Trivia / Network

• Beam Me Up, Scotty!: The actual line from Howard Beale's rant is "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!" Often misquoted as "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not gonna take it anymore!" Also, Beale doesn't shout it out the window; only his viewers do, although their wording differs slightly... which makes this case of Beam Me Up, Scotty! understandable. Another element factoring into this is that the "as mad as Hell" version of the line was a flub that was left in the final product; the "mad as Hell" one actually is how it was meant to be written.
• California Doubling: For once, inverted, with the New York exurbs doubling for California and Arizona (where the Ecumenical Liberation Army filmed their bank robbery). For various cost and logistical reasons, the TV studio scenes were shot in Toronto.
• Cast the Expert:
  • Arthur Burghardt (the Great Ahmed Khan) was an actual ex-convict, serving several years in prison for Draft Dodging.
  • Darryl Hickman^note Twin brother of Dwayne Hickman, who played Bill Herron (the bearded UBS program exec who screens the ELA bank robbery footage), worked as a network executive for a while after he gave up acting full-time as an adult (he'd been a prolific child actor).
• Cast the Runner-Up: Sidney Lumet briefly explored the possibility of Peter Finch playing Max Schumacher and William Holden playing Howard Beale. Holden preferred the role of Max and Finch was cast as Beale after Lumet discovered that he could do a convincing American accent.
• Creator's Favorite Episode: Sidney Lumet thought this was his best film, and Faye Dunaway holds it in high regard, naming the climactic scene where the UBS brass discusses what to do with Howard Beale as her single favorite scene of her entire acting career.
• Deleted Scene: One scene in the shooting script that never got filmed was Diana, during her visit to California, going to a gay bar to hire a male hustler for sex.
• Doing It for the Art: 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 for the screen test.
  • He was initially not considered because the producers felt he couldn't convincingly fake an American accent. So he played them a tape he had made of himself reading newspapers in an American accent. Along with his screen test, the tapes clinched the deal.
• Enforced Method Acting: Beatrice Straight's Oscar-winning scene was deliberately filmed by Sydney Lumet after multiple back to back rehearsals and filmed takes which ultimately meant that by the time the takes that made the final cut were shot, Straight was exhausted and while still managing to give a powerhouse performance of bitter anger and sadness also came off with a distinct air of desperation and defeat that was exactly what Lumet wanted out of her. When Paddy Chayefsky, who in many ways had more control over the movie than Lumet did and was very particular about the tone he was trying to set, raised disagreements with Lumet about the efficacy of this idea, Lumet waved him off by saying, "Paddy, you know comedy, I know divorce." ^* Given that Lumet had already been twice divorced by the time of filming and would go through another one less than two years later he wasn't kidding.
• Fake American: Peter Finch, born in England, raised in Australia, and living in Jamaica at the time, as Howard Beale.
• Looping Lines: One of Louise's lines was very obviously post-dubbed, because Beatrice Straight mispronounced "emeritus" as "em-er-REE-tus. Straight and Sidney Lumet both said they'd never actually heard the word spoken before, and didn't realize she was saying it wrong.
• Mid-Development Genre Shift:
  • Network was directly descended from The Imposters, a script for a proposed TV series that Paddy Chayefsky wrote in 1969. In The Imposters, the main character is a Max Schumacher-type figure (named Eddie Gresham) who holds the job that Diana Christensen would have at UBS (which was still the name of the fictitious network even then). He tries to reconcile the junk he's been programming with his idealistic plans to produce quality programming, then concludes that it's a hopeless battle. CBS, unwilling to do a TV show that criticized TV, passed on it. Years later Chayefsky conceived the saga of Howard Beale independently, and resurrected some ideas from The Imposter.
  • Before coming up with the idea of an anchor who cracks up, Chayefsky also considered the angle of a documentary-style look at a typical day behind-the-scenes at a big network, which seems very Sorkin-like in hindsight.
• One-Take Wonder: 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. What's in the completed film is the second take for the first half of the speech, and the second half from the first take.
• The Other Marty:
  • Arthur Jensen was orginally played by veteran character actor Roberts Blossom. Blossom had previously played the ill-fated patient Guernsey in Chayefsky's The Hospital. Since Guernsey was another character who leads a deranged old man to cause mischief by giving him an apocalyptic sermon, Blossom as Jensen made sense on paper. But he got fired because Paddy Chayefsky didn't like his performance, and, as producer, he outranked Sidney Lumet, who thought Blossom was doing fine. Having bumped into Robert Altman during the shoot, Lumet mentioned the situation and Altman recommended Ned Beatty as a replacement. Beatty had worked with Altman in Nashville.
