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

missed it,” Chayefsky recalled. “Never saw it.”
    The 1953 broadcast of “Marty” brought an outpouring of appreciation and recognition for its author. If, as the future Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling wrote, Chayefsky regarded television plays as “the most perishable item known to man,” then “Marty” was the exception that gave the form value and longevity. As Serling’s widow, Carol, later said when she spoke of her husband’s esteem for Chayefsky, “He had the gift of melding significance and meaning and humor into one play, often into one single situation. He gave stature to television. And that was really Rod’s feeling.”
    “Marty” also attracted renewed interest from the motion picture industry. The original teleplay, which Chayefsky had written in a matter of days and for which he was paid $1,200, was purchased for a film adaptation by Burt Lancaster and his producing partner Harold Hecht, with Chayefsky receiving a $13,000 option and a percentage of its earnings to write the movie script. Wary of another Hollywood fiasco, Chayefsky negotiated that he be allowed to do his work in New York, that advance rehearsals be held prior to filming, and that Delbert Mann, who had directed the television production, also direct the movie.
    Though he worked with an agent, Bobby Sanford, at the start of his career, Chayefsky made his later business deals on his own, and his lawyer, Maurice Spanbock, reviewed his contracts. As he would later explain, “My position is nonnegotiable. That’s how much I want and what kind of controls I want. It is up to the other side to figure out how to make it palatable to themselves, because there is plenty of room left for everybody to make all the money they want.” Most crucially with Marty , the movie, Chayefsky insisted that he be allowed to participate creatively throughout the filmmaking process. All his demands were accepted, and he was given an additional credit as associate producer.
    Marty , starring an ebullient and eminently likable Ernest Borgnine and featuring a jaunty pop theme song by Harry Warren, is more eager to please and less rough around the edges than its television predecessor. But it was no less a cultural sensation when it was released by United Artists in 1955. In an early review, Variety wrote, “If Marty is an example of the type of material that can be gleaned, then studio story editors better spend more time at home looking at television.” Time praised the film for telling “the whole truth and nothing but the truth about the unattached male,” adding that Chayefsky “can find the vernacular truth and beauty in ordinary lives and feelings. And he can say things about his people that he could never get away with if he were not a member of the family.”
    In a marketplace of extravagant, widescreen Technicolor and CinemaScope presentations, the simple, black-and-white Marty was a surprise winner of the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and in 1956 it won the Academy Award for best picture and Oscars for Borgnine, Mann, and Chayefsky, who, after receiving his statuette and a kiss from Claudette Colbert, declared, “If I hadn’t won, I’d have been disappointed.”
    By this time, Chayefsky had seen the birth of his son, Dan, and the TV broadcasts of his last scripts for The Philco-Goodyear Television Playhouse , including “The Bachelor Party,” “Middle of the Night,” and “The Catered Affair.” He was also growing more assured in his abilities and more strident in his criticism of television. In a New York Herald Tribune article matter-of-factly headlined CHAYEFSKY ASSAILS TV AS STUPID AND DOOMED , he said, “The industry has no pride and no culture. The movies, with all their crassness, can point to something they’ve done with pride during the year.”
    Where he had once boasted that he wrote the dialogue in Marty “as if it had been wire-tapped,” he now snapped at reporters who dared to ask if the words uttered