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

don’t have to play footsie with Ruddy any more.”
    Some ideas and characters fell out of the screenplay completely at this stage: a scene following the opening narration in which Howard Beale is found by his housekeeper “still wearing the clothes he wore last night, curled in a position of fetal helplessness on the floor in the far corner of the room”; Beale’s nineteen-year-old daughter, Celia, who bemoans her fate as having “a nut for a mother and a drunk for a father”; a psychiatrist, Dr. Sindell, who examines Beale and suggests to Schumacher that he be institutionalized for his catatonic trances and manic delusions that “are traditional to schizophrenia, not that any of us know what the hell schizophrenia is.”
    Chayefsky’s internal editor excised dialogue when it tended to be too overtly didactic—for example, a line spoken by Hackett in private to his fellow television and corporation executives: “Television is the most powerful communications medium that has ever existed. Its propagandistic potential hasn’t even been touched. I sent several confidential memos to you about just that, Clarence.”
    But when his sense of humor was allowed to expand to its fullest dimensions of cynicism and morbidity, he did not always recognize when he had gone too far. In the scene where Beale and Schumacher drown their sorrows after the anchorman has been told of his firing and they drunkenly brainstorm the terrible TV programs that could follow his on-air suicide, Schumacher’s imaginary pitch for The Death Hour is to be accompanied by additional suggestions for The Madame Defarge Show and something called Rape of the Week .
    The rise and fall of Schumacher and Diana’s love affair, from devious flirtations to smoldering passion to burned-out ashes, is a trajectory Chayefsky worked out over numerous revisions. When the female lead of his screenplay was still called Louise, she was a more romantic soul who, with dewy eyes, confesses to Schumacher that she’d previously met him when he gave a guest lecture during her senior year of college: “You and Ed Murrow and Fred Friendly had knocked off McCarthy, a craggy man, about thirty-eight, tie askew, collar unbuttoned—I think you were affecting the manners of the hard-bitten, hard-drinking, tell-them-like-it-is reporter. You made a terrific hit with the kids. I fell instantly in love with you. I had never had a crush on anyone before.”
    When she became Diana, her temperament changed, too. Like her namesake, she had the unattainability of a goddess and her animal wiles, but she was also volatile, joyless, and depressed, telling Schumacher that she lived “on the brink of despair” twenty-four hours a day.
    If I could stand the taste of liquor I’d be a lush. I had three wretched years of marriage and four futile years of psychoanalysis. I’ve tried hallucinogen drugs, commune living, activist politics.… In order of appearance, I’ve tried to believe in God, the dignity of man, love and marriage, drugs and feminism and even the absolutism of sex, and I was lousy at all of them, especially sex. I can’t tell you how many men have told me what a lousy lay I am. I seem to have a masculine temperament. I arouse quickly, consummate prematurely, and promptly lose interest.
    As the relationship turned physical, Chayefsky’s prose was at times prurient, and he was unabashedly direct that Diana’s presence in Schumacher’s office, her lithe form “lit only by his desk lamp,” was enough to give the old newsman an erection: “it was nipple clear that she was bra-less; when she leaned to his desk to flick an ash from her cigarette into the tray, he could see the assertive swells of her body, and, damn, if he wasn’t reacting to all this like a schoolboy.”
    Over the course of an evening’s seduction, the action moves from the UBS office building to a deserted Hamptons beach to a romantic Italian bistro to the dimly lit bedroom of a highway motor lodge—but