Network

 1976
 R
 2h 1m

 Peter Finch ... Howard Beale

 William Holden ... Max Schumacher (head of news department)
 Carolyn Krigbaum ... Max's Secretary
 Cindy Grover ... Caroline Schumacher
 Beatrice Straight ... Louise Schumacher
 Faye Dunaway ... Diana Christensen
 Ned Beatty ... Arthur Jensen (Head of entire network)
 Wesley Addy ... Nelson Chaney (president and senior executive)
 William Prince ... Edward George Ruddy (business executive and PR manager)
 Robert Duvall ... Frank Hackett (business head of network and Diana’s lover)
 Ed Crowley ... Joe Donnelly (standards and practices & ad sales)
 Pirie MacDonald ... Herb Thackeray (legal affairs)
 John Carpenter ... George Bosch (Diana’s assistant)
 Conchata Ferrell ... Barbara Schlesinger (Diana’s assistant)
 Michael Lipton ... Tommy Pellegrino (Diana’s assistant)
 Darryl Hickman ... Bill Herron (head of west coast programing department)
 Stanley Grover ... Jack Snowden (news announcer replacing Howard)
 Lane Smith ... Robert McDonough (replacement head of the news division)
 Jordan Charney ... Harry Hunter (Newsroom technical crew)
 Lydia Wilen ... Hunter's Secretary
 Bernard Pollock ... Lou (Newsroom receptionist)
 Arthur Burghardt ... Great Ahmed Kahn (leader of the ELA)
 Kathy Cronkite ... Mary Ann Gifford (Kidnap victim)
 Lance Henriksen ... Executive (Network Lawyer at Khan's Place)
 Marlene Warfield ... Laureen Hobbs (head of the US Communist party)
 Ken Kercheval ... Merrill Grant (Lawyer for US Communist party)
 Roy Poole ... Sam Haywood (Lawyer for US Communist party)
 Jerome Dempsey ... Walter C. Amundsen
 Gene Gross ... Milton K. Steinman
 Mitchell Jason ... Arthur Zangwill
 Michael Lombard ... Willie Stein
 Sasha von Scherler ... Helen Miggs
 Ted Sorel ... Giannini
 Bill Burrows ... TV Director
 Paul Jenkins ... TV Stage Manager
 Kenneth Kimmins ... Associate Producer
 Lynn Klugman ... TV Production Assistant
  Zane Lasky ... Audio Man
 Russ Petranto ... TV Associate Director
 Fred Stuthman ... Mosaic Figure
 Cameron Thomas ... TV Technical Director
 Robert P. Cohen ... Window Person
 Andrew Duncan ... Agent
 Todd Everett ... Reporter
 John Gabriel ... TV Anchor Reporting Beale's Suicide Threat
 Tom Gibney ... Announcer
 Raymond Martino ... Window Person
 John Pashley ... Cameraman
 Michael Tucker ... Man at Desk
 Lee Richardson ... Narrator (voice)
 John Chancellor ... Self (archive footage)
 Walter Cronkite ... Self (archive footage)
 Betty Ford ... Self (archive footage)
 Gerald Ford ... Self (archive footage)
 Howard K. Smith ... Self (archive footage)
 David Susskind ... Self (archive footage)
 Ahmed Yamani ... Self (archive footage)

When Beale is offered and accepts the angry man commentator, he is dressed all in black as the anti-
hero should.

The Ned Beaty speech sounds very much like the introduction to the world of Rollerball

“The American people have turned sullen. They’ve been clobbered by Vietnam, Watergate, inflation and
the depression.”

Screenplay uses a lot of TV news jargon about ratings and such. This is an element that Chayefsky often
does in his scripts.

Lumet and Chayefsky both worked together on the early days of television.

Peter Finch was desperate to win the role of Howard Beale once he had read the script. He even offered
to pay his own airfare to New York City for the screentest. But Sidney Lumet was concerned about
Finch's Australian accent. Finch won the part after sending Lumet a recording of himself reading the New
York Times with a perfect American accent.

According to Sidney Lumet, the "Mad as Hell" speech was filmed in one and a half takes. Midway
through the second take, Peter Finch abruptly stopped in exhaustion. Lumet was unaware of Finch's
failing heart at the time, but in any case, did not ask for a third take. The complete film features the
second half of the first take and the first half of the second take.

