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Go to patreon.com literature to sign up today. Hello. He began his career as an accountant and wound up one of the most celebrated and by some measures the most honored playwright and screenwriter in American history. Perhaps most famous for Marty, the Academy Award winning film about a New York butcher looking for love and network. The indictment of television that tapped into a feeling that the country was mad as hell and not going to take this anymore. Paddy Chayefsky today on the history of literature. Okay, here we go. Welcome to the podcast. It was quite a weekend here in America as The country turned 250 years old and it is not at all clear where we're headed. Our trajectory is less like a plane in ascent or a rocket headed to the moon than a damaged aircraft doing loop de loops. Are we in an upswing or is this false promise? Or are we headed down but we'll right the thing eventually? Are we going to get there and then crash or crash before we get there? And just where are we headed anyway? It's like one of those crazy spins they do where even the pilots no longer know if they're right side up or upside down. Is this a celebration of freedom or a nation in free fall? I'll leave that to you to decide. But let me tell you what I had in mind at first, in honor of this momentous weekend, I was going to reclaim an episode about Thoreau and civil disobedience, which seemed appropriate. And there's a new book about the Emerson Circle that would have been a nice tie in. We'll have my conversation with the author of that book coming up for you in a few weeks. And I received a request to rerun an interview about Shakespeare in a Divided America with one of our favorite guests, James Shapiro, which also felt appropriate. But in the end, I started rewatching Network and I fell into a Paddy Chayefsky rabbit hole. And I thought, why not? This seems to have all the highs and lows we need, and the things that are on my mind are right here in this film. Famously, Paddisayevsky predicted where television was headed back in 1976, 50 years ago. We'll see what he got right and what it has all meant and where things stand today. I thought about Paddy Chayevsky also while watching the Bob Dylan biopic with Timothee Chalamet and Ed Norton as Pete Sager. Oh my goodness, this film. I know I'm coming late to it. I think it came out last year or the year before. It really got to me. I'll be talking about that a bit today, too. I think the reason why, if I get there, the reason why I thought about Patty was because of that episode that Mike and I did when Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize. Mike was against it, you might recall the first songwriter to win the Nobel Prize. In fact, that's how the movie ends, with a title card saying Bob Dylan is the only songwriter to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. And then it said he did not attend the ceremony. That's the final words of the film. A little odd, I thought. What are we supposed to make of that? That he did not attend the ceremony. What? Oh, there's that Bob. Breaking rules till the end, defying the establishment. Just like he defied the Newport Folk Festival and Pete Seeger and all those do gooders. Rebel being his own person, an artist. I don't know. He wrote a pretty long speech about Melville and some other writers who meant something to him, and he sent that in instead of attending the ceremony that the Nobel Prize Committee had thrown in his honor. And he was in his late 70s by then, I think. Anyway, whatever. If I am the first podcaster to win the Nobel Prize, I will happily accept in person, if that matters to anyone. Maybe I just ruined my chances. Do we want our heroes to be cranky and curmudgeonly and to rebel? Rock and roll. Here's me in my leather jacket. Well, that's kind of what we're going to be talking about today. That's what we wanted in 1976. That's the world I grew up in. The Cold War air I was breathing. You don't want to sell out. Rock and roll is all about rebellion. Well, that's kind of gone, isn't it? Rock and roll is practically gone, and the idea of selling out is gone. We might have a different view now, but it was Paddy Chayefsky's world, the one he was inhabiting, one he was helping to create. Anyway, after Mike and I did that episode about whether Bob Dylan, where any songwriter should win the Nobel Prize for literature, I thought about filmmakers. How about a Nobel for Orson Welles? Or Stanley Kubrick or Ingmar Bergman? What about Kurosawa? Satyajit Ray? Martin Scorsese, Jean Luc Godard, Chiarostami? Edward Yang? Some might say Werner Herzog or Jodorowsky Or Pasolini, Errol Morris, Charlie Chaplin? Woody Allen had a shot back in the day. No chance now. Almodovar. Hmm. Kind of giving you a preview of what the episode would have been like. It's a long list. We haven't even mentioned any women. Agnes Varda, Jane Campion, Katherine Bigelow, Joanna Hogg, Ava Duvernay, Claire Denis Mira Nair, AKA Mamdani. Mom, we could do this all day. Maybe. Maybe this should be an episode. But it's. It's more likely, I think, that if we do have a Nobel Prize winner, we'll have a screenwriter. We've had so many playwrights, there's really no reason why a screenwriter shouldn't qualify if they were making movies that were worthy of the award. I know they don't award the Nobel posthumously, but on the short list of individuals, people who could have won, maybe should have won, might have won a Nobel for their screenplays, we can put Paddy Chayefsky. Okay, let's hear an email before we do. You know what? Let's save the email. We'll see if we have time. I have a feeling we're going to run a little long today, so get ready. Paddy Chayefsky was born Sidney Chayefsky in the Bronx in 1923. His father was Harry Chayefsky, his mother was Gussie, and her maiden name was Stuchevsky. When she was married, she went from being Gussie Stuchevsky to Gussy Chayevsky. It's like the Russian Jew version of being a Smith and marrying a Smythe. Sidney could speak intelligently at the age of two and a half. And at his New York public schools, including DeWitt Clinton High School, he was known for his verbal ability and his work as editor of the school's literary magazine. He graduated early from high school and started attending the City College of New York. And he played semi professional football. And then in 1943, two weeks before graduation, he was drafted into the army. His grandfather, as it happened, had served 25 years in the Russian army, but Sidney was drafted into the army to go fight in Europe, and he received the nickname Paddy while he was there. The story ran that he was supposed to wake up early for kitchen duty. And he told the officer, don't wake me up. I can't make it because I have to attend Mass. And the officer, knowing that he wasn't Catholic and was in fact Jewish, said, oh, sure you do, Patty, as if to say, don't pretend to be Irish or something, we know you're not Catholic. And the nickname stuck. And friends later said that Patti liked the way the name sounded and liked the way the name defied people's expectations, challenged their thinking, made them wonder a bit about the point of view of the person writing these plays. Writing these plays? What plays? We're still in the army years. Well, that's where the writing began, actually. When he entered the army, he was planning to be an accountant when he got out. But he was wounded by a landmine in Germany. And while he was in the hospital recovering, he started writing. He wrote the story and lyrics to a musical. And it was so good that the show was produced by the army to entertain the troops. And the musical toured European army bases for two years. And then opened in London's West End. Suddenly, Sidney Chayefsky, future accountant, was Paddy Chayefsky, successful playwright, and he never looked back. He returned from the war and worked briefly in his uncle's print shop. But he was a writer now. Stories for the magazines, a trip to Hollywood to write for the movies. He wrote the outline of a play that was sold as a novella and then bought by Hollywood Radio scripts. He was writing gags for radio hosts. Not too much was produced. I sold some plays, he later said, to men who had an uncanny ability not to raise money, end quote. He was married in 1949 and had a son in 1955. And it was in the 1950s that he. That he really earned his reputation as a writer. Writing now for men who did have a canny ability to raise money or who had no need to raise it as they were working for television studios. Television, a medium that was taking off and needed content to fill the hours that it was on the air and that it was broadcasting and television at this time entered the first of its golden ages, in large part because they turned to New York's Broadway scene to find content. The rise of television is an incredible story, really. Milton Berle, we'll use him as an example. He had a show that was on the air from 1948 to 1956. Okay, eight years. At the start of those years, 1948, television was in 2% of American homes. By the time he left the air with that show eight years later, it was in more than 70% of American homes in eight years. Two years after that, the number was 90%. Everyone, almost every. It was 95%. A few years after that, everyone, everyone had a television, and it was new. It was new. And the people producing television were producing something that had never been produced before. What is this broadcast? How do we broadcast these pictures and sounds to the entire country? Nearly every genre of television was invented during that handful of years. The Western, the situation comedy, the hospital drama, the nightly news program, the morning news and feature show, the variety show, the soap opera, the quiz show. All of those came out in that brief period of time. But the reason why we usually call it golden age of television is because it also. They relied heavily on a type of show that soon disappeared, the live drama. New York actors and playwrights and directors brought in. They were brought into stage dramas that were broadcast live on programs with names like the Pulitzer Prize Playhouse, the Goodyear TV Playhouse, Kraft Television Theater, US Steel Hour, and Playhouse 90. These programs showed dramatic adaptations of classic plays. In literature, like Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, which was on often along with Shakespeare and Ibsen and George Bernard Shaw. George Bernard Shaw, I've come to understand it's how he pronounced his name. Original plays