Cinema Seminar:
Network

Taught by Paul Wright, Ph.D.
Instructor of English and History, Main Line Classical Academy

“I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” was the line immortalized in the masterful Network (1976), directed by Sidney Lumet (12 Angry Men, Dog Day Afternoon) from a savagely satirical script by Paddy Chayefsky (Marty, The Hospital). Peter Finch (The Flight of the Phoenix, Sunday Bloody Sunday) won the first posthumous acting Oscar as Howard Beale, a troubled news anchor whose declining television ratings and depression cause him to threaten suicide on air.

Unwittingly finding himself the avatar of so many Americans’ outrage in the troubled 1970s, Beale is transformed into a media “prophet” and ratings juggernaut by ambitious television executives (Robert Duvall and Faye Dunaway). Beale’s friend and news division president Max Schumacher, portrayed beautifully by the legendary William Holden (Sunset Boulevard, The Wild Bunch), finds his own moral standards slipping and watches helplessly as his troubled friend is exploited while journalistic standards are sacrificed.

The dumbing down of a nation is squarely in Lumet and Chayefsky’s sights in this film, which was at the time dismissed by some as hyperbolic and implausible; surely our news, our media, and our nation could never fall quite so far as the film posits. Over time, many would acknowledge that the film was a prescient satire, a funhouse-mirror documentary of a bottom-line world without standards of truth.

Join us to learn more about this captivating film and decide just how much our current media and political ecosystem matches Network’s predictions.