Beatrice Straight is only on-screen for five minutes and two seconds. Hers was the briefest performance
ever to win an Oscar.
Peter Finch died before the Academy Awards were to take place, where he was nominated for Best
Actor. He won, making him the first performer ever to receive a posthumous award at the Oscars. The
second winner was fellow Australian Heath Ledger for The Dark Knight (2008).

Director Sidney Lumet and screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky claimed that the film was not meant to be a
satire but a reflection of what was really happening.

Paddy Chayefsky's screenplay adapted by Lee Hall into a play at the National Theatre, London. The
director is Ivo van Hove with Bryan Cranston as Howard Beale, Douglas Henshall, Michelle Dockery and
Caroline Faber . The production will have an 18-week limited run at the Cort Theatre on Broadway
beginning November 2018. Cranston will reprise his London performance, with Ivo van Hove again
directing.

14 years later, Robert Duvall and Faye Dunaway would also appear as husband-wife in The Handmaid's
Tale (1990).

Aaron Sorkin has claimed that Paddy Chayefsky, and particularly his script for this film, have been a
major inspiration for his own writing. He has written "no predictor of the future, not even Orwell, has
ever been as right as Chayefsky was when he wrote 'Network.'"

According to Shaun Considine, the author of "Mad As Hell: The Life and Work of Paddy Chayefsky",
George C. Scott was offered the role of Howard Beale, but declined without reading the script,
apparently due to his having once been offended by director Sidney Lumet. Whatever happened, exactly,
the hatchet must have been buried at some time, as Scott made his final feature film appearance in the
Lumet-directed Gloria (1999).

Arthur Burghardt (Great Ahmet Khan) was a vegetarian. For the scene where he was to munch on a
piece of chicken, Burghardt stuffed his cheeks with paper towels and smeared the grease on his face
before the camera rolled, instead of actually eating meat.

Beatrice Straight who won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress was only in two scenes. The first, her
only dialog was, "Wake up Max, because Howard's gone," and the second was her 4 minute, 38 second
diatribe against her husband's confession that he (played by Holden) was having an affair with Diana
Christensen (played by Faye Dunaway). This should qualify as one of the shortest screen-times to win the
coveted gold statue.

Beatrice Straight's return to the big screen after 12 years. Her previous appearance on a theatrical film
was in The Young Lovers (1964).

Black radical Laureen Hobbs' character is loosely modelled after Communist activist Angela Davis.

Diana Christensen is loosely based on Lin Bolen.

Diana says she wants to start a homosexual soap opera. This wouldn't happen in the U.S. for another 24
years, but on cable TV. Showtime's "Queer As Folk."

Sidney Lumet witnessed Peter Finch's death. Finch was seated in the lobby of the Beverly Hills Hotel
waiting for Lumet to go to an interview for the film together when he collapsed of a heart attack as
Lumet approached. Finch was taken to the hospital where he was pronounced dead in the ICU several
hours later, never regaining consciousness.
During his "the world is a business" speech, Jensen references rins, a Japanese currency that had been
out of circulation for over twenty years.

During rehearsal, Sidney Lumet noticed William Holden would not look Faye Dunaway directly in the eye
during dialogue dealing with his fear of aging and death. Lumet told Holden to instead never break eye
contact. Holden nailed the speech in one take.

Faye Dunaway and Paul Jenkins also appeared in Chinatown (1974).

Faye Dunaway managed to put aside their earlier clashes and enjoy an apparently cordial relationship
with William Holden. She claimed that during the shooting of the new film, "I found him a very sane,
lovely man."

Faye Dunaway revealed in her autobiography that she wanted Robert Mitchum to play Max.

Faye Dunaway would later say that this was "the only film I ever did that you didn't touch the script
because it was almost as if it were written in verse." She was as happy with Sidney Lumet as with the
writing, describing him as "one of, if not the, most talented and professional men in the world. In the
rehearsals, two weeks before shooting he blocks his scenes with his cameraman. Not a minute is wasted
while he's shooting and that shows not only on the studio's budget but on the impetus of performance."

Filmed entirely on location, with no movie sets built. However the newsroom and control room and
studio audience scenes were all filmed in Canadian TV studios, for the simple reason that no TV station
in New York could spare their newsrooms or stages for enough time for the movie's shooting schedule.

Henry Fonda turned down the role of Howard Beale, saying that it was "too hysterical." Glenn Ford and
George C. Scott did also. Although William Holden turned it down, he was cast in the other male lead
and was nominated for Best Actor along with Peter Finch.

