The Talkies/Worst Movie of the Year
Everitt, David
THE TALKIES & David Everitt Worst Movie of the Year Network has been nominated for ten Academy Awards including all the major categories: best picture, director, screenplay, actor, and...
...This might well be the most inane love affair the screen has ever known...
...Oscar-nominated director Sidney Lumet has made good movies before, but the auteur theory notwithstanding, a good director just cannot mise-en-sc~ne his way out of a bad script...
...GWP 32 The Alternative: An American Spectator April 1977...
...The first chance he gets, Holden then tells her that he can't live without her...
...Anyway now that I have been dealt a new hand I want to renew my public life...
...After all we have scrupulously avoided hiring Republicans in our news division...
...Most of the time he is supposed to be the wisest and most sophisticated of the crowd, and at the same time he is supposed to be moronic enough to get into Great Americans Serzes PORK QUEEN Miss Lois Hanebutt of Center Township was crowned the Hendricks County Pork Queen Friday, and will be representing the Hendricks County Pork Producers in the state contest...
...Address all correspondence to The Bootblack Stand, c/o The Alternative...
...It is always laboriously clear exactly where the plot is headed...
...That really happened...
...I know he would be eloquent on all sorts of important events from a towering tarte aufromagefrais to a sentimental c/sou rouge ~ la limousine...
...Now The Alternative: An American Spectator April 1977 31 he appears determined to speak of nothing but "big things" which come off sounding very small...
...My more liberal colleagues feel we should only ask the Republican former secretary of state to discuss those matters in which he was intimately involved, mainly the senseless bombing and maiming of countless thousands of innocent Vietnamese men, women, and children...
...I, being more of a centrist, feel he should contain his comments to traditional Republican matters of interest, like international sports events...
...Accordingly, when Chayefsky satirizes the world of TV, the ridicule is something less than surprising, and the movie stops being funny halfway through...
...For lack of any personal cohesion, the Holden character seems merely to serve as a mouthpiece for whatever Chayefsky feels like lecturing about at the time...
...The characters themselves are not really human beings...
...In the far-off yesterday I was just a suspected Communist and ex-con...
...In Marty the only literary references Chayefsky made were to Mickey Spillane...
...Instead we have a parade of one-dimensional c h a r a c t e r i z a t i o n s and bombastic posturing...
...Clearly television has taken a precipitous spill since the "golden age," but no less than Chayefsky, its critic...
...Have you any suggestions...
...In this manner, they are slapped together, affording Chayefsky innumerable opportunities for more speeches...
...Perhaps you could show him expounding on a memorable Bavarian Cream Pie, while standing before a blown-up X ray of his large intestine...
...Kissinger, which show him spilling out of his already capaciously cut suits, inspire a solution to your problem...
...I suspect they were disappointed, for I had told them so much about them...
...Give this suggestion careful thought...
...His basic premise is ultimately a non-issue, a non-controversy...
...You could interview his tailor and even feature an exchange with his gastroenterologist...
...and Mrs...
...6 ~ Q ~ O ~ U O O D U t O O ~ O ~ O ~ 6 m m O ~ 8 O O 6 0 m Q Q I ~ I ~ U D m t O O U O O O I J . . . . D O ~ O I Q O O I 9 0 t ~ O g j ~ O ~ m Q O O 6 . . . . . O O ~ I p Q I . . . . O O p t O ~ B O . . . . ~ . . . . ~ . . . . O~D . . . . . ~ . . . . . . . . . . . . . THE BOOTBLACK STAND Dr...
...Peter Finch and Robert Duvall are first-rate actors but cannot do much with narrowly defined roles, and Faye Dunaway plays the unhappy femme fatale with just enough flutters and twitches to be annoying...
...Schlosser: Recent pictures of Mr...
...And the message is essentially this: TV is ruthless, TV is ruthless and, furthermore, TV is ruthless...
...If a character is neurotic there is no reason to keep your eye out for revealing nuances or even outright actions...
...By the way I thought it cunning of your son Tony to describe you in his new book as an extremely "private" man...
...But in Network there is no such graceful unfolding...
...GWP Dear Dr...
...His characters don't" exchange lines, they swap platform statements...
...The award for best screenplay is most bewildering, for it is clearly screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky's simple-minded vision that makes Network the most grating movie to come along in quite a while, perhaps since Hospital, which Chayefsky also wrote...
...And in case you don't tumble to this in the first hour and a half, William Holden is kind enough to tell Faye Dunaway that she is "TV incarnate" just for good measure...
...George Washington Plunkitt, our prize-winning political analyst, has accepted a staff position with the House Ethics Committee, but he has graciously consented to continue advising American statesmen in these times of troubles...
...Yours cordially, Herbert Schlosser President, NBC Dear Mr...
...THE TALKIES & David Everitt Worst Movie of the Year Network has been nominated for ten Academy Awards including all the major categories: best picture, director, screenplay, actor, and actress...
...In lieu of such qualities as style, coherence, and perception, Network seems to have muscled its way to all these honors through sheer force of pretension...
...Network is a movie that is hard to be blast about...
...Of all the characters, the only one with more than one dimension is Holden, and he just doesn't make sense...
...and Mrs...
...The pity of it is that Holden looks prepared to give one of the most eloquent performances of his impressive career...
