NUMBER EIGHT: "I don't have any bullshit left. I just ran out of it, you see."

It probably seems impossible that a film like NETWORK could drop a few places on anyone's list, but it did. Hopefully it'll all make sense once the list is up here in full. In the meantime, here's my number eight (formerly number six).


Somewhere Paddy Chayefsky is truly laughing his long dead ass off. When NETWORK opened in 1976 people looked at it as a kind of prophetic farce, from what I gather in the reviews written about it at the time. Great art. But, no, things aren't that bad. And isn't this a great warning of how bad things could get if we aren't careful. The headlines from the L.A. Times over the last year must have a horrible, delicious taste to Mr. Chayefsky, wherever the cranky bastard might be right now.

Though nearly every word in this screenplay is golden to me, one speech by Howard Beale feels especially important lately. If you switch out a few of the words (maybe change "Russians" and replace it with "terrorists") you see we're where we've always been as Americans, television viewers and bad citizens of the world:

Howard Beale: 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 work, 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 TV's while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that's 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 gonna 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.

Before things get too down, I have to talk about Faye Dunaway. She was not just a fabulous babe of the day. She was a real badass. Look at her choices: CHINATOWN, BONNIE AND CLYDE, NETWORK. Damn. Can you imagine having a haircut as fine as the one she had in BONNIE AND CLYDE and being able to run circles around Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson? IMHO, her work here as the ruthless programming executive with an emotional maladjustment no episode of Oprah could solve is her best...and certainly among the best I've ever peeped - actor or actress - on the screen. She's so good you begin to feel sorry for someone who is fundamentally a hollow, selfish a-hole. And then, in my case, you wonder where she bought those amazing boots.


I didn't see this movie until many years after its release. Our advisor to the Arizona Daily Wildcat - a seasoned journalist who'd worked all over for Sports Illustrated and the daily papers in Arizona - insisted one day that I watch it before I decided to work any longer even as just a student journalist. More than anything I remember one particular moment in the movie which seemed to foreshadow a horrible trend in journalism - newspapers becoming corporate properties rather than being run by local upstarts with a sense of making some small difference in their community - and I still wonder today how it's all gonna shake out based on this speech:

Arthur Jensen: It is the international system of currency which determines the vitality 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. Beale? 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.