In 2005, in preparation for what would eventually be a scrapped project for a live television adaptation
of this film, George Clooney screened the film for a group of teens and young adults in order to
determine their reactions to it. He found, much to his surprise, that none of the young people
recognized the film as satire. "I couldn't understand it", Clooney told the Associated Press. Then he
"realized that everything Paddy Chayefsky wrote about had happened."

In researching her role as the rare female in the mostly male world of television executives, Faye
Dunaway met with NBC daytime programming Vice President Lin Bolen. Bolen noted later that while she
could see something of herself in Dunaway's mannerisms and speech patterns, she disavowed any
further connection to the character, and was appalled by her lack of moral standards.

In Shaun Considine's biography of Paddy Chayefsky, it is revealed that Glenn Ford and William Holden
were the finalists for the role of Max Schumaker. Holden's recent success in The Towering Inferno (1974)
was believed to have been the deciding factor in his casting.

In the film, Max and Diana refer to their affair as "a many-splendored thing", an inside joke, since William
Holden had starred in Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955).

In the script Max confesses to his wife his affair with Diana before the sex scene between Max and Diana.
In the final cut the sequence of the scenes were reversed.
In the UK/US stage adaptations of the film, Faye Dunaway's Diana is played by Michelle Dockery
(UK/2017) and by Tatiana Maslany (US/2018). Peter Finch's Howard Beale: Bryan Cranston (UK & US).
William Holden's Max Schumacher: Douglas Henshall (UK/2017) and Tony Goldwyn (US/2018). Robert
Duvall's Frank Hackett: Tunji Kasim (UK), etc.

Is one of only three films that has been awarded three acting Oscars, the other films being A Streetcar
Named Desire (1951) and Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022). Although both A Streetcar Named
Desire and Network were nominated, neither film won the Best Picture Oscar that year.

James Stewart turned the film down because of the strong language.

Listed right across from th fictional "Edward George Ruddy dies" obituary in the new york time is a listing
announcing the real death of Sidney Buchman( Sidned Jostrom, Scenarist, aged 73,)accademy award
winning screen writer of Mr. Smith Goes To Washington.

Ned Beatty once remarked that actors should never turn down work ("I worked a day on 'Network' and
got an Oscar nomination for it") . Beatty is on screen for five minutes and 53 seconds, but the
performance earned him a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination. Beatrice Straight's performance
runs even shorter--five minutes and 40 seconds--but she actually won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar
for that performance.

Ned Beatty was brought in as a last-minute replacement of Arthur Jensen. Sidney Lumet claimed that the
actor originally cast in the part could not comprehend the tone of the screenplay, and played up the
madness and absurdity in the "the world is a business" speech to Howard Beale. Beatty however
understood that the monologue needed to be delivered with persuasion and truth.

Paddy Chayefsky and Sidney Lumet made it clear to Faye Dunaway that they wanted a cold-blooded,
soulless characterization with no sympathetic shadings. "I know the first thing you're going to ask me",
Lumet told her. "Where's her vulnerability? Don't ask it. She has none. If you try to sneak it in, I'll get rid
of it in the editing room, so it'll be a wasted effort." Dunaway's then-husband Peter Wolf warned her
that she could risk typecasting in such a role, but Dunaway plunged ahead fearlessly.

Paddy Chayefsky envisioned Henry Fonda, James Stewart, Paul Newman, or Cary Grant filling the role of
Howard Beale.

Paddy Chayefsky insisted to the studio that there be no expository dialogue, and that the characters (all
veterans of television) should speak at the level of expertise they would in real-life to each other, with
shorthand, acronyms and terminology authentic to the details of television broadcasting and network
business. He believed that whether or not the audience could understand everything that was discussed
was less important than they were convinced they were watching the reality of how television is
produced.

Paddy Chayefsky thought of Candice Bergen, Ellen Burstyn, and Natalie Wood for the hard-driving
programming executive, Diana Christensen. The studio also suggested Jane Fonda, Kay Lenz, Diane
Keaton, Marsha Mason, and Jill Clayburgh for the role.