...The reference to Tolstoy, on the other hand, just smacks of a sorry pitch for intellectual status...
...Chayefsky plays with such a stacked deck and overloads his situations with such broad contrivance that his targets become nothing more than clay pigeons just begging to be shot down...
...Plunkitt: Life is like nothing I've ever seen before...
...Boy, that Mickey Spillane, he sure can write...
...Things are going your way now, and if the media continues to celebrate you, you may be able to wangle a Supreme Court nomination or even a position on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission...
...Norwood Pritchett of Center Township, was the runner-up...
...I myself have heard him discourse ardently on mousse au chocolat, and let me assure you his remarks were intelligent and poignant...
...Now people stop me on the street to tell me that they saw me on the Today Show and mention admiringly that it appeared I had forgotten to wipe the shaving cream from my face or that my shoes didn't match or that throughout the interview my coat collar was up and my fly was open...
...The movie is additionally irritating because Chayefsky used to be so good, especially in those days when he wrote for, of all sordid things, television...
...Through the shabby seams of the script he manages to evoke a well-rounded richness that might have been fully realized in an intelligible part...
...On another occasion I almost did myself irreparable damage when I mistook my son's pet cobra for a pair of Lederhosen...
...The other Oscar nominees do not fare much better...
...In the climactic scene of Network, the Dunaway character is described as "TV incarnate" because she is heartless and unfeeling...
...In the voting for the New York Film Critics Awards it placed second for best film of the year, second for best performance by an actress (Faye Dunaway), and first for best screenplay...
...from the Republican of Danville, Indiana July 15, 1976 an affair with the blatantly viperish Dunaway...
...As your series continued you could feature historic NBC news clips showing how Mr...
...He or she will tell you so and in just those words and if you miss it the first time around, not to worry, it'll be said again and again...
...She is the daughter of Mr...
...Alas, this was not to be...
...As in Hospital all the dramatic possibilities are sapped somewhere in the first half while the characters continually subject each other to self-reportage and self-definition...
...Network is supposed to be a satire, but instead it is a "message film" in the unfortunate sense of the term...
...early in the movie would have been agreeable enough if the film had wound up with some sort of dramatic integrity...
...I am now a media superstar...
...Have the former secretary of state comment only on those aspects of his diplomatic career in which his performance was truly remarkable...
...Along the wordy way he brings in an analogy to Anna Karenina, which, of course, is very sophisticated...
...I recall a gorgeous spring morning in 1959 when I snagged my crew neck sweater on a nail on my front door and walked six blocks before a Good Samaritan informed me that all I had left was a very long piece of wool thread and a collar...
...The reference is obviously meant to be laughable, and fully is, while at the core being somewhat pathetic and revealing...
...With such teleplays as Marty, Bachelor Party, and Middle of the Night he put a compelling focus on some of the so-called small things in life, putting to use a wonderful ear for common speech that was a s natural-sounding a s it was incisive...
...As ever, Alger Hiss Dear Mr...
...They are symbols, simplistic and shrill...
...What with the vehemence and thoroughness with which Chayefsky debunks the television industry, it makes one wonder if he thinks there is actually some strong body of opinion that claims that TV is honorable and beyond reproach...
...Kissinger's circumference expanded during his years of public service...
...Ask him to reflect on the really superior p~ches cardinals he has known...
...How absent-minded I am, but harmless, absolutely harmless...
...I want to run for Congress, and why not on the slogan "Alger's Back" ? Would you lend me some counsel...
...Chayefsky isn't content anymore to write dialogue, he writes lectures...
...Chayefsky's limited success at humor David Everitt writes from Great Neck, New York...
...What I like about Mickey Spillane is he knows how to handle women...
...If you fail to act the Public Broadcasting Service is bound to...
...To allow one to comment extensively on international relations during the Carter Administration could jeopardize national security...
...Miss Lana Pritchett, daughter of Mr...
...Even the most absurd gags need to be built up with a sense of naturalness that gulls the viewer into accepting them as logical conclusions...
...and I never did find the Lederhosen, much to my chagrin, for I was on my way to a movie about concentration camps in Chile and many were irate when I arrived without my Lederhosen...
...one lady threw up...
...Paul Hanebutt, Danville, and will be a junior at DHS...
...Other pictures have just a s little to offer, but this film is so aggressively intent upon appearing important that it invites the strongest reaction from anyone who dislikes it...
...Some people have a lot to be private about, eh Alger...
...One might suppose that in addition to "TV is ruthless," a subordinate message would be "Love is strange...
...Plunkitt: Now that we have signed Henry Kissinger to a 1.5- to 3 million-dollar contract to comment on international relations, there is some disagreement around here as to precisely what sorts of international issues he should deal with...
...Hee hee, the cobra was furious...
...Dunaway deceives Holden, takes advantage of him, gets him fired, and leaves him castrated...
...When Holden's wife finds out about his affair with Faye Dunaway, Holden tries to explain to her what is at work in his attraction for this unscrupulous woman...
...Hiss: Relax, stick to your stamp collection...
...Dear Dr...
...In the fifties it was TV that broadcast such heartful, compassionate works as Marty and Bachelor Party...
Vol. 10 • April 1977 • No. 7