and teleplays by writers like Gore Vidal and Rod Serling, who went on to create the Twilight Zone, and Reginald Rose, who wrote twelve Angry Men. Even among these luminaries, Paddy Chayefsky was perhaps chief among them as the representative of the era of live performances on television, thanks in large part to his episode Marty, which was a runaway popular and critical success. It's often cited as the pinnacle of the golden age. It was then made into a film that went on to win the Academy Awards for best Picture, best actor, best director and best screenplay, which was the award that went to Paddy Chayefsky alone. He's the only screenwriter to win three Oscars for best screenplay that were given to him alone. Others have won three, but only some or all of them were in combination with someone else. In fact, Petchevsky earned an honor that maybe says even more than an Academy Award. Maybe not more than an Academy Award, but it's kind of a singular tribute. When network came out 21 years after Marty, the screen credits said network by Paddy Chayefsky. It didn't say written by Paddy Chayefsky or network story and screenplay by Paddy Chayefsky. Think about who is left out by that word. By that network is by Paddy Chayefsky. The director is not there. The producer Chayefsky is Val vaulted above them. This is a big deal. Guilds are involved. Aaron Sorkin, there's a. There's a documentary. A lot of this information and sort of my understanding of Chayefsky and his importance and the themes we're talking about today comes from a documentary that came out recently about Paddy Chayefsky. I think it's on HBO Max, one of those streaming services. You can find it somewhere, I'm sure. I recommend was a wonderful couple of hours on the treadmill watching Paddy Chayefsky and Aaron Sorkin, the writer, I'm sure you know him. He's behind the West Wing and Social Network and A Few Good Men and dozens of other successes, smash hits, prize winners. Aaron Sorkin's a brand name and he was highly influenced by Paddy Chayefsky. And he's obsessed with that credit, that word. Buy, network, buy Paddy Chayefsky. Aaron Sorkin has won prizes. He's fabulously wealthy. He's practically a household name, but he doesn't have a movie that's by him. He only has a story by him or a script by him or a based on a play by him. We are getting close to a break here, but let's talk about Marty before we take our break. I'm going to talk about six, I think, Paddy Chefsky films, not counting the documentary. I've watched or rewatched four of them. Maybe I'm going to talk about five. We might skip over Altered States. We'll end with network, I think, But I've watched or rewatched four of these in the past week or so. Marty is the second best after network, and it's very different from network. It's the difference between the 1950s and the 1970s, you could say. It also feels like the difference between the 19th and the 20th centuries in a way. It's in black and white. It stars Ernest Borgnine in a fantastic performance, and it's absolutely heartbreaking. Do you remember the movie Quiz show with John Turturro and Ralph Fiennes, directed by Robert Redford? The movie is that movie tells. It's a very good movie, too. It tells the story of the 1950s quiz show scandal where a member of the New York intellectual set, the Van Dorns, Charles Van Dorn, was part of a cheating scheme on these early television quiz shows. One of the themes of that movie was that there was another candidate who had more of an immigrant or another contestant, I should say, who had more of an immigrant background. Herb Stemple was his name. He was played by John Turturro. He was the candidate who was pitted against the golden boy played by Ralph Fiennes, named Charles Van Dorn, the Columbia University professor and part of the distinguished Van Dorn family. The types who knew all about poetry and Shakespeare and had, I don't know if they came over on the Mayflower, but they had been in New York forever, that kind of thing. Well, Herb Stemple was set up by the producers to lose because he wasn't what the business side of television wanted to broadcast across the country. He wasn't what the sponsors wanted. The quiz show scandal is often seen as the end of television's first golden age, where we realized that this new medium wasn't going to be bringing Shakespeare and Ibsen to the masses forever. It was primarily going to be there to sell people cigarettes and cars and Coca Cola. The thumb would be pressed on the scale. The thumb of dumbing down would be pressed on the scale. Well, before that happened, if you'll Recall in the movie, Herb Stempel came in and he was talking about the movie that he loved, that he thought told his story, that he identified with, that he is someone living in an immigrant family where people spoke with accents and didn't look like Ralph Fiennes with his pedigreed Mayflower family type. Stempel had a movie that spoke to him and about him and for him. And that movie was Marty. Marty was originally shown on the Philco Goodyear television playhouse in 1953, and it starred Rod Steiger, who went on to several successes. You may know Rod Steiger from On the Waterfront and what was the other movie? In the Heat of the Night. Duck, you sucker. That was his. But on the Waterfront, if you remember the speech by Marlon Brando where he says, I could have been a contender. Well, he was saying that to Rod Steiger. Rod Steiger was in the television version of Marty. It was a big success. People wanted more. The film version came out in 1955 and starred Ernest Borgnine won the Academy Award for Best Picture. It was a somewhat unlikely winner. It's the shortest film ever to win Best Picture. Still, it's only 90 minutes, 89 minutes, I think, and it's a fairly quiet picture. Best picture before. The year before was on the Waterfront with Marlon Brando, and the year after was around the world in 80 days bigger productions. Marty, by contrast, is an intense character study of a man in an immigrant immigrant family who's starting to get older. And he's lonely. He's in his early 30s. He's a butcher. He's thinking about buying his store. He's a good friend and a good son, but everyone wants him to get married, and yet they don't want him to get married. His friends want him to go out with them to a dance. And he wants to go, too, except he kind of doesn't. The famous exchange of dialogue is familiar to bored teenagers everywhere. What do you want to do tonight? I don't know. What do you want to do? I don't know. Pause. Talk about other stuff. Then what do you want to do tonight? I don't know. What do you want to do? What they want to do is meet girls. Or to be clear, women. These are men getting on in years, and they're about to give up on women, or women as anything other than sisters and sisters in law and mothers and nieces. They're about to give up on the idea of marriage because these women aren't attracted to them. But before you think of this as an incel. Rant it's really more about isolation and the pressures of being in a community with the other isolatos, as Melville's Ishmael might call them, because the mother, as much as she wants Marty to get married and pressures him to get out there, meet someone, get married, she really kind of doesn't. She doesn't want a daughter in law who might toss her out of the house, as happened to Marty's mother's sister recently. And those friends who are eager to find a date and get Marty out and get him to go to the dance. Well, unless and until that happens, unless and until they find a date, they don't want Marty to find one either, right? Misery loves company. Well, one of those dances which Marty attends reluctantly, he gets shot down for the nth time on the phone. But then he does go to one of those dances and he does meet a nice woman who is in the process of being jilted herself. And Marty is kind to her and she's sweet in return and, and they have a nice conversation. And Marty eventually has to decide whether he can break free from his chains. The social pressure of those closest to him who love him for his misery because it provides them with company. Will he break free and be happy? Or will he break the one thing that has happened to him recently that has mattered? It's a surprisingly heart wrenching story because it's well constructed and it introduces us as film viewers to Paddy Chayefsky's specialty, which is dramatic speech, almost like a monologue or soliloquy, which is very well crafted. Chayefsky was, as a writer, he was an actor's dream on stage as well as screen. And there are times in every Chayefsky movie where it feels like you're really watching him play and you can imagine the character delivering lines that are going to keep the audience on the edge of their seat. But what Chayefsky does well when he's at his best is to make those soliloquies smart and emotionally powerful and eloquent, but eloquent in a natural idiom. Marty the butcher doesn't suddenly start talking like a graduate of Yale. He stays in his natural rhythms and vocabulary, but expresses himself in a way that makes you think and makes you feel. Then you get the sense, based on Chayefsky's own background and his kind of schlumpy appearance, that these are people he knew well and he knew what they felt. Even if Marty is not exactly a biographical stand in for Chayefsky, he doesn't have Chayefsky's worldly, cosmopolitan outlook, his anger at institutions. He's a butcher, but he's one who has psychological depth. Which he expresses in a butcher's diction. Here are a few examples. Marty says, all my brothers and brothers in laws tell me what a good hearted guy I am. You don't get to be good hearted by accident. You get kicked around long enough, you become a professor of pain. Later, he says, ma, sooner or later there comes a point in a man's life when he's gotta face some facts. And one fact I gotta face is that whatever it is that women like, I ain't got it. I chased after enough girls in my life. I went to enough dances. I got hurt enough. I don't want to get hurt no more. I just called up a girl this afternoon and I got a real brush off. Boy, I figured I was past the point of being hurt. But that hurt some stupid woman who I didn't even want to call up. She gave me the brush. No, Ma, I don't want to go to the Stardust Ballroom. Because all that ever happened to me there was girls made me feel like I was a bug. I got feelings, you know. I had enough pain. No, thanks, Matt. Can you hear that? He's talking about feelings. He's going deep and raw, but he's not clicking into iambic pentameter or using