NOTE: This film was scripted by Paddy Chayefsky more than 30 years ago. Network news and American Culture had not nearly descended…yet…to the levels prophesied by Chayefsky. Which makes this film so extraordinary. Satire in 1975 is Reality in 2005.
Written by Paddy Chayefsky
Directed by Sidney Lumet
Starring: William Holden, Peter Finch, Faye Dunaway, Robert Duvall
This story is about Howard Beale, who was the network anchorman at USB television. In his time Beale had been a mandarin of television, the grand old man of news with a Hutt rating of 16 and a 28 audience share. In 1969, however, his fortunes began to decline and he fell to a 22 share. The following year his wife died and he was left a childless widow with an 8 rating and he became morose and isolated and began to drink heavily. And on September 22, 1975, he was fired, effective in two weeks.
Beale (Peter Finch) and his longtime friend Max Schumacher (William Holden) commiserate at a local NY bar…
“I’m going to kill myself…Blow my brains out right in the middle of the 7 O’clock News.”
“You’ll get a hell of a rating. I’ll tell you that. We could make a series out of it. Suicide of the Week. What the hell…why limit ourselves? Execution of the Week. Terrorist of the Week.”
“I love it.”
“Suicide! Assassination! Mad bombers! Mafia hitmen!. Automobile mishaps!…The Death Hour! Great Sunday night show for the whole family.”
Howard Beale…ON THE AIR
“Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to announce that I will be retiring from this program in two weeks time, because of low ratings. Since this was the only thing I had going for me, I’ve decided to kill myself. I’m going to blow my brains out, right here on this program, a week from today. Tune in next Tuesday. That should give the public relations people a week to promote the show. Ought to get a hell of a rating out of that. A 50 share at least.”
Hacket…the corporate rep from CCA, the parent company of UBS (Robert Duvall)
“We have a stockholder’s meeting tomorrow at which time we’re going to announce the restructuring of management and I do not want this grotesque incident to interfere with that!”
Dianna Christensen, director of entertainment at UBS (Faye Dunaway)
“He’s got eight minutes of a bank robbery that is absolutely sensational! Authentic stuff! Shot while the robbery was going on…Look we’ve got a bunch of hobgoblin radicals called the Ecumenical Liberation Army who go around taking pictures of themselves robbing banks. Maybe they’ll take movies of them kidnaping an heiress, hijacking a 747, blowing up a bridge, assassinating ambassadors!!! We open each week’s segment with that authentic footage, hire a couple of writers to write a story behind the footage and we have ourselves a tv series!!!
Howard Beale…ON THE AIR
“Good evening. Today is September 24 and this is my last broadcast. Yesterday I announced that I was going to commit public suicide, admittedly an act of madness. Well, I’ll tell you what happened…I just ran out of bullshit. Bullshit is all the reasons we give for living. And if we can’t think of any reasons of our own, we always have the god of bullshit. Well if there’s anyone out there who can look around this demented slaughterhouse of a world we live in and tell me Man is a noble creature, believe me that man is full of bullshit….so I don’t have any bullshit left. I just ran out of it you see.”
Dianna Christensen, pitching “The Howard Beale Show” to Hackett…
“The Arabs jack up the price of oil another 20%, the CIA is reading Hubert Humphrey’s mail, there’s a civil war in Angola, another one in Beirut…and the front page of The Daily News is Howard Beale. And a page one, two column story in The Times….I want that show! I see Howard Beale as a messianic prophet inveighing against the hypocrisies of our time! And I’m talking about a $6 cost per thousand show. I’m talking about $130,000 minutes!”
Howard Beale: ON THE AIR
“A voice told me, ‘I want you to tell the people the Truth.’ And I said, ‘Why me?’ And he said, ‘Because you’re on television dummy.’”
Beale to Schumacher…
“This is not a psychotic episode. This is a cleansing moment of clarity. I’m…imbued, Max…with some special spirit. It is an exalted flow of the space/time continuum…I feel on the verge of some great and ultimate truth.
