35 years later and it’s come down to this:
“We’re mad as hell, and we’re going to elect Mitt Romney!”
“We’re glad as hell and we’re going to reelect Barack Obama!”
Christ…
This film comes about as close as we are ever likely to in exposing how “the system” really works. In particular, how the corporate media functions to perpetuate it. But even this is just a fairy tale. Done basically as a satire. Can you imagine any of it really happening. About as close as we come to a “systemic critique” these days is…Bill Moyers?
We don’t even have The Wire anymore. Or anything like it.
You don’t watch Network so much as read it. It’s got more ideas packed into its 2 hours than you’re likely to find in all the crap Hollywood produces today over the course of an entire year. Even if you don’t buy the narrative you sure as hell can’t deny the fact it’s a powerful one. And as fully relevant today as it was then. If not more so.
Oh, and keep a disctionary near at hand. You might need it.
IMDb
[b]The director and the screenwriter claimed that the film was not meant to be a satire but a reflection of what was really happening.
Beatrice Straight is only on screen for five minutes and forty seconds, making hers the briefest performance ever to win an Oscar.
Walter Cronkite and John Chancellor were approached for the Howard Beale role, but neither was interested. However, Cronkite’s daughter Kathy Cronkite agreed to play left-wing radical Mary Ann Gifford and her character is loosely based on Patricia Hearst.
Sidney Lumet claimed that he wanted to cast Vanessa Redgrave in the film, but Paddy Chayefsky didn’t want her. Lumet argued that he thought she was the greatest English-speaking actress in the world, while Chayefsky, a proud Jew and supporter of Israel, objected on the basis of her support of the PLO. Lumet, himself a Jew, said “Paddy, that’s blacklisting!” to which Chayefsky replied, “Not when a Jew does it to a Gentile.”[/b]
wiki
[b]Part of the inspiration for Chayefsky’s script came from the on-air suicide of television news reporter Christine Chubbuck in Sarasota, Florida two years earlier. The anchorwoman was suffering from depression and battles with her editors, and unable to keep going, she shot herself on camera as stunned viewers watched on July 15, 1974. Chayefsky used the incident to set up his film’s focal point. As he would say later in an interview, “Television will do anything for a rating… anything!”
Not all reviews were positive: Pauline Kael in The New Yorker, in a review subtitled “Hot Air”, criticized the film’s abundance of long, preachy speeches; Chayefsky’s self-righteous contempt for not only television itself but also television viewers; and the fact that almost everyone in the movie, particularly Robert Duvall, has a screaming rant: “The cast of this messianic farce takes turns yelling at us soulless masses.”[/b]
NETWORK
Directed by Sidney Lumet
[b]Howard: No, no. I’m gonna blow my brains out right on the air, right in the middle of the 7 O’clock news.
Max: You’ll get a hell of a rating, I’ll guarantee you that. 50 share easy.
…
Max: We could make a series of it. “Suicide of the Week.” Aw, hell, why limit ourselves? “Execution of the Week.”
Howard: “Terrorist of the Week.”
Max: I love it. Suicides, assassinations, mad bombers, Mafia hitmen, automobile smash-ups: “The Death Hour.” A great Sunday night show for the whole family. It’d wipe that fuckin’ Disney right off the air.
…
Howard: I would like, at this point, to announce that I will be retiring from this programme in two weeks’ time because of poor ratings. Since this show was the only thing I had going for me in my life, I have decided to kill myself. I’m going to blow my brains out, right on this programme, a week from today. So tune in next Tuesday. That should give the public-relations people a week to promote the show. We ought to get a hell of a rating out of that. A 50 share, easy.
…
Diana: Look, we’ve got a bunch of hobgoblin radicals called the Ecumenical Liberation Army who go around taking home movies of themselves robbing banks. Now, maybe they’ll take movies of themselves kidnapping heiresses, hijacking 747s, bombing bridges, assassinating ambassadors. We’d open each week’s segment with their authentic footage, hire a couple of writers to write a story behind that footage, and we’ve got ourselves a series.
…
Diana: Look, I sent you all a concept analysis report yesterday. Did any of you read it?