Paddy Chayefsky wanted Walter Matthau or Gene Hackman for Max Schumacher.
Paddy Chayefsky was eerily prescient in his screenplay in three significant ways. First, the screenplay
pertains to the goings-on at UBS, the fictional fourth network existing alongside the non-fictional ABC,
CBS, and NBC. In 1987 Fox became the real fourth network. Second, in her speech to her employees
about her goals for UBS, Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway) says, "I don't want conventional
programming on this network. I want counterculture, I want anti-establishment", the type of
programming delivered by FOX with its two debut series, Married... with Children (1987) and The Tracey
Ullman Show (1987). Third, Diana Christensen's creation of the show about the Ecumenical Liberation
Army and its criminal activities is prescient of "reality TV" in that, as a result of the writers' strike of 1988
(which lasted twenty-two weeks), FOX started to run low on new content. To replace it, the network
bought the show Cops (1989) (which featured police officers trying to thwart criminal activity). Despite
very noteworthy predecessors, such as An American Family (1973), which depicted the experiences of
the Loud family, and Scared Straight! (1978), some consider Cops (1989) the true progenitor of the long-
running trend of "reality TV".

Paddy Chayefsky worked on a pilot script for a possible television comedy series called "The Imposters",
in which political subversives infiltrate and try to undermine a television network.

Per UBS's coverage of Sarah Jane Moore's attempted assassination of Gerald Ford, the film's events
begin on September 22, 1975.

Peter Finch was desperate to win the role of Howard Beale once he had read the script. He even offered
to pay his own airfare to New York City for the screentest.

Sidney Lumet began a period of rehearsals in early 1976 in a ballroom of the Diplomat Hotel in New York
City. Like most Lumet movies, the film was shot in New York City, although control room and news studio
scenes were filmed at CFTO-TV Studios in Toronto, Ontario. Lumet said that he planned a very specific
visual scheme for the film, shooting the early parts with available light and minimal camera movement,
as in a documentary. As the movie progressed, he added more light and movement so the final
sequences were as brightly lit and "slick" as possible.

Sidney Lumet claimed that he wanted to cast Vanessa Redgrave in the film, but Paddy Chayefsky didn't
want her. Lumet argued that he thought she was the greatest English-speaking actress in the world,
while Chayefsky, a proud Jew and supporter of Israel, objected on the basis of her support of the PLO.
Lumet, himself a Jew, said "Paddy, that's blacklisting!", to which Chayefsky replied, "Not when a Jew does
it to a Gentile." The year after this film swept the Oscars, Redgrave won a Best Actress in a Supporting
Role Oscar for Julia (1977). The Jewish Defense League had protested her nomination, and was picketing
and burning her in effigy outside the Academy Awards ceremony. In her controversial acceptance
speech, Redgrave decried intimidation by "Zionist hoodlums". Chayefsky was one of the scheduled
presenters later in the evening, and he took a moment to express his contempt at Redgrave for
"exploiting" the Academy Awards for "personal propaganda".

Sidney Lumet claimed that one of the reasons he wanted to cast Robert Duvall was due to his screen
image from westerns and war movies. In Lumet's experience many television heads came from the
American heartland.

Sidney Lumet openly admitted that he was furious to have the picture lose to Rocky (1976) for Best
Picture at the Academy Awards.
Sidney Lumet recalled that Paddy Chayefsky was usually on the set overseeing his direction, and would
give him advice on how certain scenes should be played. Lumet claims that Chayefsky had better
comedic instinct than him, but when it came time to shoot the argument scene between William Holden
and Beatrice Straight, the four-times-married director told Chayefsky, "Paddy, please, I know more about
divorce than you."

Sidney Lumet said that he shot the film using a specific lighting scheme. He said in the film's opening
scenes, he shot with as little light as possible, shooting the film almost like a documentary. As the film
progressed, he added more light and more camera moves and by the end of the film, it was as brightly lit
and "slick" as he could make it. The idea was to visually convey the theme of media manipulation.

Since the entire movie was filmed on location, all the office building scenes at night in which the city
outside was seen through high-rise windows had to be actually filmed at night without backdrops. The
rainstorm seen outside Frank Hackett's office when he rants about Howard Beale's ratings was also real,
and had to be matched with artificial rain for the following scene in the script of Howard Beale is walking
on the street, and his soaking wet, disheveled appearance thereafter.

The cast includes several actors who had some part in the saga of "Superman"--including Arthur
Burghardt who would later provide voice roles for Super Friends (1973), Ned Beatty who would portray
Lex Luthor's henchman Otis in Superman (1978) and Superman II (1980), Faye Dunaway who would play
the wicked sorceress Selena in Supergirl (1984), and Lane Smith who would become a very popular
version of Perry White over the four seasons of Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman (1993).

