Network

The Primal Forces of Network

According to the Writers Guild of America the greatest screenplay of all time belongs to Casablanca. A sentimental favourite, no doubt, worthy for a handful of catchy one-liners capped off with a convincing dump-the-dame speech. While Bogie plays himself, Bergman, who may have been the most beautiful woman of all time, didn't have much to say. The best moments in Casablanca were, in fact, the silent ones, and without Bogie and Bergie's chemistry, it probably wouldn't have made the top 10.

Best screenplay suggests best story, best plot, best characters and dialogue; best combination of drama, comedy, intrigue, emotional engagement, suspense, social and political relevance; one peppered with casual eve...

Network broadcasts its televisional corruption through satirical poetry that beckons democratic madness. Im as mad as hell, and Im not going to take it anymore, screams Howard Beale from the confinement of his studio desk. Exerting his ornate insanity upon the entranced viewers who innocently stare at their cubic televisions, watching the news broadcast fuelled by media misrepresentation and propaganda. Go to your nearest window and scream, acting as the voice of the working class, benign to the American corporate fundamentals that masquerade the politics of democracy. In an age where leading actors can represent constituencies or states, and businessmen can be presidential candidates for a nation (and successfully winning...), Lumets timel...

The UPS network is a television network that suffers from a lack of viewership. This led to the layoff of a group of their employees, including the great media night news presenter, Howard Beale, and this led to the events of a psychological impact on Beale, so he promised that he would commit suicide in front of the camera the next day.

The conditions and conditions of the network changed after Beale's decision to commit suicide in front of the camera the next day. The film takes us through the changes that occur to the network after this incident. How did Howard get the situation to the brink, how does the network deal with the crisis, and how do they benefit from the incident, or in a more correct, how do they exploit it to increase t...

Peter Finch is superb here as the increasingly puritanical television news anchor ("Beale") who, having been told he was about to be fired decided on air to tell the audience he was going to shoot himself on live telly. Next night - yep, he was allowed back - he declared that it was time the viewing public got off their sofas and declared they had "had enough" with lazy government and corporate greed. His long suffering boss "Max" (William Holden) wants to have him looked after (medically) but the ambitious PR executive "Diana" (Faye Dunaway) sees an opportunity amidst all this evangelicalism and convinces the station's new boss "Hackett" (Robert Duvall) to remove "Max" and to reinstate "Beale" with his own hour long news hour programme com...

Few Hollywood productions have been as utterly prescient as director Sidney Lumets cinematic masterpiece Network (1976), a chillingly serious satire about the television business in the 1970s and where it was ultimately headed in years to come. Written by TV pioneer Paddy Chayefsky, this winner of four Oscars on 10 total nominations provides a comical but cynically disturbing look inside the workings of a fictitious American television network. In telling this story, the film eerily forecast the direction this medium would take in the decades that followed with remarkable accuracy, stunningly predicting such developments as the tabloidization of TV, the consolidation of media ownership, the impact of foreign influence and investment, and th...