NETWORK

GEORGE CLOONEY: “My favourite movie is Network. Paddy Chayefsky was a brilliant writer. There’s the scene with Ned Beatty going, ‘There is no Soviet Union. There is no China. There is only Exxon and AT&T.’ It is such a brilliant speech. Everything Paddy Chayefsky wrote about in that movie came true. It was supposed to be a joke! I screened that movie for a bunch of young people, and told them it was a comedy and they said, ‘We love the movie, but it’s not a comedy!’ The idea when he wrote it, that the anchorman could be the entertainer, was impossible. You couldn’t imagine it. ‘I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore’ — how far is that from Trump? It’s crazy.”

INT. CONFERENCE ROOM — DAY

Arthur Jensen (Ned Beatty) escorts Howard Beale (Peter Finch), the newsman whose prophetic on-air rantings initially garnered huge ratings, but which have now put the wrong kind of noses out of joint, into a huge conference room. In the middle, a giant table bedecked with green-domed lights.

JENSEN: Valhalla, Mr Beale! Please, sit down.

Howard sits down at one end of the table as Jensen crosses to the window and closes the curtains. He walks back to the head of the table, steps into the light, then suddenly launches into an impassioned tirade, gesticulating wildly as he does so.

JENSEN: You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr Beale, and I won’t have it, is that clear? You think you have merely stopped a business deal — that is not the case! The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back. It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity, it is ecological balance! You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations! There are no peoples! There are no Russians, there are no Arabs, there are no Third Worlds, there is no West! There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multi-variate, multi-national dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars! Reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds and shekels! It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet! That is the natural order of things today! That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And you have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and you will atone!

And, again, Jensen flips a switch and starts speaking more conversationally.

JENSEN: Am I getting through to you, Mr Beale?

Howard has been watching, enrapt.

JENSEN: You get up on your little 21” screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and Dupont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state — Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable by-laws of business. The world is a business, Mr Beale! It has been since man crawled out of the slime, and our children will live, Mr Beale, to see that perfect world in which there’s no war or famine, oppression or brutality...

Jensen slowly walks toward’s Howard’s chair.

JENSEN: ... one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquillised, all boredom amused.

He is now shrouded in darkness.

JENSEN: And I have chosen you, Mr Beale, to preach this evangel.

BEALE: Why me?

JENSEN: Because you’re on television, dummy. Sixty million people watch you every night of the week, Monday through Friday.

BEALE: I have seen the face of God!

JENSEN: You just might be right, Mr Beale.