[Aides stare blankly at her]
Diana: Well, in a nutshell, it said: “The American people are turning sullen. They’ve been clobbered on all sides by Vietnam, Watergate, the inflation, the depression; they’ve turned off, shot up, and they’ve fucked themselves limp, and nothing helps.” So, this concept analysis report concludes, “The American people want somebody to articulate their rage for them.” I’ve been telling you people since I took this job six months ago that I want angry shows. I don’t want conventional programming on this network. I want counterculture, I want anti-establishment. I don’t want to play butch boss with you people, but when I took over this department, it had the worst programming record in television history. This network hasn’t one show in the top twenty. This network is an industry joke, and we’d better start putting together one winner for next September. I want a show developed based on the activities of a terrorist group, “Joseph Stalin and His Merry Band of Bolsheviks,” I want ideas from you people. This is what you’re paid for. And by the way, the next time I send an audience research report around, you’d all better read it, or I’ll sack the fucking lot of you. Is that clear?
…
Howard: Good evening. Today is Wednesday, September the 24th, and this is my last broadcast. Yesterday I announced on this program that I was going to commit public suicide, admittedly an act of madness. Well, I’ll tell you what happened: I just ran out of bullshit. Am I still on the air? I really don’t know any other way to say it other than I just ran out of bullshit. Bullshit is all the reasons we give for living. And if we can’t think up any reasons of our own, we always have the God bullshit. We don’t know why we’re going through all this pointless pain, humiliation, decays, so there better be someone somewhere who does know. That’s the God bullshit. And then, there’s the noble man bullshit; that man is a noble creature that can order his own world; who needs God? Well, if there’s anybody out there that can look around this demented slaughterhouse of a world we live in and tell me that man is a noble creature, believe me: That man is full of bullshit. I don’t have anything going for me. I haven’t got any kids. And I was married for thirty-three years of shrill, shrieking fraud. So I don’t have any bullshit left. I just ran out of it, you see.
…
Diana: [flipping through the newspaper] You know, Barbara, the Arabs have decided to jack up the price of oil another 20%… uh, the CIA has been caught opening Senator Humphrey’s mail… there’s a civil war in Angola… another one in Beirut… the, uh, New York City’s still facing default… they finally caught up with Patricia Hearst… and the whole front page of the “Daily News” is Howard Beale.
…
Diana [to Max]: I watched your 6 o’clock news today; it’s straight tabloid. You had a minute and a half of that lady riding a bike naked in Central Park; on the other hand, you had less than a minute of hard national and international news. It was all sex, scandal, brutal crime, sports, children with incurable diseases, and lost puppies. So, I don’t think I’ll listen to any protestations of high standards of journalism when you’re right down on the streets soliciting audiences like the rest of us. Look, all I’m saying is if you’re going to hustle, at least do it right.
…
Diana: By tomorrow, he’ll have a 50 share, maybe even a 60. Howard Beale is processed instant God, and right now, it looks like he may just go over bigger than Mary Tyler Moore.
…
Frank: I got a hit, Schumacher, and Ruddy doesn’t count any more. He hoped I’d fail with this Beale show, but I didn"t. It’s a big fat big-titted hit and I don’t have to waffle around with Ruddy any more. If he wants to take me up before the CCA, let him. Think Ruddy is stupid enough to go to the board and say “I’m taking our one hit show off the air”? Come November I’ll be there at the annual CCA management review meeting and I’ll announce projected earnings for this network for the first time in five years. Believe me, Mr Jensen’s gonna be rocking back and forth in his little chair, and he’s gonna say “That’s very good, Frank. Keep it up.” So don’t have any illusions about who’s running this network now!
…
Howard: 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 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. 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, 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 gotta 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 GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!”
…
Narrator: By October the Howard Beale show had settled in on a 42 share, more than equalling all the other network news shows combined. In the Nielsen ratings it was listed as the fourth-highest-rated show of the month, surpassed only by “The Six Million Dollar Man”, “All in the Family” and “Phyllis”.
…
Diana: Hi. I’m Diana Christensen, a racist lackey of the imperialist ruling circles.
Laureen: I’m Laureen Hobbs, a badass commie nigger.
Diana: Sounds like the basis of a firm friendship.
…
Diana: I’m interested in doing a weekly dramatic series based on the Ecumenical Liberation Army. The way I see the series is: Each week we open with an authentic act of political terrorism taken on the spot, in the actual moment. Then we go to the drama behind the opening film footage. That’s your job, Ms. Hobbs. You’ve got to get the Ecumenicals to bring in that film footage for us. The network can’t deal with them directly; they are, after all, wanted criminals.
…
Laureen: The Ecumenical Liberation Army is an ultra-left sect creating political confusión with wildcat violence and pseudo-insurrectionary acts, which the Communist Party does not endorse. The American masses are not yet ready for open revolt. We would not want to produce a show celebrating historically deviational terrorism.
Diana: I’m offering an hour a week into which you can stick any propaganda you want.