long, Latinate, erudite words. He's speaking in a way that the Herb Stemples of the world can identify with. At one point, Marty says to his best friend, listen, Ange, I've been looking for a girl every Saturday night of my life. I'm 34 years old. I'm just tired of looking, that's all. I like to find a girl. Everybody's always telling me, get married, get married, get married. Don't you think I want to get married? I want to get married. Everybody drives me crazy. Marty isn't the only one who gets to express himself. Here's his Aunt Catherine. I won't mimic her Italian accent, but imagine this coming from the voice of an immigrant who's seen some things. She says, so I'm an old garbage bag put in the street, huh? These are the worst years. I tell you, it's going to happen to you. She's talking to Marty's mother. It's going to happen to you. I'm afraid to look in a mirror. I'm afraid I'm going to see an old lady with white hair. Just like the old ladies in the park. With little bundles and black shawls waiting for the coffin. I'm 56 years old and what am I going to do with myself? I've got strength in my hands. I want to clean, I want to cook. I want to make dinner for my children. Am I an old dog to lay near the fire till my eyes close? These are terrible years, Teresa. Terrible years. It's going to happen to you. It's going to happen to you. What are you going to do if Marty gets married, huh? What are you going to cook? Where's all the children playing in all the rooms? Where's the noise? It's a curse to be a widow. A curse. What are you going to do if Marty gets married? What are you going to do? This could come straight out of Chekhov. Can I spoil it for you? Skip the next minute or two if you don't want the movie Marty spoiled. Okay, fast forward, here we go. This is the big finish of Marty after Marty has realized that his friends and his mother are trying to drive him away from this girlfriend. I don't know if he can even call her a girlfriend. This the seedling of a relationship which is being squashed before it can flower. But Marty has to stand up to them, which is not easy for him. It's easier just to fall back into old habits. The comforts, the familiarity, the set of expectations that his closest, the people closest to him have set up for him. But here's Marty in the rousing, surprisingly emotional conclusion. He's talking to his best friend again. He says, you don't like her. My mother don't like her. She's a dog and I'm a fat, ugly man. Well, all I know is I had a good time last night. I'm going to have a good time tonight. If we have enough good times together. I'm going to get down on my knees. I'm going to beg that girl to marry me. If we make a party on New Year's. I got a date for that party. You don't like her. That's too bad. Like I said, it's a very quiet movie if you just describe the plot. And yet the emotional highs are moving even today. They're there. It was nominated for eight Academy Awards and won four. I think I mentioned this already. Best Motion Picture, Best Director, Best Actor and Best Screenplay. Paddy Chayefsky's life changed overnight. Let's take a quick break and come back with the rest of Chayefsky's life and work. Foreign. Hey, folks, it's Jack here to Talk about mental health. It's important to take care of yourself and to get the care you need. But therapy can be expensive. 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Hey folks, if you're looking to read more this summer, try 11 Reader, the app that puts you in control of voices and the listening experience. 11 reader has best sellers you want at a fair price, and it also lets you turn your own docs or PDFs or ebooks into natural sounding audiobooks. I'm on a mission to stay healthy, which means getting more exercise. Well, what better way to spend those minutes than listening to a good book in a voice and style? That's right. For me, the 11 reader has more than 200,000 premium audiobooks from top publishers at an affordable monthly price. Or maybe you've heard some of the books we've mentioned here at The History of Literature podcast. And you've thought about diving in. Yes, you should. And this is your chance to do that on your commute or while doing the dishes or on a walk through your neighborhood. And here's a special offer for our listeners. Use Promo Code Podcast to get your first two months for only $1. That's promo code podcast with the 11 reader app. The tricky thing about being an intelligent, restless writer who is writing for a marketplace and in a genre like television or films or the stage is that you can sometimes lo your way railing against the forces that set limits on your vision. You can see this with some of Chayefsky's failures. It's clearly not the right time, or the studio has gotten in the way, or the the production is miscast, or there's some other problem in his life. He had two, maybe three perfect fits. Marty is the one that works within the genre and the system to produce a classic network, which we'll get to, is the one that takes advantage of of a medium that's willing to expose itself. Unless you don't consider Hollywood and television to be the same medium. Maybe that was part of it. Hollywood criticized television in a way that the television couldn't or wouldn't. But from our perspective, 50 years later, the indictment is against showbiz in general, against commercialized showbiz and the weakness of the American individual in the face of corporate overlords. Maybe in 1976 it seemed like television would give in and and film. Hollywood would resist in 2026. It's hard to see a difference between the two, but we're not there yet. First we have to talk about the next 15 or 20 years, when Chayefsky was still very successful, well respected, but his biggest successes were on Broadway during this period. He didn't really have a film that worked. The Americanization of Emily, a 1964 film starring Julie Andrews and James Garner, is set in World War II and it's an anti war movie and it really doesn't work. It's smart, but the speeches didn't land for me. They feel unnatural to the characters and I don't think the leads are right. I love them both. Both actors. I love spending time with Julie Andrews, my goodness, a personal favorite, and James Garner, the epitome of cool. But I don't think either of them really fits their character here. James Garner plays a roguish cad who takes care of an American admiral stationed in the UK during World War II, and Julie Andrews is one of the drivers. Garner working for The Americans. Garner is a kind of. He's the kind of chief of staff type who makes sure that his admiral has the finest cuts of roast beef at the dinner parties that he throws. He knows how to grease palms and entice women with Hershey bars and designer clothes that are hard to obtain in wartime Britain. He's also a coward, a guy who hates the way war produces meaningless deaths and then elevates the dead into heroes, which brings more people into the war looking to be heroes and produces more meaningless deaths. It has happened to his brother who died and then his youngest brother, who can't wait to sign up and be the hero that their mother reveres. Let's hear some of this. In Chayefsky's words, here's Lieutenant Commander Charles E. Madison, played by James Garner, delivering his worldview to Julie Andrews, who's expressed her distaste for what looks to her like Americans enjoying the war while all around them the Europeans are living through hellish conditions. Madison says, you American haters bore me to tears, Ms. Barham. I've dealt with Europeans all my life. I know all about us parvenus from the States who come over here and race around your old cathedral towns with our cameras and Coca Cola bottles, brawl in your pubs, paw at your women and act like we own the world. We over tip, we talk too loud. We think we can buy anything with a Hershey bar. I've had Germans and Italians tell me how politically ingenuous we are and perhaps so, but we haven't managed a Hitler or a Mussolini yet. I've had Frenchmen call me a savage because I only took half an hour for lunch. Hell, Ms. Barham, the only reason the French take two hours for lunch is because the service in their restaurants is lousy. The most tedious lot are you British. We crass Americans didn't introduce war into your little island. This war, Miss Barham, to which we Americans are so insensitive, is the result of 2000 years of European greed, barbarism, superstition and stupidity. Don't blame it on our Coca Cola bottles. Europe was a going brothel long before we came to town. End quote. Emily, played by Julie Andrews. Ms. Barham protests. She says, I believe in honor, service, courage and fair play. And cricket and all the other symbols of British character which have only civilized half the world. And Madison says, you British plundered half the world for your own profit. Let's not pass it off as the Age of Enlightenment. You see, I say this movie wasn't a success. And I don't think it fully was. But listen, I mean, this very. Compared to what we usually get from films, it's very intelligent. This is fun. These are great speeches. Here's a little more about war in Madison Chayefsky's view. He says, war isn't hell at all. It's man at his best, the highest morality he's capable of. It's not war that's insane, you see, it's the morality of it. It's not greed or ambition that makes war, it's goodness. Wars are always fought for the best of reasons, for liberation or manifest destiny, always against tyranny, and always in the interest of humanity. So far this war, we've managed to butcher some 10 million humans in the interest of humanity. Next war, it seems we'll have to destroy all of man in order to preserve his damned dignity. It's not war that's unnatural to us, it's virtue. As long as valor remains a virtue, we shall have soldiers. So I preach cowardice. Through cowardice, we shall all be saved. End quote. It's not just the leaders or the profiteers who are to blame. It's the average citizens. Again, here's a stem winder of a speech. First, Madison is talking to Emily's mother, and then Emily chimes in. Madison says, I don't trust people who make bitter reflections about war, Mrs. Barham. It's always the generals with the bloodiest records who are the first to shout what a hell it is. It's always the war widows who lead the Memorial Day parades. And Emily sticks up for her mother because her mother is a war widow. So Emily says, that was unkind, Charlie, and very rude. And Madison says, we shall Never end wars, Mrs. Barham, by blaming it on the ministers and