...and STILL is. Baby. If that's 75 that's a reason to stay alive.
Posted on 06/17/2016 8:50:22 AM PDT by Captain Peter Blood
Let us go back forty years. Here is one of the greatest scenes in the history of the movies. Howard Beale is the presumptive Republican candidate for President of the United States.
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, polls indicate that a majority of British voters are going to vote to pull out of the European Union on June 23.
The international establishment is facing a two-front war. The Atlantic alliance is in visible disarray. This has not happened before. This is truly historic.
(Excerpt) Read more at garynorth.com ...
Paddy Chayefsky, the screen writer, was able to write a satire, that at the time seemed like fantasy. Roll forward 40 years and what Paddy Chayefsky thought was satire has now become reality. Network News is now run by the Entertainment Divisions of the major networks and cable news companies and bears no resemblance to the serious sober broadcasts of Huntley-Brinkley, Walter Cronkite, and Howard K. Smith of 50 years ago.
If Paddy Chayefsky were alive today what he make of it all, I think he would be amazed and disgusted at the same time.
So here he have Donald Trump being cast as the modern day Howard Beale. What Beale railed against 40 years ago has now come full circle and has given us the political landscape we have now. People are now disgusted and have had enough of the no-nothing politicians. So we will see if the Howard Beale anger takes up through November to a real change.
So many things in that movie that seem to be reality today, not for the better either.
Man, you said it.
Paddy Chayefsky was a prophet.
While Network is certainly to be respected what I want to know is when did Yes, Minister/Yes, Prime Minister become a documentary of governance and not a farce?
I actually leaned a lot on politics watching that show as it really exposed it as so hypocritical.
Nigel Hawthorne as Sir Percy Appleby was the perfect bureaucrat that made getting things done in government so crazy.
Great show and worth watching again.
Bumped to front page sidebar!
I have been patiently waiting for, “We are MAD as Hell, and we aren’t going to take it anymore”.
Cannot thank you enough for sharing this very prescient film speech from 40 years ago.
RE: This is the scene I remember from “Network”...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mggkGeDX6lg
I wasn't watching the movie, but could hear noise out in the quad. It grew and grew, and I finally went outside to hear many people yelling out the window of their room:
"I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!"
Today, it would be a good chant at a protest, especially in front of a major news studio.
I have often thought of Network when I look around these days. Beale became very unstable, though, and Trump shows no signs of that.
...and STILL is. Baby. If that's 75 that's a reason to stay alive.
That one still sends chills up my back.
I always thought Howard K. Smith was the best of the bunch.
Ned Beatty nails the delivery!
More Network facts:
http://www.moviefone.com/2011/11/27/25-things-you-didnt-know-about-network/
Bookmarking...
McLaren, who managed the New York Dolls & created the Sex Pistols - said music would be dead in 20 years, replaced by what he had heard on the NY streets at the time, a melange of urban Latino & black [crap]. And he was right, to the point of his proof-of-concept with 1998's early dub/dance experiment "Buffalo Gals".
Pretty sad. Guy gets his big break, the role of a life time, and a year later, he's dead of a heart attack.
William Holden also died a few years after Network, but he had a very full career.
Network kind of fell apart as it went on. Howard Beale was so crazy, I don't think Chayefsky knew what to do with him, but it's amazing the way the movie still unavoidably towers over more recent movies about the news business.
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