{"id":2978,"date":"2011-05-22T11:18:01","date_gmt":"2011-05-22T18:18:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/2011\/05\/lamenting-the-lack-of-satirical-clarity\/"},"modified":"2011-05-24T11:23:50","modified_gmt":"2011-05-24T18:23:50","slug":"lamenting-the-lack-of-satirical-clarity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2011\/05\/22\/lamenting-the-lack-of-satirical-clarity\/","title":{"rendered":"Lamenting the lack of “satirical clarity”…"},"content":{"rendered":"

from The New York Times<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Notes of a Screenwriter, Mad as Hell<\/h1>\n

<\/p>\n

United Artists<\/p>\n

The screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky(1923-1981) won an Academy Award for his jeremiad \u201cNetwork\u201d (1976), starring Faye Dunaway.<\/em><\/p>\n

By DAVE ITZKOFF<\/span><\/p>\n

LAMENTING the lack of \u201csatirical clarity\u201d in the screenplay he was laboring on in the early 1970s, Paddy Chayefsky was mad at himself and American television viewers at large. He was seeing the venomous spirit of the era of Watergate and the Vietnam War infiltrate every program the broadcast networks offered, from their news shows to their sitcoms, and he concluded\u00a0in a typewritten note to himself<\/a>\u00a0that the American people \u201cdon\u2019t want jolly, happy family type shows like Eye Witness News\u201d; no, he wrote, \u201cthe American people are angry and want angry shows.\u201d He had set out to write a comedy, but if his film script was funny at all, he said, “the only joke we have going for us is the idea of ANGER.”<\/p>\n

In the following months, Chayefsky channeled that fury and his intense frustration with television \u2014 the medium he described in another note as \u201can indestructible and terrifying giant that is stronger than the government\u201d \u2014 into the screenplay for \u201cNetwork,\u201d his dark satire about an unstable news anchor and a broadcasting company and a viewing public all too happy to follow him over the brink of sanity.<\/p>\n

\u201cNetwork,\u201d directed by Sidney Lumet and released in 1976, won four Academy Awards, including Oscars for Chayefsky\u2019s script, Faye Dunaway\u2019s performance as a cynical programming executive and Peter Finch\u2019s frenetic portrayal of Howard Beale, the troubled \u201cmad prophet of the airwaves.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thirty-five years later, \u201cNetwork\u201d remains an incendiary if influential film, and its screenplay is still admired as much for its predictive accuracy as for its vehemence: a relentless sense of purpose that is even more palpable in the files Chayefsky left behind upon his death in 1981.<\/p>\n

[ click to continue reading at nytimes.com<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from The New York Times Notes of a Screenwriter, Mad as Hell United Artists The screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky(1923-1981) won an Academy Award for his jeremiad \u201cNetwork\u201d (1976), starring Faye Dunaway. By DAVE ITZKOFF LAMENTING the lack of \u201csatirical clarity\u201d in the screenplay he was laboring on in the early 1970s, Paddy Chayefsky was mad at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2978","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-art","category-los-angeles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2978","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2978"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2978\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2978"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2978"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2978"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}