  • Very nearly happened with Faye Dunaway. She had trouble delivering Paddy Chayefsky's unique style of dialogue and Sidney Lumet pondered replacing her. Then she suddenly refused to do the Diana/Max sex scene, and the studio even gave Lumet and Chayefsky permission to fire her, but instead they had her agent convince her to do the scene.
• Pop-Culture Urban Legends: It's often claimed that a young Tim Robbins plays one of the assassins in the final scene. Robbins (who would've still been in high school at the time) is on record denying this, but it's been propagated everywhere from IMDB to Turner Classic Movies.
• Reality Subtext: Like Max, William Holden was in a May–December Romance at the time (with future Hart to Hart star Stefanie Powers). Peter Finch was also married to a woman who was a couple decades his junior.
• Throw It In!: Beale's signature line was written as "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!" Peter Finch inadvertently said "I'm as mad as hell", and it stayed in the final cut.
• Wag the Director: While Sydney Lumet was still very much the director and in charge of the final product, everyone involved in the production is very quick to admit that it was ultimately Paddy Chayefsky's movie. Not only was the script entirely his doing but he also refused to entertain the idea of any changes or alterations to it by anyone at all, and was also present on the set during rehearsals and filming for a large percentage of the time to make sure his dialogue was being delivered and performed exactly how he had intended and acted as what essentially amounted to a co-director to Lumet. Worth noting too that this was all approved of and supported by not just Lumet but also the entire cast and crew, all of whom had tremendous respect for Chayefsky and trusted his vision because of it. This is ultimately why his writing credit is "BY Paddy Chayefsky" ^* as opposed to the more common "written by" because there was absolutely no doubt at all among anyone who's movie it really was.
• Word of God: It has long been rumored that Tim Robbins made his film debut playing an assassin at the film's end. But Robbins has debunked that rumor, saying he was still in high school at the time.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Sidney Lumet had been Paddy Chayefsky's first choice all along to direct, but other names considered were Bob Fosse, Mike Nichols, Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, John Huston, Elia Kazan^note Who had been Faye Dunaway's acting mentor, Roman Polański, Sydney Pollack and Martin Scorsese. Hal Ashby's name was also tossed around, but Chayefsky didn't like Shampoo.
  • Similarly, Chayefsky, Lumet and the studio put together lists of ideas for casting, finally settling on a handful of names.
    • For Howard Beale, George C. Scott, the star of The Hospital, was courted and was interested, but said no when they refused to cast his wife Trish Van Devere as Diana Christensen. Paul Newman was contacted but turned it down. Chayefsky decided on Gene Hackman as his preferred choice, with Henry Fonda (also a candidate for Max), Sterling Hayden, Jimmy Stewart, Robert Montgomery, Glenn Ford and Cary Grant as other possibilities. Peter Finch, who was never even considered, practically begged for the part.
    • Faye Dunaway was always the top choice for Diana, with consideration also given to Candice Bergen (also considered for Louise), Ellen Burstyn, Natalie Wood, Jane Fonda, and Diane Keaton. Lumet pitched the idea of Vanessa Redgrave, but Chayefsky, a passionate Zionist, loathed Redgrave's support for the Palestinian Liberation Army. Lumet, who like Chayfesky was Jewish, compared it to The Hollywood Blacklist while Chayefsky claimed "not when a Jew does it to a Gentile."^note The actual blacklist allegedly has its roots in anti-Semitism, namely blaming communism on the Jews and combining that with claims that the Jews control Hollywood. It was that line of thinking that, tragically, led to the Holocaust. Chayefsky later made waves at the Academy Awards when he chided Redgrave for her anti-Zionist comments in her acceptance speech for Julia.
    • For Max Schumacher, Lee Marvin had been Chayefsky's preferred choice, but William Holden was also always a candidate even before he formally got the role. Burt Lancaster and Walter Matthau were also short-listed. Dunaway suggested Robert Mitchum.
  • George Clooney pursued the idea of a live TV adaptation of the film around 2005, which would've been a nice bit of symmetry with Chayefsky's work on live TV dramas in The '50s^note Clooney had starred in a live TV adaptation of Fail Safe five years earlier. One reason it never happened is that, with what eventually happened to network TV in the decades after the film, Clooney wasn't so sure that audiences would even recognize that the story was supposed to be satire.

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