Laureen: The Ecumenicals are an undisciplined ultra-left gang whose leader is an eccentric to say the least. He calls himself the Great Ahmed Khan and wears a hussar’s shako.
Diana: Ms Hobbs, we’re talking about 30 to 50 million people a shot. Better than handing out Mimeographed pamphlets on ghetto street corners.
…
Laureen: Well Ahmed, you ain’t gonna believe this. They gonna make a TV star out of you. Just like Archie Bunker. You gonna be a household word.
Great Ahmed Kahn: What the fuck are you talking about?
…
Howard: [arms outstretched to the heavens] Edward George Ruddy died today! Edward George Ruddy was the Chairman of the Board of the Union Broadcasting Systems, and he died at eleven o’clock this morning of a heart condition, and woe is us! We’re in a lot of trouble! So. A rich little man with white hair died. What has that got to do with the price of rice, right? And why is that woe to us? Because you people, and sixty-two million other Americans, are listening to me right now. Because less than three percent of you people read books! Because less than fifteen percent of you read newspapers! Because the only truth you know is what you get over this tube. Right now, there is a whole, an entire generation that never knew anything that didn’t come out of this tube! This tube is the Gospel, the ultimate revelation. This tube can make or break presidents, popes, prime ministers. This tube is the most awesome God-damned force in the whole godless world, and woe is us if it ever falls in to the hands of the wrong people, and that’s why woe is us that Edward George Ruddy died. Because this company is now in the hands of CCA - the Communication Corporation of America. There’s a new Chairman of the Board, a man called Frank Hackett, sitting in Mr. Ruddy’s office on the twentieth floor. And when the twelfth largest company in the world controls the most awesome God-damned propoganda force in the whole godless world, who knows what shit will be peddled for truth on this network?!
…
Howard: [ascending the stage] So, you listen to me. Listen to me: Television is not the truth! Television is a God-damned amusement park! Television is a circus, a carnival, a traveling troupe of acrobats, storytellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, side-show freaks, lion tamers, and football players. We’re in the boredom-killing business! So if you want the truth…Go to God! Go to your gurus! Go to yourselves! Because that’s the only place you’re ever going to find any real truth. But, man, you’re never going to get any truth from us. We’ll tell you anything you want to hear; we lie like hell. We’ll tell you that, uh, Kojak always gets the killer, or that nobody ever gets cancer at Archie Bunker’s house, and no matter how much trouble the hero is in, don’t worry, just look at your watch; at the end of the hour he’s going to win. We’ll tell you any shit you want to hear. We deal in illusions, man! None of it is true! But you people sit there, day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds…We’re all you know. You’re beginning to believe the illusions we’re spinning here. You’re beginning to think that the tube is reality, and that your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you! You dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube, you even think like the tube! This is mass madness, you maniacs! In God’s name, you people are the real thing! We are the illusion! So turn off your television sets. Turn them off now. Turn them off right now. Turn them off and leave them off! Turn them off right in the middle of the sentence I’m speaking to you now! TURN THEM OFF…[/b]
Thank god the Internet has come to the rescue! 
[b]Louise: Then get out, go anywhere you want, go to a hotel, go live with her, and don’t come back. Because, after 25 years of building a 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 - 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 at 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.
…
Narrator: “The Mao Tse-tung Hour” went on air March . It received a 47 share. The network promptly committed to 15 shows, with an option for 10 more. There were the usual contractual difficulties.
Suit #1: “…equal to per cent, except that such percentages shall be per cent for -minute or longer televisión programmes.”
Suit#2: Have we settled that sublicensing thing? We want a clear definition here. “Gross proceeds should consist of all funds the sublicensee receives, not merely the net amount remitted after payment to sublicensee or distributor.”
Suit #3: We’re not standing for overhead charges as a cost prior to distribution.
Laureen: Don’t fuck with my distribution costs! I’m making a lousy 215 per segment. I already deficit 25 grand a week with Metro. I pay William Morris ten per cent. I give this turkey ten thou per segment, five to her. Helen, don’t start no shit about a piece again. I pay Metro 20 per cent for all foreign and Canadian distribution, after recoupment. The Communist Party’s not gonna see a nickel until syndication.
Suit #2: Come on, Laureen, the party’s in for 7500 a week production expenses.
Laureen: I’m not givin" this pseudo-insurrectionary sectarian a piece of my show, I ain’t gining him script approval and I sure as shit ain’t cuttin" him in on my distribution charges.
Mary Ann: You fuckin" fascist! Did you see the film we made of the San Marino jail break-out, showing the rising up of a prisoner-class infrastructure?