The famous line as specifically written by Paddy Chayefsky - "I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take
it anymore" - became, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore" when uttered by Peter
Finch, with the first 'as' omitted. Finch had become so exhausted working on that particular scene, he
accidentally dropped the 'as,' causing writer Chayefsky much grief, but not enough to prompt director
Lumet to change the filmed dialog.

The film cast includes five Oscar winners: Peter Finch, William Holden, Faye Dunaway, Beatrice Straight,
and Robert Duvall; and one Oscar nominee: Ned Beatty.

The first film to win Oscars for both Best Actress and Best Actress in a Supporting Role since Who's Afraid
of Virginia Woolf? (1966).

The mentioned fictional terrorist group, the Ecumenical Liberation Army, serves as a parody of the real
group Symbionese Liberation Army, which operated in California from 1973 to 1975.

The movie begins on September 23rd, 1975, per a narrative of events told by a newscaster, the day after
Sara Jane Moore's assassination attempt on then President Ford in San Francisco.

The movie's line "I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!" was voted as the number
nineteen movie quote by the American Film Institute. It was voted as #79 of "The 100 Greatest Movie
Lines" by Premiere in 2007.

The on-air murder of Howard Beale was inspired by the real-life on-air suicide of anchorwoman Christine
Chubbuck.

The only music heard in the film comes from commercials and television show themes.
The opening montage used since 2012 for Turner Classic Movies' "Extras" segments, which feature short
films shown between the channel's features, depicts a production book of a screenplay annotated with
costume and production design drawings, costume stills, lighting directions, prop indications and
promotional artwork; the screenplay's pages are from the script for Network, although the other
materials are from different films.

The three Oscar winners, Faye Dunaway, Peter Finch, and Beatrice Straight, share scenes with William
Holden, but they share no scenes with each other. Finch and Dunaway, who won the Best Actor and Best
Actress Oscars, have no scenes or dialogue together in the film.

The UBS Washington, D.C. offices shown are set in the office building located at 1001 Pennsylvania Ave.,
NW, and the interior offices shown are on the second floor, overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue, and across
the street from the old Post Office Building.

this is the last movie to receive five Academy Award nominations in the acting categories.

This was one of Sidney Lumet's personal favourite movies of his own.

Throughout the entire movie, we never actually see Diana speak to Howard.

To celebrate Faye Dunaway's first Oscar victory, husband-to-be photographer Terry O'Neill arranged to
meet her at the Beverly Hills Hotel at 6:30 the morning after the Academy Awards, for a photo shoot.
What transpired was the famous image of a listless Dunaway, reclining beside the tranquil hotel
swimming pool with her Oscar statuette standing upright on the table beside her. Thrown in for good
measure were various newspapers scattered on the ground and table, the headlines of which mostly
echoed the previous night's festivities. Dunaway had not slept since her win, and so appears totally
fatigued, prompting O'Neill to title his photograph "The Morning After" shot.

United Artists agreed to make the film despite having recently settled a lawsuit brought on by producers
Paddy Chayefsky and Howard Gottfried that challenged the company's right to lease their previous film,
The Hospital (1971), to U.S. television network ABC in a package with less successful film. Later, United
Artists backed out, fearing the subject matter was too controversial. Once MGM agreed to make the
movie, United Artists suddenly did a reversal, choosing to co-produce the film with the competing studio
that, six years later, would buy United Artists outright following the debacle of Heaven's Gate (1980), a
financial and public relations nightmare that prompted United Artists' parent company, Transamerica, to
bail out of the film business.

Upon its original release, the film was a co-production of MGM, which released the film in the U.S., and
United Artists, which MGM bought five years later, distributing internationally. Due to a series of mergers
and acquisitions that happened in the years following its release, Warner Bros. now handles domestic
rights as owner of films produced by MGM up to 1986, while MGM, an in-name-only successor to the
similarly-named studio that existed when the film was made, handles foreign rights as owner of the
United Artists library.

Walter Cronkite and John Chancellor were approached for the Howard Beale role, but neither was
interested. Cronkite's daughter Kathy Cronkite agreed to play left-wing radical Mary Ann Gifford, a
character loosely based on Patricia Hearst. According to John Eastman's 1989 book "Retakes: Behind the
Scenes of 500 Classic Movies," Peter Finch studied tapes of Chancellor in order to develop a "TV-bland
accent."

