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1976 Movie Foreshadowed Fox, 'Reality' TV

Posted on: Friday, 24 February 2006, 15:00 CST

By Chris Hicks Deseret Morning News

In November 1976, when I was a rookie reporter at the Ogden Standard-Examiner, a free movie screening was offered to journalists.

Hey, anything free was attractive in those days. This was long before I became a critic, and I loved movies, so the prospect of a free flick was a very big deal to me.

The film was "Network."

I went, I enjoyed it, but I remember thinking at the time that it was pretty outrageous. My reference point -- the darkest comedy I could recall -- was "Dr. Strangelove," another jet-black satire with serious situations exaggerated just enough to be shocking and funny without being too far removed from realism.

I watched "Network" again last weekend on a new double-disc DVD special edition to be released next Tuesday (Warner; rated R for violence, language, sex; $26.98).

Though it had been quite awhile since I had seen "Network," I thought I knew it pretty well. But I was actually quite amazed.

To say Paddy Chayefsky's script was prophetic is to understate.

This story of the upstart UBS network, which earns big ratings by being more "edgy" and "out there" than the more conservative big three -- CBS, NBC and ABC -- could be about the Fox network, which came along more than a decade later.

Some of the "Network" scenarios are not that far removed from today's "reality" TV shows, or the many dramatic series that keep "pushing the envelope," as the industry likes to say.

Of course, everybody remembers the famous scene where a veteran TV news anchorman (played by Peter Finch) pounds home his message to the TV audience:

"I want you to go to the window, open it, stick your head out and yell, 'I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore.' " (This scene still sends chills up the spine.)

The central plot is that the anchorman gets nuttier with each broadcast, but since his insane antics keep pumping up the show's ratings, the powers that be not only allow him to stay on the air but eventually build a new show around him, billing Finch's character as "the mad prophet of the airwaves."

But it's everything that floats around that plot that seems particularly prescient.

The network's news director (William Holden), who is also the anchor's best friend, wants no part of all this, but he's overruled. Ratings dictate everything, and corporate takeovers and revolving- door bosses eventually get the better of him.

Early in the film the news director jokingly postulates that UBS could put on "The Death Hour," with clips of "suicides, assassinations, mad bombers, Mafia hitmen, automobile smash-ups."

The entertainment-programming director (Faye Dunaway) develops a show around a radical group that robs banks and provides footage of the robberies. "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."

She also talks of a possible daytime gay soap opera "about a woman hopelessly in love with her husband's mistress."

And she criticizes the evening news as being more "tabloid" than it wants to admit. "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."

The program director is criticized by the news director as being from the television generation. "She learned life from Bugs Bunny."

Director Sidney Lumet says in the excellent bonus features that even in 1976 he and Chayefsky felt the film was more "reporting" than "exaggerating." Even Walter Cronkite weighs in on the film's significance and how so much of it has come true.

But no one mentions Fox by name.

E-mail: hicks@desnews.com

Source: Deseret News (Salt Lake City)

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