generals or warmongering imperialists or all the other banal bogies. It's the rest of us who build statues to those generals and name boulevards after those ministers. The rest of us who make heroes of our dead and shrines of our battlefields. We wear our widow's weeds like nuns, Mrs. Barham. And perpetuate war by exalting its sacrifices. End quote. In the Chayefsky documentary, one of the commentators points out that it was brave to make an anti war movie so soon after World War II. You do get the sense that Chayefsky had developed these views during his own service. And his hatred of hypocrisy and the pointlessness of war is what spilled into this movie. But the timing feels odd. The movie is in black and white, but Insensibility is looking ahead to later, more independent films of the later 60s and 70s. Its anti war message might have felt more comfortable in the height of the Vietnam era, and the speeches, which in Marty were so naturally tied to the characters here, feel a little tacked on. The plot is overly and unnecessarily complicated and is more in service to the speeches than to the characters or to a plausible story. Chatsky once said, as soon as I figure out what my play is about, I type it out in one line and scotch tape it to the front of my typewriter. After that, nothing goes into the play that is not on theme. That's great advice. I'm sure it saved Patty from a lot of digressions, but it doesn't save him from issues with casting or story problems or his greatest weakness, falling in love with those speeches and inserting them where they don't quite fit, making them carry weight that strong characters and story could otherwise carry. The Americanization of Emily is an interesting film, though I found myself wishing that it was 30 minutes shorter and had that runtime of 90 minutes like Marty. As an aside, I could have taken Marty being 30 minutes longer, but Americanization of Emily is an interesting film and not a stupid one. It's a pleasant enough surprise to see it coming out of Hollywood at that time, but it's not, in my opinion, a successful film, which makes Marty and especially Network, seem almost more miraculous by comparison. Before we get to network, which is still 12 years away in our chronology, we have to talk about the successes that Chayefsky was having on stage. And the best way to understand his importance to Broadway might be with this New York Times review of his movie the hospital, from 1971, which is called I Hate Paddy Chayefsky. I'll get to this in more detail in a few minutes. The Hospital, the movie that was being reviewed in that I Hate Paddy Chayefsky review was a success. It was Chayefsky's second Academy Award for Best screenplay, and it was such a damning indictment of the country's medical system that Chayefsky, later in life, after he'd been diagnosed with cancer, refused surgery because he thought that the surgeons would cut me up because of that movie I wrote about them. The Hospital stars George C. Scott and is one of the rare films where Chayefsky had complete control over the movie, including the casting. He did pretty well casting George C. Scott and Diana Rigg with Nancy Marchand. You may know her as Livia Soprano, Tony's mother, but Chayefsky would have known her as the woman Marty fell in love with in the first TV version of Marty. Rod Steiger and Nancy Marchant, pretty good cast. There's also in the hospital. Stockard Channing is there as an ER nurse. Sometimes these credits from the old days are a little tough to go through, right? I remember acting in a version of My Fair lady in high school where I was Footman 2, and it bothered me that I was not even footman one. I was not really on my way to stardom if I couldn't even be the top footman. Well, imagine if you were Kathy Kirsch playing third nameless broad. Would you be jealous of Judy Carn, who was second nameless broad? This is in the Americanization of Emily. Or would the two of you unite in your envy of Janine Gray, who was cast as first nameless broad? Imagine you're Janine or Judy or Kathy. You receive the news that you've just been cast thrilled that you finally made it. You're in a movie. Your career is about to take off. Maybe your parents are thrilled too. Oh, you're in a Julie Andrews movie, Mary Poppins, for which she will win Best Actress in just a few months. And who will become legendary as Maria von Trapp next year. Yes, that Julie Andrews. Well, what part do you play? Her sister? Her best friend? Her trusted confidant? Well, I play Nameless Broad. What? Well, to be honest, it's third nameless Broad. Look further down the credits in the Americanization of Emily. These things are amazing. There's an uncredited part of Beautiful Girl. Those nameless Broads could have easily been beautiful woman 1 and 2 and 3, or even given names. How about that? Why not? But that uncredited part, Beautiful Girl, had a name that would soon be quite well known. Her name was Sharon Tate, and five years later she'd be murdered in the Manson killings. But we're talking about the hospital. This is one of the films I haven't seen. I'm not sure how well it's aged. The plot revolves around a chief of medicine, played by George C. Scott, whose life is falling apart. His marriage is on the rocks, his children are estranged, that kind of thing. He's impotent. He has suicidal thoughts. Impotence. Probably not something you would have seen or heard talked about in 1955 in Marty, but here we are in 1971. Post sexual revolution can include those things. The hospital, which was once a source of pride and comfortable to this chief of medicine, is falling apart. He falls in love with Diana Rigg. Well, join the club, buddy. Who? Diana Rigg is the daughter of a patient. Spoiler alert. Who causes some deaths at the hospital out of what sounds like a deranged view of the inhumanity of modern medical treatment. The mysterious deaths and institutional crumbling of the hospital are the backdrop of all of this. The clips that I've seen have George C. Scott saying things like, where do you train your nurses, Mrs. Christie Dachau? I'll give you two speeches from the hospital, which are the reason why actors love Chayefsky. The first is Diana Riggs, where she provides her backstory and her father's as well. Her father who turns out to be a murderer. You might think it's a bit clunky in a movie, a speech like this, but when a paragraph is this well written and delivered by an actor as fine as Diana Rigg, we can indulge ourselves. Car chase scenes bore me, and I've sat through plenty of those that take up five or ten minutes. Can listen to a speech for two. Here's Diana Riggs character quote. Within a week, my father had closed his Beacon Hill practice and set out to start a mission in the Mexican mountains. I turned in my SDS card and my crash helmet and. And I followed him. It was a disaster, at least for me. My father had received the revelation, not I. He stood gaunt on a mountain slope and preached the Apocalypse to solemnly amused Indians. I masturbated a great deal. We lived in a grass wickiup, ate raw rabbit and crushed pinon nuts. It was hideous. Within two months, I was back in Boston, a hollow shell, disenchanted with everything and dizzy with dengue. I turned to austerity, combed my hair tight, entered nursing school. I became haggard, driven, had shamelessly incestuous dreams about my father. I took up with some of the senior staff there. One of them, a portly psychiatrist, explained I was generated by an unresolved lust for my father. I cracked up. One day they found me walking to work naked and screaming obscenities. There was talk of institutionalizing me. So I packed a bag and went back to join my father in the Sierra Madre mountains. I've been there ever since. That's three years. My father is, of course, as mad as a hatter. I watch over him and have been curiously content. You see, Doctor, I believe in everything. End quote. The speech there gives you a sense of where Chayefsky was headed. Remember, as I said, this is 1971. Now, post sexual revolution, we're at the height of Vietnam we're steaming ahead into the era of filmmakers who were knocking down the walls and barriers that had been set up by the studio system and had been in place for several decades. Riggs speech is the kind of woman. This is miles away from the woman in Marty who had opinions, but she was not going to say I masturbated a lot, any more than Lucy Ricardo would have performed topless at Ricky's Club or Beaver Cleaver would have huffed glue. A lot changed between 1955 and 1971. Chayefsky, one suspects, didn't change himself so much, but what he could write about had changed. And here's a speech by George C. Scott's character. This gives you a flavor of what kind of sacred cows Chayefsky was carving up and why he was later afraid that the surgeons might want to do the same to him. It is all rubbish, isn't it? I mean, transplants, antibodies, we manufacture genes, we can produce birth ectogenetically. We can practically clone people like carrots. And half the kids in this ghetto haven't even been inoculated for polio. We have established the most enormous medical entity ever conceived, and people are sicker than ever. We cure nothing, we heal nothing. The whole goddamn wretched world strangulating in front of our eyes. End quote. That's a taste of the hospital from 1971. But we were telling you about Chayefsky's plays. While he was having these droughts between films, you see sometimes five, six years go by, he was staying very busy with an incredibly successful Broadway career. Some of those plays got made into films as well. Mostly unmemorable films, but on stage they were hits. Middle of the Night with Edward G. Robinson and Gina Rowlands. That was in 1956, a smash financially and critically. A film version came out in 1959. Maybe the most notable thing was that it starred Kim Novak, who later starred in Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo as the icy blonde, and who was a little less icy with Chayefsky, apparently, as the two of them reportedly had an affair that led to Chayefsky's divorce. Novak and the alleged affair is mentioned on Chayefsky's Wikipedia page, but it's not mentioned on Novak's Shlumpy Writer scores with Starlet. That's apparently news for shlumpy, but Starlet Slums it with Shlumpy Writer is apparently more of a dog bites man story. We skipped over a movie about Marilyn Monroe, which he claimed wasn't about her, but it really was. It earned Chayefsky a nomination for best screenplay. And reviews were, and still are mixed. To be charitable, back on