Laureen: You can blow the prisoner-class infrastructure out your ass. I’m not knocking down my goddamn distribution charges!
Ahmed [firing a revolver]: Man, give her the fuckin" overhead clause. How did I get here? Who’s gonna believe this? Let’s get back to page subsidiary rights. Let’s get back to page 22. Five, small “a”—subsidiary rights
Suit #1" “As used herein, ‘subsidiary rights’ means any and all rights…”
…
Howard [on the air]:You listen to me, and listen carefully, because this is your goddamn life I’m talking about today. When one company wants to take over another company they buy a controlling share of the stock, but first they have to tell the government. That’s how CCA took over the company that owns this network. But now somebody is buying up CCA. Somebody called the Western Worid Funding Corporation. They filed the notice this morning. Well, just who in the hell is the Western Worid Funding Corporation? It is a consortium of banks and insurance companies who are not buying CCA for themselves but as agents for somebody else. Who is the somebody else? They won’t tell! They won’t tell you, or the Senate, they won’t tell the SEC, the FCC, they won’t tell the Justice Department… I will tell you who they’re buying CCA for. They’re buying it for the Saudi-Arabian Investment Corporation. They are buying it for the Arabs!
…
Howard [on the air]: We all know that the Arabs control $16 billion in this country. They own a chunk of Fifth Avenue, downtown pieces of Boston. A part of the port of New Orleans. An industrial park in Salt Lake City. They own big hunks of the Atlanta Hilton. The Arizona Land and Cattle Company. The Security National Bank in California. Bank of the Commonwealth in Detroit. They control Aramco, so that puts them into Exxon, Texaco and Mobil oil. They’re all over! New Jersey, Louisville, St Louis, Missouri. And that’s only what we know about. There’s a lot more we don’t know about, because all those Arab petrol dollars are washed through Switzerland, Canada and the biggest banks in this country. For example, what we don’t know about is this CCA deal. And all the other CCA deals. Right now the Arabs have screwed us out of enough American dollars to come right back and, with our own money, buy General Motors, IBM, ITT, AT& T, DuPont, US Steel and 20 other American companies. Hell, they already own half of England! So, listen to me. Listen to me, goddammit. The Arabs are simply buying us. There’s only one thing that can stop them - you. You! So I want you to get up now. I want you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the phone. I want you to get up from your chairs, go to the phone, get in your cars, drive into the Western Unión offices in town. I want you to send a telegram to the White House. By midnight tonight, I want a million telegrams in the White House. I want them wading knee-deep in telegrams at the White House. I want you to get up right now and write a telegram to President Ford saying “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not gonna take this any more.” “I don’t want the banks selling my country to the Arabs.” “I want the CCA deal stopped now.” “I want the CCA deal stopped now.” Come on! I want the CCA deal stopped now. I want the CCA deal stopped now. I want the CCA deal stopped now. I want the CCA deal stopped now…
…
Frank: Mr. Jensen is unhappy with Howard Beale and wants him discontinued.
Diana: He may be unhappy, but he isn’t stupid enough to withdraw the number one show on television out of pique.
Frank: Two billion dollars is not pique! That’s the Wrath of God! And the Wrath of God wants Howard Beale fired.
…
Jensen: You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, 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 immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, 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. Beale? You get up on your little twenty-one 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. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, 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 tranquilized, all boredom amused. And I have chosen you, Mr. Beale, to preach this evangel.
Howard: Why me?
Jensen: Because you’re on television, dummy. Sixty million people watch you every night of the week, Monday through Friday.
Howard: I have seen the face of God.
Jensen: You just might be right, Mr. Beale.
…
Narrator: That evening Beale went on air to preach Jensen’s corporate cosmology.
Howard: Last night I got up here and asked you to stand up and fight for your heritage, and you did, and it was beautiful. Six million telegrams were sent to the White House. The Arab takeover of CCA has been stopped. The people spoke, the people won. It was a radiant eruption of democracy. But I think that was it, fellas. That sort of thing is not likely to happen again, because at the bottom of all our terrified souls we know that democracy is a dying giant, a sick, sick, dying, decayed political concept writhing in its final pain. I don’t mean that the United States is finished as a worid power. It is the richest, most powerful, most advanced country in the worid. I don’t mean the communists are gonna take over. They’re deader than we are. What is finished is the idea that this great country is dedicated to the freedom and flourishing of every individual in it. It’s the individual that’s finished. It’s the single, solitary human being that’s finished. It’s every single one of you out there that’s finished. Because this is no longer a nation of independent individuals. It’s a nation of some -odd million transistorised, deodorised, whiter-than-white, steel-belted bodies, totally unnecessary as human beings and as replaceable as piston rods. Well, the time has come to say is dehumanisation such a bad word? Whether it’s good or bad, that’s what is so. The whole worid is becoming humanoid - creatures that look human but aren"t. The whole world. We’re the most advanced country so we’ll get there first. The whole world’s people are becoming mass-produced, programmed, numbered and…
…
Narrator: It was a perfectly admissible argument that Howard Beale advanced in the days that followed. It was, however, also a very depressing one. Nobody particularly cared to hear his life was utterly valueless. By the end of the first week in June, “The Howard Beale Show” had dropped one point in the rating and its trend of shares dipped under 48 for the first time since last November.
