The UBS News Hour had quite the lineup back in 1976. There was Sybil the Soothsayer, reading the future. Miss Mata Hari revealed her Skeletons in the Closet. And of course, there was the main attraction, The Mad Prophet of the Airwaves, Howard Beale.
Much has happened on television in the 50 years since “Network” sent out its scabrous distress signal lampooning and decrying the state of TV news. The lines between news and entertainment have blurred to the point where they barely exist. Corporate conglomerates exert more influence over network content than ever before. Reality TV showcases human debasement and humiliation as a matter of course.
It’s enough to make anyone mad as hell. It’s also good cause to consider the prophecies and gonzo entertainment value of a great American movie that will be making the rounds throughout its golden anniversary year. The movie just entered the prestigious Criterion Collection on both Blu-ray and 4K, and will show March 7 at Harvard Film Archive as part of the Harvard Undergraduate Cinematheque’s Community in Cinema series (it’s available to rent on various streaming services).
Appropriately for a movie that revolves around a mad prophet, “Network” has proved quite prophetic. Screenwriter Paddy Chayevsky, who won one of the film’s four Oscars for his original screenplay, must have studied with Sybil.
To be sure, TV news was already veering toward infotainment when “Network” came out in 1976, and the corporate raiding of news media companies, chronicled so deftly by Ben Bagdikian in his 1983 book “The Media Monopoly,” was already bubbling up. But Chayevsky’s free-swinging satire, which found its perfect match in Sidney Lumet’s high-intensity direction, clearly foresaw the shape of the things to come.
Let’s start with the packaging and selling of rage. Howard Beale (Peter Finch, who won a posthumous Oscar for his performance) doesn’t start off as a mad prophet. Soon to be fired as evening news anchor by the fictional UBS — his ratings have dipped — he goes on the air and morosely pledges to commit suicide. As his rants get angry, culminating with his now-famous “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” outburst, network programming director Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway, who also won an Oscar for her performance) sees a potential gold mine.
“The American people need someone to articulate their rage for them,” Diana says at one point. “I want angry shows.” As New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie writes in his essay that accompanies the Criterion release, “What’s critical, in the film, is that Beale’s anger is quickly transformed into yet another product to sell to an audience.”
Fast-forward to the present. Cable newscasts have devolved into rage fests, with politically slanted pundits frothing at the mouth in the quest to fire up their base. Sports talk shows are now an orgy of hot “takes,” in which being loud and provocative is far more important than making sense. It’s hard to buy the idea that any of these people are actually mad as hell so much as they want to make a buck by feeding viewers’ appetite for anger. Rage is like a drug; think of the apocalyptic “rage virus” that fuels the classic 2002 zombie movie “28 Days Later.” And TV “news” is a prolific pusher, perhaps surpassed now by rage-bait social media content.
UBS, the broadcast network in “Network,” is owned by the conglomerate CCA, which — shocker — cares a lot more about padding the bottom line than strengthening democracy with accurate information. Howard’s rants get strong ratings, but they’re not always business-friendly; in one segment he decries a pending and very lucrative merger between CCA and a Saudi conglomerate (paging Stephen Colbert). This stance draws the ire of CCA chairman Arthur Jensen (Ned Beatty).
When Jensen summons Howard to a one-on-one in a spookily lit conference room, he brings Beale-like fire and brimstone to the corporate cause: “You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won’t have it!” Jensen then explains to Howard that “There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM, and ITT, and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.”
A bit blunt, perhaps, but prescient nonetheless. Take CBS News (or, as Nikki Glaser labeled it in her opening Golden Globes monologue, “See BS News”). CBS, after a recent $8 billion merger, is owned by Paramount Skydance Corporation (which, it appears, may soon gobble up Warner Bros. Discovery). CBS News, meanwhile, has undergone a radical shift in personnel and tone. It has decreased its watchdog journalism and reporting on, say, corporate malfeasance and political corruption, and amped up the soft, squishy, administration-friendly news-like content. In related news, Paramount paid $16 million to settle a lawsuit between CBS and Donald Trump, who didn’t like the way the network was covering him, in order to protect its merger from FCC interference. In short, CBS is fully committed to preserving the primal forces of nature.
I fear I have made “Network“ sound like some dry civics lesson. It is anything but. It’s a wild, messy, profane, profound, and hilarious piece of filmmaking, teeming with great performances (Dunaway, Finch, and Beatrice Straight won Oscars; Beatty and William Holden were nominated; and Robert Duvall was never better as UBS corporate hatchet man Paul Hackett). It’s fun to map the movie’s prophecies, but the rewards of watching (and rewatching) hardly stop there.
“Network” is right up there with the best that ’70s New Hollywood had to offer. It’s also of that era’s last great gasps, as the industry itself soon fully embraced big-profit formulas and feels. “Rocky” won the Oscar for best picture that year, not “Network” (or “All the President’s Men”). And the following year brought “Star Wars.” The news might want to make you mad as hell. But the movies prefer to help you escape.
Chris Vognar can be reached at chris.vognar@globe.com. Follow him on Instagram at @chrisvognar and on Bluesky at chrisvognar.bsky.social.