Broadway, Chayefsky was tearing it up with the Tenth man and Gideon. Both of those also hits with the critics and the public. And so we come to the New York Times review of the hospital in 1971, and famed theater critic Walter Kerr, who goes to see the movie, and then he comes back, writes his review and headlines it. I hate Paddy Chayevsky. And the review begins. This is my week to hate Paddy Chayevsky. I hate Paddy Chayevsky because he has just dumped a whole tub full of hard driving, candid, scratchily sophisticated dialogue into a film when the film doesn't need it all and the stage is starved to death for it. In times like these, you've got to hate a man for that hard driving, canid, scratchily sophisticated dialogue. What a great description of the Chayefsky monologue. A tub full of it has gone into a film that doesn't need it all. It tells you what his plays were like and how starved an intelligent and discerning Broadway critic is to have the next, the latest of production by Chayefsky. Later in the review, Kerr says, quote, compared to what I was hearing in the hospital, almost all stage dialogue nowadays, with rare exceptions, is polite, plasticized, timid, studied, self conscious, and, God help us, naive. It walks on the stage like a stork, spindly and standoffish. I don't mean to say that Mr. Chayefsky is Mr. William Shakespeare lost to the flesh pots, but no one has to be William Shakespeare to write a line that lunges long enough, plunges deep enough to give an actor, a stage actor like Mr. Scott, a chance to heave, snarl, perspire, and grin ferociously before he's got the whole thing out. And this sort of opportunity is traditionally a stage opportunity. The tirade, the soliloquy, the verbal breaking of the dam. The hospital could have been made with half its words. Film's verbal requirements are so minimal, so many tend to clot the screen. It's on stage that they're free to flow openly like a cut vein. And yet the film had them. The stage doesn't. End quote. As I said, that's one of the qualities of a Chayefsky movie that's unmistakable. You get this dialogue, not a grand speech, but a scratchily sophisticated one. It's got rhythm and musicality. Sounds like something. It's got the. The. The polish of something polished. But it doesn't sound polished. It's got underlying intelligence, but it's given the vocabulary and the idioms of a real person talking. It is an actor's dream. But you do feel in a Chayefsky film that you're watching something that probably plays better in front of a live audience. An actor who can command the stage, ch. Scenery and delivering a paragraph or a page long sidewinder that keeps the audience riveted. Sometimes these speeches are so blended into the fabric of the film as they are in Marty that they feel more natural, like a rise in the action, a climax, a legitimate place for the speech to occur. And sometimes, when it's not so successful, as in the Americanization of Emily, you find yourself grabbing your phone to see if the film may have originally been a stage play and who might have acted in it. Network is the second time where it all comes together. It is a masterpiece. But let's circle back to 1969 first for something that's decidedly not a masterpiece, but which illustrates what I'm talking about. This difference between stage and screen. Paint yout Wagon is one of the oddest films I've ever seen. It's a Clint Eastwood. Sorry, a Clint Eastwood Eastern. Clint Eastwood. Sorry. It's a Clint Eastwood western film with Lee Marvin. So far so good, except it's a musical with both of these guys singing, hey, what? And it had originally been a successful Broadway musical with Lerner and Low music and lyrics. That's good. But it also has a female lead of Jean Seberg, whom you might know as the lead from the French New Wave film Breathless. What's she doing here? And the plot, which apparently Chayefsky changed because he thought the original was so boring. The plot is about a Mormon wife who arrives in a Gold Rush town that has no women, and she's there as part of a bigamist marriage. Wife number two married to a man who has two wives. And he doesn't need two. And the town really needs at least one woman. So the town bids on her to join their town and she winds up being purchased by Lee Marvin. A drunk Lee Marvin. This character is drunk. He was probably drunk too, according to reports. And then somehow she winds up married to both Clint Eastwood and Lee Marvin. Get the reversal. If a husband can take two wives, why not a wife taking two husbands? And we'll have some bouncy tunes to go along with. It's maybe the best example of this issue of a play being turned into a film that I've ever seen. Also because of the time when it was made. The director or producer, or maybe both had been criticized for their previous work. Making a. A film that looked like it was on a Hollywood back lot because it was. So they flew up to the Pacific Northwest somewhere and they built this whole town. Spent way too much money on the film. In the last scene they destroy the sets in a ridiculous plot twist where the whole thing collapses into the earth. It feels like you're watching the end of something and maybe you are. Clint Eastwood plays the new Hollywood type. Cool, understated. And that doesn't really work in a what's essentially a 1950s Broadway musical. Lee Marvin, meanwhile, is playing it as if it's a 1950s Broadway musical. Loud, brash, going for big laughs, gags, overacting, mugging, playing to an audience, a state of in person audience that's not there. And that doesn't really work for a late 1960s era film. And everything that made Gene Seberg the epitome of youth and coolness and the avant garde in Breathless is just gone. It's as if she's Samson and her power was all in her hair. Except the other way around. When she had short hair, she had enormous power. And here her hair grown long again and conventional and given this ridiculous set of things to do and say. She, she's. She's beautiful but somehow plain. I won't belabor the film because Chayefsky's involvement was limited. I think he tried to take his name off it at one point he was fired. But it shows a kind of impatience he had with the era and the changes that it was going through. The industry was changing and so were the audiences and so was the writing. But the content and the production were lagging behind the ambitions and sensibilities of the new Hollywood. You could see it in Eastwood, you see it in Seberg and you see it in Chayefsky. The plot was boring. He turned it into something kind of interesting. A female bigamist. And sex is in there, but the movie doesn't work. The same was true of the Americanization of Emily. You can see Chayefsky trying to push an envelope that refuses to be opened any further. It's not until network that it all comes together. We'll explore that film after this. Fourth of July savings are happening now at the Home Depot with select appliances starting at $398. Plus get free delivery on appliance purchases of $398 or more. No membership required. Upgrade your kitchen with a modern and sleek GE profile refrigerator featuring hands free autofill. For the perfect pour every time and make laundry day easier with 2 in 1 washer dryer combo innovation that completes laundry in about 90 minutes. Shop Top brand appliances now at the Home Depot offer valid June 17, July at the US only C store online for details this summer Prime Video takes you back before Legally Blonde, before law school and into the world of Elle woods in high school. Set in 1995, this Gemini vegetarian knows exactly who she is until her family moves from Bel Air to Seattle. Packed with iconic fashion, 90s nostalgia and a throwback soundtrack, Elle proves one law school was hard. High school was harder. From the world of Legally Blonde, watch Elle, a new original series only on Prime Video. Watch now. If Marty was the perfect encapsulation of the best that the 1950s had to offer were a stage play, a television episode that was filmed like a stage play and a film could all be in sync with great writing, great acting and great directing. All all creative input, all the creators pulling in the same direction with a kind of Chekovian character study as its goal. Then network is another encapsulation, equally successful, showing us what we can get from the 1970s. Now we have a director like Sidney Lumet and a writer like Paddy Chayefsky, who had basically insisted on Sidney Lumet as the director. We have a cast of rebellious actors, almost too good to be true. The movie is perfectly, perfectly cast, and the stars align once again. This is an era of films like the Godfather and All the President's Men. It comes just before summer blockbusters and sequels have wrecked the joint. It's post sexual revolution and post Watergate, and the atmosphere is one of grown ups who can say things frankly and look at the world clearly. And Hollywood views its job, at least in part, to criticize America when that's appropriate, and to be visionary truth tellers when it comes to how our society has failed and how it might be headed for an even bigger failure. A collapse. The film revolves around the news division of a fictional fourth network called ubs, which is undergoing some changes. The lead anchor of the flagship nightly news program, Howard Beall, has fallen out of favor, and the show is consigned to a dismal fourth place. And the news division, as with other networks, costs the company money. While that might be fine at the other networks who are committed to the news division operating as a loss leader to lend the network prestige rather than help its bottom line, UBS has been taken over by a conglomerate that wants to see profits. The news division, headed by William Holden, an industry stalwart who goes back to the glory days of CBS under Edward R. Murrow, is under pressure. Also under pressure is the anchorman, Howard Beale, played by Peter Finch, who's gone through some personal failures. And now the dying program is weighing on him as well. And it turns out he doesn't have much else in his life to prop him up. And applying the pressure, most notably are the shadowy heads of the company that owns the network. We'll say more about them in a moment. And the more immediate pressure being applied by Faye Dunaway, who's tasked with making entertainment hits and sees ways to do the same with news. Kind of a reality TV sort of approach to news she's got. And Robert Duvall, her boss, who becomes persuaded to try her ideas. The plot is a work of art. It's like a finely tuned Swiss watch. Its