last chance for him at something, some kind of feeling, maybe no different than Peter Finch saying I still matter, and I'm going to express myself, even if it's just a bunch of rage. He's saying, you know what, You're not just going to
push me out the door. I'm not just going to be this zion of TV news and I'm just going to go out to pasture. This is sort of my last chance to prove myself as the still kind of virile man of action. And she is only a response to that because she really can't be anything else. There is no way in those scenes I mentioned earlier, the romantic weekend getaway where he is actually having a good time,
but he is playing along. He is playing along because I think he needs it and she needs it, just as he does say to her late in the film. So I guess that's how I convinced myself, Josh, of what Chayevski was after with that couple.
All right, So convince me why Duval is so great in this because I had some I'm glad you said I struggled with his performance.
It's one of those performances that I just love every moment of it. I don't know how to completely articulate it, but there isn't a line reading or a set of grimaces or expressions I didn't find surprising and just fun as hell. When he says, for example, to the guy playing Nelson Cheney, the president of the network, the ineffectual president, he says, we're not a respectable network. And he says, well, I don't want any part of it. I don't fancy
myself the president of a whorehouse. And Hackett says, that's very commendable of you, Nelson. Now sit down, your indignation is duly recorded. You can always resign tomorrow, and just very calmly puts him completely in his place. That's one of the scenes I love. But it's honestly, it's just watching him in agony as he is hearing what Howard Beale said on the airwaves, knowing that Arthur Jensen is going to call him back to New York the next day and he's gonna probably get fired, and you just
see how it's tearing him apart. It's all in the way he kind of grits his teeth, the way he smiles in a completely false way.
It's just Duval. It's just Dumal to me, it's a pure Duval performance. I'm finished any second.
That phone's gonna ring and Clarence Mcalane's gonna tell me mister Jensen wants me in his office tomorrow morning so.
It can personally chop.
My head off.
Four hours ago, I was a sun gun at Cca, mister Jenson's hand picked golden boy, the air Apparent.
Now I'm a man operation.
Let's get that to Howard feel.
I like how Dunaway snaps him out of it because I was thinking, like, please, please stop. We get the point. He keeps struggling for more metaphors for how much trouble he's in, how far he's fallen. It's so overwritten and overperformed. I can't remember a guy with so little hair constantly pushing back his hair in movie. It's like, there's nothing there, Bobby. I mean, you can keep going for it. I don't know.
I think that he it's it's a movie of a lot of performances that are didactic, but he's the only one I found who was kind of overdoing the material, which didn't which didn't need, you know, much doing at all I did, like on his desk, I like the touch. This is nothing to do with the performance. But what does the sign say on his desk, I kindly refrain from smoking in this room. And it was just a
nice visual, like joke. Here's this guy who's supposed to be the hard ass in the movie, right right, and then he has that in nineteen seventy six, he has this on his desk, please referring from smoking here actually the hardass in the movie. We got to talk about ned Baty's scene.
Oh my good, incredible.
That is where Loumette pulls out the filmmaking stops. I feel under percent know, the lights go down in this boardroom. He sits beal down. He's going to ream him out for for going on air and talking about the corporations and so forth, and he gives this, what is that a corporate cosmology? Is that the phrase he throws at him. It's this, I mean, there's the profit of evil is what That's what ned Baty is and and Loumette frames him.
There's all of these glowing green reading lamps on this long conference table, and it's just like there's these oracles of globalism chanting around ned Baty as he booms from mount capitalism.
You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, mister mel and I won't have it.
Is that clear.
You think you've merely stopped a business deal.
That is not the case.
The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country and now they.
Must put it back.
It is flow, title gravity, it is psychological balance. You are an old man.
I totally forgot that scene as well, and it's astonishing.
