My apologies for marking the wrong answer. I thought I’d seen it, but when I read the description I realized I hadn’t. I was thinking of Broadcast News.
BTW, I was born in 1962. Regarding the “Mad as Hell” comment, I always attributed that to Eddie Chiles.
All I remembered was the close timing of his Tonight Show appearance and his death. From FindADeath:
The next guest was George Carlin, who came out and did a whole routine on death, dying and funerals (“I don’t want to be buried, but I also don’t like cremation. I want to be blown up!”).
Peter Finch only appeared on The Tonight Show twice. In his second appearance, on the night before he died, Carson recalled abut how they had talked about the play Hair and the idea of performing nude on stage the first time. Finch more-or-less acknowledged that he had been awkward and uncomfortable about being interviewed on television back then and hadn’t said much.
This second time he was much looser and talked about his remarkable childhood. He had been raised, he said, by his eccentric grandmother in an artists’ colony in France. A next door neighbor was a wildlife painter who kept live tigers caged in his house, and the stench was incredible. His grandmother seemed to have had a kind of Auntie Mame quality. At one time she became fascinated by Buddhism and decided for a time she was going to send him away to grow up as a monk, going as far as to shave his head.
“Wow”, I thought, (how I can remember this I have no idea; I would have been 20 at the time), “Finch is going to be a guest all the time now.”
Carlin, as has been said, came out and did a monologue about death. He talked about how some people are quietly said to have “passed on” while other people are very dramatically said to have DIED. After he sat down Carson said he’d like to have his desk boarded up as a coffin and floated off to sea. Carlin observed that Carson was a sentimental guy. I don’t recall if Finch made any remark about how he would like to go; it wasn’t common for earlier guests to interject when a new one sat down.
A fine satirical point in Network which no one seems to have commented on yet was how people in the film were continually mangling English. The narrator says that the debut of Beal’s new format was not “auspicatory”. Dunnaway talks about how she would like to bring on a professional psychic to “oraculate”. It was a reflection of how people on live television often coin neologisms, especially when trying to extemporize.
I believe the Oscars broadcast that year may be the last one I sat all the way through. I remember Chayefsky saying it was obviously by mistake that he was chosen to accept the award and then inviting Finch’s widow up to accept. It was really touching to see how emotional she became, and it reinforced an impression I already had of Chayefsky from seeing him interviewed by Tom Snyder (anybody remember him?) and seeing several of his plays that he was a pretty decent, stand-up kind of guy.
For a while Network seemed to be regarded as a new landmark classic of American film. It was, at least, treated as such for several years whenever it was run on a local station in St. Louis as one of their major events for a ratings month.
Isn’t it still?
I think you’re wrong on this—“auspicatory” and “oraculate” are uncommon but well-attested English words. The OED says “oraculate” means “to speak oracularly” (i.e., in the style of an oracle) and gives a number of 19th- and 20th-century citations. It also has “auspicatory” in the sense of “of or pertaining to auspication” (i.e., getting favourable omens), though the word is marked as rare and the last citation given is from 1734. The people in the film aren’t mangling English here; they just happen to share Chayefsky’s large vocabulary (or perhaps a penchant for looking up obscure words in the dictionary).
The film does have one notable instance of an actor struggling with the language: in Beatrice Straight’s emotional scene with William Holden, she refers to his character’s “emeritus years”, but mispronounces the word as “em-mer-EET-us” instead of the usual “em-MER-it-us”. The mistake wasn’t caught until filming had wrapped up, so they had to get Straight come back to the studio and rerecord part of the line. If you watch the scene carefully, you’ll see that, for a few words, her lips aren’t synchronized with the dialogue, and that there’s an obvious change in the audio.
I’m glad to hear this. Given that this is my second-favorite film of all time, I was chagrined to think that I might have completely missed that element of the script.
Speaking of that marital confrontation, though, it is the only aspect of the film that detracts from its perfection. It’s a fantastic scene in and of itself, ironically: taken in a vacuum, it might be one of the greatest dramatic scenes of its type ever committed to celluloid. But it just doesn’t fit tonally with the satirical edge of the rest of the picture.
It may be a departure tonally, but it does afford the husband the opportunity to engage in some very insightful deconstruction of his lover’s character:
Incidentally, there’s yet another speech error in that scene, this time by Holden. He mispronounces “Karenina” as “Karenia”. This time, though, the filmmakers either didn’t notice or didn’t care to fix it.
You are right, I had forgotten how great that speech of his is. It is a perfect fit with the rest of the script. But it’s his wife’s side of the scene that got her the Oscar, and that’s the part that doesn’t fit. Holden could have given the same soliloquy to a sympathetic bartender, who stands there drying pint glasses and offering a sympathetic, or at least nonjudgmental, ear.
That’s like saying that Peter Dinklage never played for the Lakers.
A tremendous movie by any standards, even today–in fact it should probably be required viewing for today’s ADHD-addled high school students, although you’d probably have to handcuff them to their desks and duct tape their cell phones to the ceiling for the duration.
Just a seamless script. Not sure between Network and From Here To Eternity which I like better.
Another fun fact: A couple days before she was scheduled to film the sex scene, she tried to back out of it, claiming she had never agreed to it. She wasn’t simply objecting to being nude in the scene; she refused to do the scene at all, and had her lawyer write letters to that effect.
The producer was dumbfounded, as Dunaway had been given the script before she even signed on to the film; she must have known in advance that it featured a sex scene. They pleaded with her to reconsider but she wouldn’t budge. She relented only when the producer got in touch with MGM to secure permission to fire her and hire another actress; they forced her to sign a memorandum of understanding that she would do the scene.
Years later, when Network was shown for the first time on television, she went through the whole rigmarole all over again. She got her lawyer to sue the television network for airing the nude scene, which she again claimed she had never consented to.