…
Max: I feel lousy about the pain that I’ve caused my wife and kids. I feel guilty and conscience-stricken, and all of those things you think sentimental, but which my generation calls simple human decency. And I miss my home, because I’m beginning to get scared shitless, because all of a sudden it’s closer to the end than the beginning, and death is suddenly a perceptible thing to me, with definable features.
…
Narrator: By July “The Howard Beale Show” was down 11 points. Hysteria swept through the network.
Laureen: He’s plague, he’s smallpox, he’s typhoid. I don’t want to follow his goddamn show. I want out of that 8 o’clock spot. I’ve got enough troubles without Howard Beale as a lead-in. You guys scheduled me up against “Tony Orlando and Dawn,” NBC’s got “Little House on the Prairie,” ABC’s got “The Bionic Woman”. You’ve gotta do something. You’ve gotta do something about Howard Beale. Get him off the air. Get him off. Do something. DO ANYTHING.
…
Diana: Let’s stop kidding ourselves. Full-fledged messiahs don’t come in bunches.
…
Max: 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: [hesitatingly] Then, don’t leave me.
Max: 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.
[Kisses her]
Max: 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.
[Picks up his suitcases and leaves]
…
Frank: Mr Jensen wants Howard Beale on the air, and he wants him kept on. I would describe his position on this as inflexible.
Suit: Where does that put us, Diana?
Diana: That puts us in the shithouse, that’s where that puts us. Do you want me to go through this?
Frank: : Yes.
Diana: The Beale show Q score is down to. Most of this loss occurred in the child and teen and categories, which were our key core markets. It’s the AR department’s judgement, and mine, that if we get rid of Beale we should maintain a respectable share in the high 20s, possibly with a comparable Q level. The other segments of the show - Sybil, Jim Webbing, the Vox Populi - have all developed their own audiences. Our AR report showed that it is Howard Beale that is the destructive force here. Minimally, we’re talking about a ten-point differential in shares. I think Joe ought to spell it out for us. Joe?
Jow: A 28 share is $80,000 minutes. I think we can sell complete positions on the whole. We’re getting into the pre-Christmas gift sellers. The agencies are coming back to me with $4 CPMs. If that’s any indication, we’re talking $40 to 45 million loss in annual revenues.
Suit: And you would describe Mr Jensen’s position on Beale as inflexible?
Frank: Intractable and adamantine.
Nelson: So what do we do about this Beale son of a bitch?
Frank: I suppose we’ll have to kill him.
…
Diana: I think I can get the Mao Tse-tung people to kill Beale for us as one of their shows. In fact, it’ll make a hell of a kick-off show for the season. We’re facing heavy opposition on the other networks and “The Mao Tse-tung Hour” could use a sensational opener. It could be done right on camera, in the studio. We ought to get a fantastic look-in audience with the assassination of Howard Beale as our opening show.
Nelson: Well, if Beale dies, what would our continuing obligation to the Beale Corporation be?
Suit: I know our contract with Beale contains a buyout clause triggered by his death or incapacity.
Frank: There must be a formula for computation of the purchase price.
Suit: Offhand, I think it was based on a multiple of 1975 earnings with the base period in 1975. I think it was 50% of salary plus 25% of the first year’s profit multiplied by the unexpired portion of the contract. I don’t think the show has any substantial syndication value, would you say Diana?
Diana: Syndication profits are minimal.
Nelson: We’re talking about a capital crime here. The network can’t be implicated.
Suit: I hope you don’t have any hidden tape machines in this office, Frank.
Frank: Well, the issue is shall we kill Howard Beale or not? I’d like to hear some more opinions on that.
Diana: I don’t see we have any option. Let’s kill the son of a bitch.
…
Narrator: This was the story of Howard Beale: The first known instance of a man who was killed because he had lousy ratings.[/b]