Free Mad as Hell: The Making of Network and the Fateful Vision of the Angriest Man in Movies by Dave Itzkoff

deep-pocketed producer of a coming remake of King Kong , Chayefsky hit upon the idea of reinventing another classic horror tale, turning Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde into the story of a latter-day character who experiments with an array of drugs, devices, and therapies as he studies “the states of human consciousness.” For now this idea was little more than a literal sketch, a doodle of his imagined hero: pinched, peanut-shaped head, comb-over hairdo, pointy nose, and prominent chin.
    Turning back to the screenplay he was supposed to be writing, Chayefsky tossed aside potential endings as fast as he could imagine reasons why they wouldn’t work. What if the revolutionary group kidnapped Beale as a way of attracting attention for their group? But, wrote Chayefsky, “If their show is a hit, they already have attention—Ransom? They’re already rich from TV—in fact, we are trying to say their revolutionary ideals have already been corrupted by TV—in what way?” None of this sounded like the American counterculture he thought he saw sprouting up all around him, which, he wrote, “wants chaos, depression + disaster to produce the popular discontent necessary to the creation of a revolutionary class.”
    An especially grim possibility considered by Chayefsky centered on a radical he named Achmed Abdullah, who is being groomed by Diana for a television show of his own and whom she convinces that “if he assassinates Beale and takes film of it—doing it right on camera during a Beale show,” it “would give his show a tremendous kickoff for his first season.” Chayefsky was at one point so certain he was on the right track that he wrote the following words, drew a black box around them, added a red box around the black box, and placed six red check marks next to the red box: “So the terrorist story is really the story of Achmed Abdullah, the mad terrorist who is slowly corrupted into a TV star and finally winds up slaughtering everybody + HB just to give his TV show a terrific looking audience for his first show.”
    Had this version of the story come to pass, it would have ended with Achmed Abdullah using himself as a suicide bomb to blow up Beale and his studio audience, leaving only Diana “alone in the shambles wondering if there can be another way for the world to go.”
    The conclusion that Chayefsky instead settled on was milder, if only slightly. “We’ve got to replace Beale,” he wrote to himself. “They replaced Allen with Paar—they replaced Paar with Carson and that show’s still killing everybody—It’s not Beale—it’s his bullshit that sells.” The solution was to have Diana get her up-and-coming terrorist group to assassinate Beale—“It not only gets Howard off the air, but it gives terrific promotion for the counter-culture hour”—and in the final joke of the movie, “they kick this idea around just like any other network decision.”
    If Chayefsky felt any sense of confidence or closure after reaching this conclusion, it was short-lived. It was here that he pulled a sheet of lined paper out of a notebook and dejectedly wrote to himself across the top of the page: “THE SHOW LACKS A POINT OF VIEW.” Whatever this thing was that he had been laboring on all these months, it had “no ultimate statement beyond the idea that a network would kill for ratings, and even that doesn’t mesh with the love story and whatever the love story says thematically.” Maybe there was something darkly funny about these futile characters and the dehumanizing institutions they occupied, but he had not created them “just for laughs.” “They are allegorical figures in a social satire—extreme social forces trying to get power through the medium of television—But, at the same time they are corrupted and eventually dominated by the medium they are trying to exploit.” Chayefsky berated himself for not taking a clear stand in the narrative—“I’m not for anything or anyone”—and seemed to