Sidney Lumet (1924-2011)

The famous "mad as hell" scene from Network was done basically in one take -- some of the early part is from a second take director Sidney Lumet asked for, but Peter Finch was so exhausted (and already, unknown to Lumet, already ill) that he was unable to complete the second take. The shots of people shouting out their windows were all filmed in one night. Lumet said of the scene in 2006: "I never thought it would achieve the kind of iconic status it has, but it sure has."

"She's television. She learned life from Bugs Bunny."

-- former TV news president Max Schumacher (William Holden),
talking to his wife about his infatuation with programming
executive Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway), in Network

by Ken

Last September, after rewatching Network for the first time in decades, but more particularly after watching some of the director's commentary on the 30th-anniversary DVD edition, I was fascinated by his detailed description of how his collaboration with legendary screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky had worked. Faced with the news of Sidney Lumet's death, I'm risking the presumption of reprinting some of what I wrote then.

I confess that I enjoy hearing people who do things really well talk about things they've done really well, especially if they actually have some insight into them. Sidney Lumet, who was born in 1924 and thus would have been 82-ish when he recorded that commentary for the film's 30th anniversary in 2006 (the photo, by the was, was taken at the Toronto Film Festival in 2007; does this look like a man of 83?), is a fanatically precise craftsman, with his own very particular way of making movies, and also a filmmaker with an intense sense of purpose, and so I shouldn't have been surprised to find myself caught up watching the movie again with his running commentary.

I try to take care, when referring to the authorship of Network to refer jointly to director Lumet and screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky, apparently kindred souls who began working together in the storied days of live television drama in the 1950s. At the outset of the commentary, Lumet expresses the abiding regret that Paddy isn't on hand, both to add his perspective on the film and, more important, to have been able to see the cultural impact it wound up having. As a matter of fact, although Lumet is not quite 17 months younger than his old friend and colleague, Chayefsky didn't make it anywhere near 2006; he died in August 1981. However, he remains a throbbingly vital presence throughout the commentary; it would be hard to find anyone who appreciates his script better than the man who turned it into this remarkable movie.

I loved working with Paddy every second -- I wanted him on the set; he was there in the cutting room. He's a great artist . . . I had no pride of authorship. I don't want to have to think of it. If he thinks of it, great; if I think of it, great. It doesn't matter. Just the result matters.

I especially enjoyed this tribute Lumet pays, with regard to casting a film with a Chayefsky script: "One of the joys of having a writer like Chayefsky is that when you send a script to an actor, you don't expect, nor do you get, a rejection. Everybody -- except for the Peter Finch character, where I tried some other actors first -- everybody." With that one exception, he says, every role was cast with their first choice. And the exception had nothing to do with lack of regard for Peter Finch as an actor; it just didn't occur to them that the Australian-born Finch, whose career had been made in England, could sound plausibly American.

Earlier Lumet has told about the lengths Finch went to to persuade them that he could, because he wanted so badly to play the role, and indeed as Lumet mentions elsewhere, talking about the film's limited budget, all of the actors had such high regard to their roles that they accepted substantially less than their standard fees.

(Note: Later in the commentary Lumet reveals at least one exception to the principle that they always got their cast "first choices" rule, at least as regards the actual film. It's quite possible that the actor originally cast as megacorporate titan Arthur Jensen, the man who believes that democracy is passé and nations don't matter, that all that matters is "the international currency," was their first choice, but he had to be let go during rehearsal because Lumet couldn't dissuade from playing the character's madness. The unnamed fellow was replaced three days before shooting by Ned Beatty, who garnered a supporting-actor Oscar nomination.)

I think the thing that struck me most powerfully about the film on re-viewing was the consistent brilliance of the acting, and throughout the commentary Lumet provides fascinating background on both the casting (for example, the unexpected, and brilliant casting of Robert Duvall as the CCA corporate hatchet man, for which he knew he wanted a non-New York, middle American type; Duvall is indescribably brilliant, though Lumet manages some helpful description) and the work process (which as always with Lumet involved actually theater-type rehearsal of every scene, a process that was unfamiliar to William Holden, but with which he fell in love). There's also an enormous amount of insight into the technical sophistication of a film shot virtually in its entirety on location, much of which -- with regard to the lighting, for example (as an overall note, he explains that the film moves from naturalism to the stylized artificiality of "a Ford commercial" -- is so successful that the viewer isn't even aware of it consciously, as he himself acknowledges late in the commentary.

Now, to get back to the possibly elusive quote at the top of this post. It's from the scene, the only extended one that Beatrice Straight, who played Louise Schumacher, the wife of news producer Max Schumacher (William Holden), had in the picture, but which won her a supporting actress Oscar. (You can see the scene here. Unfortunately embedding has been disabled.) Lumet declares the Bugs Bunny line as one of his favorites in the film, then goes on to say:

It's absolutely accurate. So much of what we're dealing with today comes because people -- we're now in probably, what?, the third generation of people who've never known life without television, and so so much of what they're thinking and feeling today is vicarious. It's learned from the box, but they've never experienced it actually, and I think it's got a lot to do with the state of things today.

By the way, all the TV control-room and studio scenes were shot in Canada -- not because it was cheaper (it wasn't), but because they were unable to find any American facility they could use for the two weeks they needed for filming. It also worked out that the Canadian studio was also better equipped for producing the kind of live television depicted in the film.

Anyone who watches Network today is apt to see that, as Lumet notes, Chayefsky pretty well laid out the future of "reality television" in 1976. (In case you were wondering, he's not a fan. In fact, he and Chayefsky considered television a dead medium for drama when it stopped being live. "We never left television," he says. "It left us.")

The amazing scene that begins at 8:40 of the post-top clip, in which Howard Beale both warns the audience about the menace of television and informs them of his discovery that Arab money is behind the impending acquisition of TV network UBS's giant conglomerate parent company, CCA, Lumet pays tribute to Chayefsky's scrupulous accuracy about the kinds of purchases that were then being made by foreign investors.

I think that one of the most trenchant things in the whole scene, that applies so much today, is how much control was being wrested out of our hands, in terms of the destiny of the country, by foreign ownership. It may not be only oil today, because that's what was being used then (and is being used today), but as you know, so much of what we've got in the country, so much of the economy of the country, is totally dependent [on] continual purchase and ownership of United States Treasury bonds by foreign countries. And one of the enormous dangers today of the falling dollar is that at one point they may say, "Wait a minute, these bonds may not -- and the debt we've been accumulating -- these bonds may lose a lot of their value. And if they ever stopped buying them, or start throwing them onto the open market, the value of the bonds will drop. It might precipitate one of the greatest financial crises this country has ever had. But primarily it's the loss of control we've got over our own destiny -- and that's what was concerning Paddy enormously, 30 years ago.

It's a scene, Lumet says, "which could have been shot yesterday," from a film he explains is "about corruption." He mentions that Chayefsky was a good friend of then-NBC news anchor John Chancellor, and he himself was a good friend of CBS's Walter Cronkite (whose daughter Kathy played the Patty Hearst-style kidnapped heiress in the film), and laments the precipitous falloff in credibility that TV news has suffered since their time.

In fact, looking at Network now, you have to wonder whether people who "learned life from Bugs Bunny" didn't have a substantially firmer grip on reality than people who "learn life" from, say, Survivor or 24 or The Real Housewives of Oshkosh -- not to mention the infotainment news media.

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