gears move with precision as we see the motivations of all involved. Even as the individuals reverse course and change positions, we always know why they're doing what they're doing. It is in response to circumstances and events. It all feels organic. Characters that seem one sided become complex. And characters that seem complex turn out to be monomaniacal. And it all feels plausible. And the wind up device, to our watch, the thing that sets it all in motion is a fascinating idea. Howard Beale, the anchorman, announces during a news program that he's going to kill himself on air. And he jokes that it will probably get some good ratings. And while the producers scramble to deal with that, they start to realize, people at the network start to realize that it probably would get good ratings. And his angry rants as Howard Beale starts to slip into a kind of madness that's going to get good ratings too. They could harness it and ride it like a bucking bronco. And some are disgusted at what this means for news and television. Some are excited, some are. Some are disgusted. But they want it to happen, to show the people who are excited how wrong they are. And there are personal relationships that begin and end. And somehow you're drawn into this drama, personal and professional drama, while barely noticing that Chayefsky is indicting everything about television and entertainment and America's inability to take itself seriously, to take the symptoms of its maladies seriously, as indicative of a disease that's already threatening the good health of its patient and could eventually lead to its demise. But let's hear all this in Howard Beale's voice, in words that Chayefsky no doubt labored over, but which come across naturally. This is Beale talking to the American public from his news desk in 1976, quote, 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 street. And there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do. And there's no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat. And we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that Today we had 15 homicides and 63 violent crimes, as if that's the. The way it's supposed to be. We know things are bad. Worse than bad. They're crazy. It's like everything everywhere is going crazy. So we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller. And all we say is, please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV 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. I don't want you to protest, I don't want you to riot. I don't want you to write to your congressman 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 Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you've got to get mad. You've got to say, I'm a human being, God damn it, my life has value. So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it it and stick your head out and yell, I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore. I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell, I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore. Things have got to change, but first you've got to get mad. You've got to say, I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore. Then we'll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis. But first, get up out of your chairs, open the window. Stick your head out and yell and say it. I'm as mad as hell and I'm not gonna take this anymore. End quote. People get up, they yell out their windows. The audience feels like doing it too. They're in the theater. It's cathartic. But it's also a little scary. Scary not because of what you're seeing on the screen, which is joyous. You're glad when those windows open and people are screaming. But it's scary because of what you know is not happening in real life. You feel like sharing that sentiment of being as mad as hell. I felt that 50 years later that the individual is being lost. And you believe that. You do share that feeling with everyone who is on the screen opening their windows and yelling. And everyone who is in real life sitting next to you in the theater or your living room. But what's frightening is knowing that this disease seems unstoppable. It runs through the body politic with little to stop it. There's another great speech in the film which is delivered by Ned Beatty, the head of the company that owns ubs. This one goes even deeper than the criticism of television. It's a bleak view of the world coming into view in the 1970s where the companies were getting bigger, amassing power, overrunning something as modest and humble as a democratically elected government. Howard Beale starts to question this. And Ned Beatty calls him into a huge boardroom which is shot like a cathedral and delivers some hard truths. This is his character, Arthur Jensen, played by Ned Beatty. He says, quote, you have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beal, and I won't have it. Is that clear? You think you've merely stopped a business deal. 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. It is ecological balance. You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no Third Worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems. One vast and immense, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars, petrodollars, electro dollars, multi dollars, Reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds and shekels. It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today. And you have meddled with the primal forces of nature. And you will Atone. Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beal? You get up on your little 21 inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and Dupont, Dow, Union Carbide and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state? Karl Marx. They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions. And compute the price cost probabilities. Of their transactions and investments. Just like we do. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beal. The world is a college of corporations. Inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beal. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beal. To see that perfect world. In which there's no war or famine. Oppression or 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 tranquillized. All boredom amused. And I have chosen you, Mr. Beale. To preach this evangel. Howard Beale says, why me? Arthur Jensen says, because you're on television, dummy. 60 million people watch you every night of the week, Monday through Friday. Howard Beale, I have seen the face of God. Arthur Jensen. You just might be right, Mr. Beale. New Yorker reviewer Pauline Kael didn't like Network. But I think she would agree that a world where she could review a film like Network. As one might review the latest novel by Toni Morrison or Don DeLillo. Is a better world than one where the films are based on comic book characters wearing costumes. These are real ideas coming through. And characters, too, we haven't yet talked about. The nihilistic corporate executive Faye Dunaway won the Academy Award. She's excited about getting a hit program. Even if it means glorifying terrorists. Or bank robbers or kidnappers or all of the above. Because, hey, that's what the public wants. And it's her job to give it to them. Here she is describing herself at a dinner. That's kind of her version of no nonsense seduction. She says, I was married for four years and pretended to be happy. And I had six years of analysis and pretended to be sane. My husband ran off with his boyfriend. And I had an affair with my analyst. Who told me that I was the worst lay he'd ever had. I can't tell you how many men have Told me what a lousy lay I am. I apparently have a masculine temperament. I arouse quickly, consummate prematurely, and can't wait to get my clothes back on and get out of that bedroom. I seem to be inept at everything except my work. I'm goddamn good at my work, and so I confine myself to that. All I want out of Life is a 30 share and a 20 rating. End quote. Once again, it's striking how far we are from the world of Marty. This is. These are characters that have. Are fully realized characters in a way. Maybe even more fully realized than people in real life, if that's possible. Faye Dunaway's character has an affair with William Holden's character. He plays that news veteran who was in charge of the whole thing and is watching everything fall to pieces in front of his eyes. Sometimes with his participation, sometimes against his resistance. But he eventually leaves her. And here's an exchange where he accuses her of being eaten alive by her ambition. And in particular, this ambition to get out of life. A 30 share and a 20 rating. Max Schumacher. That's William Holden's character's name. He says, you need me. You need me badly because I'm your last contact with human reality. I love you. And that painful, decaying love is the only thing between you and the shrieking nothingness you live the rest of the day. Diana Christensen. Then don't leave me, Max Schumacher. It's too late, Diana. There's nothing left in you that I can live with. You're one of Howard's humanoids. If I stay with you, I'll be destroyed. Like Howard Beale was destroyed. Like Laureen Hobbs was destroyed. Like everything you and the institution of television touch is destroyed. You're television incarnate, Diana. Indifferent to suffering, insensitive to joy. All of life is reduced to the common rubble of banality. War, murder, death are all the same to you as bottles of beer. And the daily business of life is a corrupt comedy. You even shatter the sensations of time and space into split seconds and instant replays. You're madness, Diana. Virulent madness. And everything you touch dies with you. But not me. Not as long as I can feel pleasure and pain and love. Then he kisses her. Then he goes on and says, and it's a happy ending. Wayward husband comes to his senses, returns to his wife with whom he has established a long and sustaining love. Heartless young woman left alone in her arctic desolation. Music up with a swell. Final commercial. And here are a few scenes from next week's show. And he picks up his suitcases and he leaves. This is Chayevsky's music. He has a full symphony and network, allowing his characters to deliver their virtuosic performances using all the power of their instruments. His themes are prominent, like swelling melodies accompanied by trills and deep bass harmonies and other grace notes along the way. Holden has to tell his wife what he's doing, that he's fallen. Say that he's fallen for Faye Dunaway's