It's incredible. And let's give credit here to the cinematographer, the great cinematographer Owen Royceman who in the seventies just gonna mention some of the titles in addition to Network, the French Connection, The Heartbreak Kid, The Exorcist, Three Days of the Condor. And I agree that's the standout scene
in the movie in so many ways. But in terms of the filmmaking, utilizing the boardroom table and the space with those lights you mentioned, I was watching it thinking, like we discussed with all the President's men, are they using a diopter here? And I don't think they are, but it's almost a diopter effect where because of those lights and where the camera is positioned almost underneath them, shooting through them. It seems that ned Baby is very distant while also right on top of you, right on
top of Beale, just overpowering him. And it really does make you think of Jensen in that scene as a director. You know, he brings him into that space for a reason. He dims the lights, he positions himself just so and starts his oration and then that line where he finally then breaks and says, am I getting through to you is hilarious.
That's the line of the movie.
And you know, I think it's easy without psychoanalyzing too much here or reading too much into his personal biography. I don't know a whole lot about Patty Chaiaevsky other than I will say I read Davidskoff's book about the making of Network, very good, very fun read. I also read the biography of Bob Fosse, and he was really intimate friends with Patti Chaiyevsky. So I have a little bit of background, and it's easy to see the Howard Beale in Patti Chaiyevsky. It's easy to see the William
Holden in this scene. I'm watching Arthur Jensen and thinking not only of you know, Lamette and the symmetry to a director, but I'm thinking about Chaievsky as a storyteller, where you've got that kind of fire and Brimstone Preacher, the didacticism of that I'm here to impart a very important message that you better listen to. But he's also trying to frame it as a storyteller. He's considering how to best get through to his audience, and in this case,
that's how Jensen sets up the entire scene. So yeah, I think that's one of the standouts, and I think Baby is incredible in it.
All right, real quick, one last question I got for you. The occasional narration. The whole the movie begins with this voiceover narration, kind of a TV announcer setting things up, and I think it comes back five or six times more again than I remembered. Why do you think that's there? Is it just another kind of metaplay on TV tropes that they wanted to layer in because other than that, I was kind of like, well, it's not really giving us anything.
New, No, and it really probably isn't necessary. I'm not sure that it really moves anything along, but there is something about the framing of it, that device, that self awareness. I think maybe if it was actually used just a little bit more than it was, it probably would have been very annoying. But as it is the beginning, the end, a couple key moments in between his transitions, I didn't have a problem with it watching it this time.
Yeah, Yeah, just stood out to me. And again I'm thinking it's you know, they're referring to their lives as a script of Diana's, and here the movie obviously has a script. It's also being narrated as a script, so it fits.
Yeah, going back to Lumett and Reusman for a second. Actually, while I was thinking about this today, I put it on in the background here at my desk, just so I could kind of be watching Network and maybe, you know, gathering something through us Moss, Josh and you what really struck me When I think about Network, and I just watched it two nights ago, I in my head think about how dark it is. I think about the scenes like with Jensen. I think about the scenes in the
boardroom at the end. I think about the scenes on Howard Beale's set when he's the mad Profit and it's all dark and so artificially lit, and I was kind of shocked to go back and have it on, and I'd keep looking up at the screen, and through the first half or so of the movie, it is very evenly and brightly lit, and Lumette is constantly and Reisman are constantly relying on natural light to tell this story.
It really isn't that dark at all.
It's only as the movie itself gets darker and darker and everybody gets it seems a little bit more corrupted. That then it's like every moment is a TV set moment. But earlier in the movie, if you go back and look all of those scenes in offices or that take place with that suy, Yes, there's a ton of natural light always coming into the room.
Yeah, they're in this corporate high rise. These are day meetings, and so that's kind of the setting. And then you're right, we transition into the studio, more more things take place at night, and the movie overall grows darker.
Yeah, and you mentioned the script, and I understand you're wrestling with the didacticism little bit, but there is a
poetry to it. And I use that word because I did catch part of an interview today where Chaievsky has asked about the poetry of the script and whether or not audiences will accept it, And I think what I'm getting at, or I want to get at, is just the language of the script, the word choices, the way it doesn't feel natural all the time, and yet the way the characters deliver it, it does feel like it
makes sense within this world. There's a line of Duballs actually that I've quoted fairly often throughout my life, and when you think about quotable lines from network, nobody would ever point to this one.
Right.
There's all these lines.
