I know, I really need to pick a great movie scene from after 1980…
Just posted one on On The Waterfront, and here I am back in 1976 for Network, another classic scene cued by a single line of dialogue:
“I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this any more!”
This rant won Peter Finch the Best Actor Oscar. It also bagged one for young Faye Dunaway as Best Actress, and Best Screenplay for the superb Paddy Cheyefsky. The movie has a young Robert Duvall, as well as classic stuff from William Holden and Ned Beatty. It’s from 1976 though, so it goes without saying half my screenwriting Millennials at Columbia College will have missed it. Check the scene and put Network into your Netflix cue, Good Millennial!
The Wikipedia Elves have provided us with still more sterling facts about this movie: “In 2000, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”. In 2002, it was inducted into the Producers Guild of America Hall of Fame as a film that has “set an enduring standard for U.S. American entertainment”.[3] In 2006, Chayefsky’s script was voted one of the top-ten screenplays by the Writers Guild of America, East. In 2007, the film was 64th among the 100 greatest American films as chosen by the American Film Institute, a ranking slightly higher than the one AFI had given it ten years earlier.”
The world has let Howard Beale (Finch) down. He’s announced that he will commit suicide on live national TV. The honchos debate–do they let him back on the air? This is satire, so yeah, they allow it. Nobody knows what Beale will do but it’s gonna grab a 40 rating for sure.
While the nature of television has changed with the Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, HBO, and YouTubes of the world out there delivering content access 24/7, the movie’s message of humanity being crushed out by corporate mega-conglomerate interest still rings true. Howard Beale is the mad voice of the little guy, pinned down in his single room alone, no connection to the world at large, helpless, just holding on. That man has found his champion in Howard Beale, though nobody knows what he’s going to do when he races in from a rainstorm, and sits down in his anchor chair with only seconds to spare:
— and, suddenly, the obsessed face of HOWARD BEALE, gaunt, haggard, red-eyed with unworldly fervor, hair, streaked and plastered on his brow, manifestly mad, fills the MONITOR SCREEN.
HOWARD (ON MONITOR)
I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things
are bad. It’s a depression. Everybody’s out of work or scared
of losing their job, the dollar buys a nickel’s worth, banks are
going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter, punks
are running wild in the streets, and there’s nobody anywhere who
seems to know what to do, and there’s no end to it. We know
the air’s unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and
we sit and watch our tee-vees while some local newscaster
tells us today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three
violent crimes, as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be.
We all know things are bad. Worse than bad. They’re crazy.
It’s like everything’s going crazy. So we don’t go out any
more. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we live in
gets smaller, and all we ask is please, at least leave us alone
in our own living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my tee-vee
and my hair-dryer and my steel-belted radials, and I won’t say
anything, just leave us alone. Well, I’m not going to leave you
alone. I want you to get mad —
In this next passage you can see the speed of the crosscutting in the script. Remarkable because Cheyefsky hits us with powerful language. The very heart of the movie’s theme is delivered here(or perhaps later when Beale asks a Divine-like Network executive (Beatty) why he was chosen to deliver the message of the Gods… “because you’re on television, dummy.”)
Apologies, but have to do some trims here in the name of space, as Beale rants on, and America listens:
ANOTHER ANGLE showing the rapt attention of the PEOPLE in the control room, especially of DIANA —
HOWARD
I don’t want you to riot. I don’t want you to protest. I
don’t want you to write your congressmen. Because I wouldn’t
know what to tell you to write. I don’t know what to do about the
depression and the inflation and the defense budget and the Russians
and crime in the street. All I know is first you got to get
mad. You’ve got to say: “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going
to take this any more. I’m a human being, goddammit. My life
has value.” So I want you to get up now. I want you to get
out of your chairs and go to the window. Right now. I want
you to go to the window, open it, and stick your head out
and yell. I want you to yell: “I’m mad as hell and I’m not
going to take this any more!”
DIANA
How many stations does this go out live to?
HUNTER
Sixty-seven. I know it goes out to Atlanta and Louisville,
I think —
HOWARD (ON MONITOR)
— Get up from your chairs. Go to the window. Open it.
Stick your head out and yell and keep yelling —
But DIANA has already left the control room and is scurrying down —
INT. CORRIDOR
— yanking doors open, looking for a phone…
INT. THACKERAY’S OFFICE
PITOFSKY
They’re yelling in Baton Rouge.
DIANA grabs the phone from him and listens to the people of Baton Rouge yelling their anger in the streets —
HOWARD (ON CONSOLE)
— Things have got to change.
But you can’t change them unless
you’re mad. You have to get mad.
Go to the window —
DIANA
( her eyes glow with excitement)
The next time somebody asks you
to explain what ratings are,
you tell them: that’s ratings!
(exults)
Son of a bitch, we struck the
mother lode!
William Holden looks out his window when he hears one voice, then another, then a chorus, then a thunder of voices, all screaming it:
MAX joins his daughter at the window. RAIN sprays against his face —
MAX’S P.O.V.
He sees occasional windows open, and, just across from his apartment house, a MAN opens the front door of a brownstone —
MAN (shouts)
I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this any more!
OTHER SHOUTS are heard. From his twenty-third floor vantage point, MAX sees the erratic landscape of Manhattan buildings for some blocks, and, silhouetted HEADS in window after window, here, there, and then seemingly everywhere, SHOUTING out into the slashing black RAIN of the streets —
VOICES
I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this any more!
A terrifying enormous CLAP of natural THUNDER, followed by a frantic brilliant FULGURATION of LIGHTNING; and now the gathering CHORUS of scattered SHOUTS seems to be coming from the whole, huddled, black horde of the city’s people, SCREAMING together in fury, an indistinguishable tidal roar of human rage as formidable as the natural THUNDER again ROARING, THUNDERING, RUMBLING above. It sounds like a Nuremberg rally, the air thick and trembling with it —
FULL SHOT – MAX
standing with his DAUGHTER by the open terrace window-doors, RAIN spraying against them, listening to the stupefying ROARS and THUNDERING rising from all around him. He closes his eyes, sighs, there’s nothing he can do about it any more, it’s out of his hands.