character. He slept with her, and he plans to continue doing so. The speech that his wife delivers in response is a thing of beauty, and it earned an Academy Award for an actress who was on screen for something like five minutes total in the movie. And she won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Really? Because of this one speech. I'm going to read it here because it will let you hear Chayefsky where he's not fulminating about television or corporate America, but speaking about a person's emotional experience. And this is as important to understanding Chayefsky as the speeches about the state of the world. It's why I would propose him as a candidate for someone, a screenwriter who might have won a Nobel Prize had they been giving them out to screenwriters. Because we get the humanity as well as the geopolitical commentary. Louise Schumacher says, then get out. She's talking to her husband. Then get out. Go anywhere you want. Go to a hotel, go live with her, but don't come back. Because after 25 years of building up home and raising a family and all the senseless pain that we have inflicted on each other, I'm damned if I'm going to stand here and have you tell me you're in love with somebody else. Because this isn't a convention weekend with your secretary, is it? Or some broad that you picked up after three belts of booze. This is your great winter romance, isn't it? Your last roar of passion before you settle into your emeritus years. Is that what's left for me? Is that my share? She gets the winter passion and I get the dotage. What am I supposed to do? Am I supposed to sit home knitting and purling while you slink back like some penitent drunk? I'm your wife, damn it. And if you can't work up a winter passion for me, the least I require is respect and allegiance. I hurt. Don't you understand that? I hurt badly. Chayefsky. You get lines in Chayefsky like your last roar of passion before you settle into your emeritus years and knitting and purling while you slink back like some penitent drunk, which sound like something an Ivy Leaguer might say. But you also get lines like some bra that you picked up after three belts of booze and I'm your wife, damn it, which is as good as, I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore. And you get the swell of an outpouring, the riveting lines that keep coming one after the other, as one character pours out her heart, which is broken, and the other actor, the one who did the breaking, stands there, absorbing the blows of her words as they strike his craggy face. It's the kind of scene you watch and immediately rewind and watch again, and you think about long after the film is over. Network. I didn't even mention Robert Duvall, give you some of his speeches. I'll save that. I'll let you enjoy that when you watch the movie. He is fantastic in the movie, too. I'm going to skip over altered states from 1980, although some people love that movie and they love Chayefsky's novella that the movie is based on. I think of it as another ambitious movie that didn't quite come together. It, too, missed its moment. Not all the stars were aligned for that one. And we are running long. And I wanted to end with some thoughts about Network, which was amazing in 1976, our bicentennial year here in America, and for 50 years has been given credit for diagnosing what was wrong with television and America and predicting everything that eventually came to happen. But where does that leave us now, 250 years into this experiment and 50 years after Chayefsky diagnosed those issues? I want to go back to a 1959 interview with another golden boy from that golden age of television, Rod Serling, who went on to become the famous creator of Twilight Zone, the Twilight Zone, the television series. He was one of Chayefsky's contemporaries, often mentioned in the same breath. And in this interview, Serling talks about the complicated relationship that someone trying to use television to promote truth and values has with the forces of commerce. This was already becoming clear to these people when they looked at television back in 1959, almost 20 years before network. But it kind of looks ahead and it talks about Chayevsky. So I want to. And it kind of crystallizes some of my thoughts. So here we go, the interviewer begins. This is talking to Rod Serling. And the interviewer says, you've come a long way since those early days and perhaps more than any other writer, your name is figured in the classic battle that is television writer, the battle of the writer to be his own man. What happens when a writer like yourself writes something that he really believes in for television? Rod Serling, I'm not sure I understand the question. What happens, you mean in terms of. Well, we hear a lot about censorship of the writer on tv and a good deal about it in your own case, especially, Rod Serling. Well, depending, of course, on the dramatic treatment you're using. If you have the temerity to try to dramatize a theme that involves any particular social controversy currently extant, then you're in deep trouble. For instance, Rod Serling, a racial theme, for example. My case in point, I think, a show I did for the Steel Hour some years ago, three years ago, called Noon on Doomsday, which was a story which purported to tell what was the aftermath. The alleged kidnapping in Mississippi of the till boy, the young Chicago Negro. And I wrote the script using black and white initially. Then it was changed to suggest an unnamed foreigner. Then the locale was moved from the south to New England, and I'm convinced they'd have gone up to Alaska or the North Pole if. And using Eskimos as a possible minority. Except, I suppose, the costume problem was a sufficient severity not to attempt it. But it became a lukewarm, eviscerated, emasculated kind of show. You went along with it, though, Rod Serling, all the way? I protested. I went down fighting, as most television writers do, thinking in a strange, oblique, philosophical way that better say something than nothing. In this particular show, though, by the time they had finished taking Coca Cola bottles off the set, because the sponsor claimed that this had Southern connotations, suggesting to what depth they went to make this a clean, antiseptically, rigidly acceptable show. Why, it bore no relationship at all to what we had purported to say initially. Paddy Chayefsky has talked about the insidious influence of what he called pre censorship. How does that work, Rod Serling? Pre censorship is a practice, I think, of most television writers. I can't speak for all of them. This is the prior knowledge of the writer of those areas which are difficult to try to get through. And so a writer will shy away from writing those things which he knows he's going to have trouble with on a sponsorial or an agency level. We practice it all the time. We just do not write those themes which we know are going to get into trouble. Who's the culprit? Is it the network? The sponsor. It sure is not the fcc, ROD SERLING no, it's certainly not the fcc. Ideally speaking, of course, it's a combination of culprits. In this case, it's partly network. It's principally agency and sponsor. In many ways, I think it's the audience themselves. Chayefsky saw this too. It was what the people wanted. That runs all through network. Even before the arrival of the conglomerate, which forced News to make money and put it under the control of the entertainment division, the news was already sliding into a version of that themselves. They didn't cover the big stories, the important stories, the heaviness of the world, because the people wouldn't tune in if they did. The people, the public wanted puppies saved from floods and the latest version of Jack the Ripper terrorizing some nice suburban neighborhood. One of my friends was a television producer, and he he had to show a clip of a dog getting its teeth brushed so many times that he eventually quit, quit the industry altogether. He had wanted to work in television news, and this was what was drawing eyeballs, was this clip of a dog getting its teeth brushed. Was that his fault, his boss's fault, the fault of the sponsors, or the fault of the eyeballs and the heads they were attached to, which also led to a neck and a shoulder and an arm that was holding a remote control. The Serling interview continues with him saying sadly that he doesn't want to fight anymore. The interviewer says, what do you mean you don't want to fight anymore? ROD SERLING I don't want to have to battle sponsors and agencies. I don't want to have to push for something that I want and have to settle for second best. I don't want to have to compromise all the time, which, in essence, is what the television writer does if he wants to put on controversial themes. INTERVIEWER well, then, why do you stay in television? ROD SERLING I stay in television because I think it's very possible to perform a function of providing adult, meaningful, exciting, challenging drama without dealing in controversy, necessarily. This, of course, is not the best of all possible worlds. I'm not suggesting that this is at the absolute millennium. I think it's criminal that we're not permitted to make dramatic note of social evils as they exist, of controversial themes as they are inherent in our society. I think it's ridiculous that drama, which by its very nature should make a comment on those things that affect our daily lives, is in the position, at least in terms of television drama, of not being able to take this stand. But these are the facts of life. This is the way it exists. And they can't look to me or Chayefsky or Rose or Gore Vidal or JP Miller or any of these guys as the precipitators of the big change. It's not for us to do it. Of course, Chayefsky got out of television. Rod Serling. Yeah, he did. And I can't knock that. I think this takes a relative degree of guts to leave a medium that's made you, that made you sociable is kind of a household name. Patty was the first guy to kind of lend stature to the television writer. Prior to Paddy Chayefsky, most of us were considered to be two headed hacks who worked around the clock and used boy girl situations in any one of 5,000 different routine manners. But Patty gave us a stature and I respect Patty's decision to leave. He felt that he wasn't satisfied with doing things half best, end quote. Chayefsky got out. Serling meant at this time that he got out to Broadway and Hollywood in the era of Marty. But it was even more true later with the hospital and network, where Chayefsky got to use that window