Howard Beale: ON THE AIR
“I don’t have to tell you that things are bad. Everybody knows that things are bad. Everybody is out of work, or scared of losing their jobs. The dollar buys a nickel’s worth. Shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the streets and there doesn’t seem to be anybody anywhere who knows what to do and there’s no end to it. The air is unfit to breathe and the food unfit to eat. And we sit watching the television while some local newscaster tells us we had 15 homicides and 63 violent crimes as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be. We know things are bad…worse than bad. And you say please at least leave us alone in our living room. At least let us have our toaster and our tv and our steel-belted radials and leave us alone and we won’t say anything.
“Well I won’t leave you alone. I want you to get mad. I don’t want you to protest or riot or write to your congressman. I wouldn’t know what to tell you to write….All I know is first, you’ve got to get mad! You’ve got to say, ‘I’m a human being, goddamnit! My life has value!’ So I want you to get up now. Get up out of your chairs. Go to the window and open it and stick your head out and yell, ‘I’M AS MAD AS HELL AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE IT ANYMORE! Things have got to change!!!
The Narrator:
By mid-October, the Howard Beale Show had settled into a 42 share, more than equal to all the other news shows combined.
A polemic by Beale attacking CCA, the parent company of UBS, invokes the wrath of its CEO, Arthur Jensen. Beale is summoned to CCA corporate headquarters where he meets Jensen…
“Good morning, Mr. Beale. They tell me you’re a mad man.”
“Mad as a hatter.”
“Who isn’t? I’m going to take you into our conference room. Seems a more seemly a setting for what I have to say…
“….YOU HAVE MEDDLED WITH THE PRIMAL FORCES OF NATURE, MR. BEALE. AND I WON’T HAVE IT. IS THAT CLEAR? You think you may have stopped a business deal but that is not the case. The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country and now they must put it back. It is ebb and flow. Tidal gravity. Ecological balance. You are an old man who thinks there are nations and peoples…there are NO nations. There are NO peoples. There are no Russians. Or Arabs. There is no Third World. No West. There is only one holistic system of systems. One vast interwoven, interconnected, interactive, multi-varied, multi-national dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars. Reich marks, Rubles, Pounds and Sheckles. It is the international system of currency that determines the totality of Life on this planet. This is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and sub-atomic and galactic structure of things today and YOU have messed with the primal forces of Nature!
“Am I getting through to you Mr. Beale?
“There is no America. No democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T. And Dupont and Dow and Union Carbide and Exxon. They are the nations of the world today. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business and has been since Man crawled out of the slime….and I have chose you to preach this evangel.”
(Beal:) “I have seen the face of God.”
“Mr. Beale, you just might be right.”
“But why me?”
“Because you’re on television dummy.”
Howard Beale: ON THE AIR
“I asked you people to stand up and fight for your heritage and you did and we won. It was a radiant eruption of democracy. But I think that was about it fellas. That sort of thing is not likely to happen again. Because at the bottom of all our terrified souls, we knew democracy is a dying giant. A sick decaying political concept writing in its final pain…what is finished is the notion that this great country is dedicated to the freedom and flourishing of every individual in it. It’s the individual who’s finished. It’s every single one of you out there. Because this is no longer a nation of independent individuals. It’s a nation of 200 odd million transistorized, deodorized whiter than white, steel belted bodies, totally unnecessary and as replaceable as piston rods. It’s time to say, ‘Is de-humanization’ such a bad thing’? The whole world is becoming humanoid. Creatures that look human but aren’t.”
Narrator:
It was a depressing argument. Nobody particularly cared to hear that their lives were utterly useless. By the end of the week the Howard Beale Show had dropped a point in the ratings and the trend of shares dropped under 40 for the first time since November.
Management discusses Beale’s future. Hackett and Dianna.
“So what do we do about this Beale, son of a bitch?
“I suppose we’ll have to kill him.”
Narrator:
This was the story of Howard Beale, the first known instance of a man being killed because of lousy ratings.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90ELleCQvew
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Just stood next to Prince Harry wearing a duck hat here in the backstage bar at