I'M MAD AS HELL AND I'M NOT...

...GOING TO TAKE IT ANYMORE!





Howard Beale ranted and the TV audience had a new mantra!

Once upon a time, there were only three television networks. Along came a fourth network and its ratings were drowning in the deep blue sea until...news commentator Howard Beale gave his speech whose keywords are excerpted here and...program director Diane Christiansen fiendishly injected steroids into the Nielsen Ratings of the United Braodcasting Network (UBS)...

PETER FINCH won a Best Actor Academy Award for his foaming-at-the-mouth Howard Beale character. Best Actress Academy Award winner FAYE DUNAWAY was never so diabolically delicious as when she portrayed Diana Christiansen in Network.

The 1976 film is probably the most ominously quotable movie ever made. To give deserving praise to the actors in NETWORK would take me a month of Mondays. All I will say here is that PADDY CHAYEVSKY is the only scriptwriter to win three solo Best Original Screenplay Academy Awards. Twenty-six years after Sunset Boulevard, WILLIAM HOLDEN proves why he is one of the greatest to ever grace the silver screen.

...Mr. Dylan told us that we all got to serve somebody. That includes Howard Beale. Where there are corporations, there are holding companies. Where there are television networks, there are holding companies.

I want to believe that Paddy Chayevsky was once photographed by Otto Jensen. Whether true or not, I will believe this. Anyone photographed by Otto was enthralled by Otto's aura. Therefore, Mr. Chayevsky, whose other two scriptwriting Academy Awards were for MARTY and THE HOSPITAL, named a Network character after Otto.
The actor is Ned Beatty.

Arthur Jensen is the Chief Executive Officer of the conglomerate owning the United Broadcasting System. That is, Arthur Jensen is the CEO of CCA, which owns UBS. Howard Beale is sitting at the other end of the thirty-foot table pictured here. Jensen exhorts a volcanic tirade without blowing his lid. I would love to quote the whole damn thing but will only quote the final words:

We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable by-laws of busi-ness. The world is a business, Mr. Beale! It has been since man crawled out of the slime, and our children, Mr. Beale, will live to see that perfect world in which there is no war and famine, oppression and brutality--one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused. And I have chosen you to preach this evangel, Mr. Beale.

Why me?

Because you're on television, dummy. Sixty million people watch you every night of the week, Monday through Friday.