of time in Hollywood where important topics were reaching an audience in dramatic fashion. Using the highly realized artistry of film in the hands of directors like Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese and Sidney Lumet and other directors as serious about their art as any 19th or 20th century novelist. They could speak about big things and reach a big audience. And yet, what was it for? There's a sad moment in the Chayefsky documentary when David Steinberg, one of my favorite comedians and people, says that you point these things out and you hope that they land. He himself had done this with an irreverent sermon on television on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, which CBS cut from the air. That was in 1969. One suspects that Chayefsky was taking notes. Steinberg says in the documentary, talking about Chayefsky, you say these things and you point out the truths that you can and you hope that they land. And the interviewer says, and then what? And Steinberg pauses. And he has that comedian's twinkle in his eye because he knows he's about to deliver a knockout punch. A knockout punchline, maybe I should say. The interviewer has set him up perfectly, unwittingly. And then what? He says, right, Steinberg says, you say these things and point out the truths that you can and hope that they land. And then what? Steinberg pauses, eyes twinkling, and says, nothing happens. And his eyes were twinkling and he was grinning. But there is a sadness there, too. This stuff matters. It's funny in a morbid kind of way, that the best intentions are thwarted. You hope that they land. And then what? And then nothing happens. We laugh at the goofiness of people who care, the earnestness, the striving to make the world better. I felt this watching that Bob Dylan biopic and Ed Norton's achingly sincere rendition of Pete Seeger. I felt it because I remember feeling that way about Pete Seeger and Fred Rogers and all those people in the 70s. I felt uncomfortable that they were so good and that they wanted to be so good. And the era was one of irony and one of the sarcasm and suspicion and cynicism. And people like Pete Seeger and Fred Rogers are the people striving to make the world better. What a sucker. We think, and we snicker behind their backs. But there is a sadness to seeing the inevitable falling apart of society when people who are striving to make the world better have no way of making it better. It's so easy to destroy and so hard to build. Building takes years and decades and centuries. And destruction can happen in seconds. In the year 2000, Roger Ebert looked back at network as it was turning 25. He gave it a four star review. He said the movie caused a sensation. In 1976, it was nominated for 10 Oscars, won four, and stirred up much debate about the decaying values of television. Seen a quarter century later, it is like prophecy. When Chayefsky created Howard Beale, could he have imagined Jerry Springer, Howard Stern and the World Wrestling Federation? End quote. And for the next 25 years, all that about television, those shock shows that Ebert was talking about, it became even more true. Reality television took over. Reality television, it says weird a term is artificial intelligence. Reality television is not reality. It's all television. The word reality is redundant. Just like artificial intelligence is where it's all artificial. It's not intelligent at all. It's where intelligence disappears into the word artificial. Now that network is 50, the statements of Rod Serling and Roger Ebert seem almost quaint. Yes, Chayefsky got it right. But television is no longer the only game in town. It's barely a game at all. It's like an old set of Scrabble that sits on a dusty shelf while the world plays with something newer and more dynamic. Yes, television is rotten and pointless and a waste of time. And we all got what we deserved by preferring Shock and schlock to Shakespeare and Shaw. Maligned forces took over television, and we let it happen. More than that, we applauded. More than that, we made it happen by watching and buying. But now we're in a different stage, different era. And I'll confess that I kept something from you when I gave you that interview, the interview I read with Rod Serling. The interviewer for that was Mike Wallace. And as much as I missed Rod Serling and his presence and the idea that a creator might use television to educate and illuminate and lead us away from prejudice and fascism and selfishness and the perils of isolation, I think I missed Mike Wallace, the longtime face of 60 Minutes, even more. I don't just miss television news as a serious business willing to lose a little money instead of going all in on ratings. I miss news, period. I miss newspapers. I miss journalism. I miss facts. I see all of it slipping away. We are becoming a culture of truthiness and vibes, and I'll do my own research. And being led around by fake pictures and headlines and timelines that are not based in reality, we're falling into that pit of despair where we say, I don't know what to think. I don't know what sources to trust. So I'll just muddle along and wait for someone else to tell me what to do. Because I'm tired of thinking, tired of making the attempt, and I don't really have any basis for thinking my thoughts anyway. Who knows what reality is? Everything I see might be a lie. We train AI on these facts, but what happens when it has no more new facts to go into its hopper? Where will the AI engines look for the news of things happening in 2027 and 2028? Local newspapers are mostly gone. Government websites producing information are increasingly under pressure to conform to a political view. Universities are under attack. What will produce raw data to be synthesized and summarized by minds seeking the truth? Chayefsky foresaw the shift from brains to eyeballs. From TV news being the business of smart humans trying to get things right, trying to uncover the truth, to the business of trying to earn those ratings and that share to try to get those eyeballs and those thumbs attached to the remote control. Well, now everything is a quest for eyeballs, and they're still attached to thumbs, but those thumbs are scrolling. And they're not just doing it for 30 minutes every night, they're doing it all day long. But what does that mean when most of what we see isn't true or real or based in Some kind of reality. Mike Wallace was the kind of serious journalist who was also a celebrity. I'm sure he got some things wrong. But he spent his life and his career and his reputation trying to get things right, trying to state facts and reach conclusions based on those facts. And he was at the top of a mountain of journalists and editors trying to do the same in cities and small cities and towns all over the country, putting their own credibility on the line, working for publications that tried to state things as facts and cared when they got something wrong. As our country gets bigger and as the world gets more complicated, we need more of those people, and instead we have drastically fewer. We still have the celebrity opinionists, the celebrity news readers, but basic journalism, it's a dying profession. The mountain is disappearing. I think we can say America survived the death of television news, the takeover by the corporation, the triumph of the bottom line. But that's not to say that America itself will survive. How can it? William Egginton, one of our favorite guests here on the podcast, said this once to us. We've always had political differences in this country, but what happens if we don't share a common reality with one another? How can we function? What will keep us together? There's a reality that's out there. That ground that you walk on is not imagined. That sun that shines is an actual thing. When I'm outside, talking to people, traveling, encountering people at the store, I feel optimistic. We can do this. People are still people. We're still nice. We still want to be good. But most people don't form their views out there. Most people live in a cocoon of thoughts. And those thoughts are shaped by wild, factless ideas, sometimes stray and harmless and sometimes designed to mislead. It's a scary place. Chayefsky was a prophet, but not even he predicted this. Okay, there we go. A bit of heaviness. For our Monday after the 4th, how about some good news? We are offering a discount on our book, Great Detective, in honor of Emma Wilson's birthday, our beloved producer of the podcast, you will get 20% off by using the code BIRTHDAY2026 at checkout. That's a great value, basically covering the cost of shipping. If you're here in the US for most of you, I think for all of you, we're happy to do it. And happy birthday month to Emma and to me, Jack Wilson. It's my birthday today, actually, or yesterday by the time you hear this. And nothing would make this birthday boy happier than knowing you've picked up a copy of our very first publication by the Hol Press, our new imprint over there at press.historyofliterature.com it's the first book that lets you and a reading partner share an adventure together as Sherlock Holmes and his sidekick. Also, Happy birthday to Marcel Proust. He'd be 155 years old on the 10th. That's hard to believe. I'll be back soon with some more great episodes. Oh, we've got some good guests coming up. I've been having some great conversations with some wonderful folks. I'm Jack Wilson. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time. There are a bunch of ways to prevent crime that no one is talking about. Like how wind direction can make your community more violent or peaceful and how GLP1 meds could reduce felonies. This is fighting crime where we ask the big questions. What if we've been having the wrong conversations about crime? Two policies, ban the box and clean slate don't seem to be helping, even though they sounded like they should or they would. I'm your host, Christina Quinn. I'm going across the country from prisons to universities, police chiefs to inmates to look at the evidence and question everything we think we know about how to make America safer. Economists think a lot about how people respond to incentives. If we want to reduce crime and change behavior, we need to increase the costs or reduce the benefit. Join us as we figure out new ways to fight crime and be prepared to think differently. Fighting Crime Listen or watch on Apple Podcasts, YouTube and Spotify. Uncovered windows can make your home feel up to 20 degrees hotter. 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