Mad as Hell: The Making of Network and the Fateful Vision of the Angriest Man in Movies Read Online Free

an established Broadway director at the time of the war and the future cowriter of South Pacific , was among those who took notice of this formative work, and he became fast friends with Chayefsky, whom he regarded as “a square”—not socially but physically. “Paddy is built like an office safe, one that fits under the counter and is impossible to move,” Logan would later observe. “He is the only man I know who was that way when he was in his late teens and is still that way in full-fledged manhood.”
    The musical caught the attention also of Curt Conway, then a Special Services staff sergeant who was producing shows for GIs in London. So, too, did Chayefsky. “I thought I was the sloppiest soldier in the Army,” Conway said. But Chayefsky, he found, outdid him. “Bedraggled is the best description—his shirttail always riding out of his pants and one trouser leg always out of the boot. He was generally unimpressive until you found out he had a charming sense of humor.” Chayefsky struck Conway as shy and socially awkward. “He seemed to know very little about girls,” he said.
    Garson Kanin, a noted motion picture director at the time of his enlistment, put Chayefsky to work on Carol Reed’s film The True Glory , an account of the Allied victories on the Western front that won the Academy Award for documentary feature in 1945. Returned to civilian life one year later, the two men crossed paths on the streets of Manhattan: Kanin was thriving as the celebrated playwright of the Broadway comedy Born Yesterday , while Chayefsky was working in his uncle Abe’s printing shop on West Twenty-Eighth Street, yearning to resume his literary pursuits. Kanin and his wife, the actress Ruth Gordon, gave Chayefsky a $500 advance to write a play of his own—a gift, essentially, to get him out of his print shop job. Not knowing how proper dramas were composed, Chayefsky bought a book of plays by Lillian Hellman, sat down at his typewriter, and retyped The Children’s Hour . “I copied it out word for word and I studied every line of it,” he said. “I kept asking myself: ‘Why did she write this particular line?’”
    His first original play, Put Them All Together , about a Jewish family in the Bronx, was not produced, and this was a great disappointment to him. But the narrative treatment he wrote next, called The Great American Hoax , was, and this was an even greater disappointment. The treatment, about an older man being forced out of a printing job, earned Chayefsky a $25,000 option from 20th Century–Fox and a $250-a-week job at the Hollywood studio to write the screenplay, which eventually became the Monty Woolley comedy As Young as You Feel . But long before that, the young writer (who dubbed the end product “a real stinker”) grew exasperated with the changes sought by Fox, which seemed to respond only to his irritation. “I stormed and ranted,” Chayefsky said, “and the more I raved, the more they ‘respected’ me.” With all the esteem of the studio, he took his substantial paycheck and stormed back to New York.
    The year 1949 was doubly momentous for him: February saw the opening of the play Death of a Salesman , Arthur Miller’s elegy for the misplaced values of the overlooked American middle class, an event that profoundly reshaped the perspectives of dramatists both established and aspiring. That same month, Chayefsky was married to Susan Sackler, a slight, slender ballet student who, like her new husband, came from a Jewish family in the Bronx. He found steadier employment adapting plays for radio broadcasts, and as television blossomed in the early 1950s, he was one of many writers enlisted by the networks to feed the public’s growing hunger for new programming. But his first produced script, for the CBS suspense anthology Danger , directed by a young prodigy named Sidney Lumet, did not mark an auspicious debut. “Nobody called me to tell me what night they were putting it on, so I