I'm mad as Helle, and for me, there are times where if someone says something to me where they're trying to qualify how firmly I feel about something or how firmly someone else feels about something. And there's that line at the end where they ask him just one more time, well, how did mister Jensen really feel about Howard Beale?
Like?
Can we fire him?
Says I would describe his feelings as intractable and at a man time. Now, nobody uses that phrase in real life, right, But in this movie it makes sense, and it makes sense that it's pushing on the audience in that way, it's the kind of film that makes you maybe actually go home and get out the dictionary and try to understand what some of the characters are saying. I'll also
mention a little moment. It's a complete throwaway moment, and I don't even know if it's one Lumette was very conscious about, but it I think gets at some of the subtle choices that really make this movie what it is. When they show I think his name's Edward Ruddy and he's the head of the company and he's who everybody reports to. At this point, he's in kind of a power struggle with Frank Hackett, with Duval's character, and he goes to meet with William Holden's character in his office.
I think he might even be going at this point actually to ask him to come back after he's fired him. He's about ready to leave and this is his last day at ubs.
And he goes in.
But he doesn't just show him walk into the office. He doesn't just show him sitting down or having a conversation with William Holden. He shows him enter the floor and walk up to the receptionist and walk past like four people all just doing their jobs and in every case. You see how all of those people react to him.
They are all deferential, they all show their respect to him because he's the boss, the big boss, And in a movie that really is in a lot of ways about power, who has it, who's losing it, you do need to see that nothing is even really said, it's just all in the blocking of that and the movement of those characters. You see how they defer to him as the man in charge.
Well, and this goes back to Beatty too, right, because we're constantly trying to track these layers of authority that you're talking about. Who's over who, how are they related professionally? Who's really holding the cards here? And it is communicated in details like that we only see before that boardroom scene. Batty's character once very briefly at another board meeting. He gives a few words of approval, and then he disappears and we hear him referred to. But then when we
get him, it's like we've left. This goes back to the filmmaking too. We've left those daytime offices where there are all these you know, these little ways of showing deference and who's in charge, and now we are in this I don't know. It's a totally different building. It's almost gothic.
Yeah, a little light NDErs down.
It's like, okay, if there's a guy at the top or the bottom. I think we finally found it when Baty shows up.
Yeah, I don't know if it was by accident or not either, but I even noticed today when it was on in the background that the same type of green lights that are in that Ned Baty scene with Peter Finch, which I'm sure have an exact name that I'm not aware of, where you pull the sting and reading lamps. That's what they say library meeting lamps, like at a library.
They are the same kind of lights. That seemed to me almost in the scene where you have Faye Dunaway being feeded is like she's some politician who's just won the presidency. There's all these red lights on the table, just like those green ones. And that's where everything does kind of get a little bit more sinister. As I said, network is available to stream on most platforms. I wonder if Patty Chayevski would be happy about that or not. It also plays on a loop over at the UBS network.
You can look for that on your cable provider. For more on our seven from seventy six Best Year ever series, visit Film Spotting dot Net Slash seven from seventy six. We do only have one more seventy six title to get to before we complete our seventy seven Best Picture nominee homework. We are going to talk about the eventual winner, Rocky, that will come here in a couple.
Of weeks, and his name is Sylvestre Stallone, but you will always remember him as Rocky.
I mean, Josh, it does seem from my glance at Box that Sam had a change of heart back in March twenty twenty one.
He gave Network four.
And a half stars, four and a half that. Yes, that was a wild swing of heart for Sam. I love it.
Yes, yes, now of course, maybe he's going to tell me, no, I'm mixing up my memory and it was some other film I adored, But I'm pretty sure it was Network that he was not a big fan of. And it hurt me. It really cut me deep. If you would like to dig into the film Spotting archive and hear other conversations like that one, well you can do that. As a member of the Film Spotting family. You get our monthly bonus shows. You get a weekly newsletter, you
get early ed free shows, and a lot more. To join Josh, what do they have to do to join?
Very simple, Film spottingfamily dot com. All your options, the various tears you can choose from, are right there. So check it out and join the family.