Was Oscar nominated in all the major categories of Best Picture, Director, Actor (2 nominations), Actress,
Supporting Actor, Supporting Actress and Screenplay, and won for Best Screenplay and for all the acting
categories except Best Supporting Actor.

When Beatrice Straight won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for "Network," she became the first
person to win an Oscar in a supporting role in a film whose lead actors (Faye Dunaway and Peter Finch)
both won Oscars.

When Diana and Max are discussing adding Sybil the Soothsayer to the UBS Network Evening News,
Diana claims that there are actual tarot card readers and other prognosticators offering investment
advice on Wall Street. While there have been rumors of fortune tellers working on Wall Street for many
decades, the prohibitions against SEC-registered investment advisers assuring their clients of success has
had a dampening effect on many would-be soothsayers registering to be able to give investment advice,
until recently. Starting in 2008, with the economic meltdown, many more fortune tellers have become
registered with the SEC, and more and more clients are turning to them for their securities
recommendations.

William Holden had some reservations about the scene where he and Faye Dunaway are in bed making
love and, in her excitement, she exclaims about the ratings of her successful television show. At a
climactic moment she cries out, "We're getting more publicity out of this than Watergate!" "Such scenes
are not to my liking," Holden later said. "I believe lovemaking is a private thing, and I don't enjoy
depictions of it on the screen." He rationalized that, "If nobody had been in bed on the screen before, I
might have hesitated." But he went with it, understanding that "The scene was not meant to be
pornographic. It was meant to disclose a character flaw, the fact that Faye talks all the way through it
tells more about her. It was Paddy's way of getting the dialogue out." Holden did allow, however, that he
felt "the scene was meant to be more amusing than it came off."

William Prince and Wesley Addy died a couple of months apart from each other in 1996. As coincidental,
they both play powerful figures inside the TV network.

With his Best Screenplay win for this film, Paddy Chayefsky became the first screenwriter to win three
Academy Awards for scripts that he wrote by himself. The other two awards were for his work on Marty
(1955) and The Hospital (1971). Contrary to popular belief, Woody Allen was not the second person to
achieve this feat, because he shared his Oscar for Annie Hall (1977) with Marshall Brickman.

Paddy Chayefsky visited network TV offices. He was surprised to learn that television executives did not
watch much television. "The programs they put on 'had to' be bad, had to be something they wouldn't
watch," he remarked. "Imagine having to work like that all your life."[10] According to Dave Itzkoff, what
Chayefsky saw while writing the screenplay during the midst of Watergate and the Vietnam War was the
entirety of America's anger being broadcast in everything from sitcoms to news reports. He concluded
that Americans "don't want jolly, happy family type shows like Eye Witness News" ... "the American
people are angry and want angry shows."

Paddy Chayefsky writing for Beale to bray that he "will blow my brains out right on the air ... like that girl
in Florida", which was later removed.
Peter Finch, who had suffered from heart problems for many years, became physically and
psychologically exhausted by the demands of playing Beale

Sidney Lumet and cinematographer Owen Roizman worked out a complicated lighting scheme that in
Lumet's words would "corrupt the camera". Lumet recalled: "We started with an almost naturalistic look.
For the first scene between Peter Finch and Bill Holden, on Sixth Avenue at night, we added only enough
light to get an exposure. As the movie progressed, camera setups became more rigid, more formal. The
lighting became more and more artificial. The next-to-final scene—where Faye Dunaway, Robert Duvall,
and the three network gray suits decide to kill Peter Finch—is lit like a commercial. The camera setups
are static and framed like still pictures. The camera had also become a victim of television."

Sidney Lumet and Chayefsky first sharpened their teeth in this then-nascent media landscape, directing
and writing live television plays,

Sidney Lumet praises Chayefsky’s ability to “see the future” of a changing news media landscape as
television networks came under greater control of multinational conglomerates and their stockholders.

Early TV news programs were something of an aberration in U.S. journalism history, subject to both the
Equal Time Rule and now-defunct Fairness Doctrine that other forms of news media were not.

Diana Christensen would be followed by Chance the Gardener in “Being There,” Max Renn in
“Videodrome,” Rupert Pupkin in “The King of Comedy,” and Louis Bloom in “Nightcrawler.” The concept
of television as a corrupting, de-humanizing force has grown into a reliable component of the film-about-
television genre.