“Notes of a Screenwriter, Mad as Hell”

This is one of the single coolest things to emerge about screenwriting since I don’t know when: A typewritten set of notes written by Paddy Chayefsky to himself as he was working on what would become his Academy Award winning screenplay Network. From the NYT:

LAMENTING the lack of “satirical clarity” 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 in a typewritten note to himself that the American people “don’t want jolly, happy family type shows like Eye Witness News”; no, he wrote, “the American people are angry and want angry shows.” 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.”

In the following months, Chayefsky channeled that fury and his intense frustration with television — the medium he described in another note as “an indestructible and terrifying giant that is stronger than the government” — into the screenplay for “Network,” 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.

But what about Chayefsky’s typewritten notes?

These papers were acquired by the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts in 2001 but not examined much after their cataloging in the library’s Billy Rose Theater Division was completed in 2006. The rarely seen documents on “Network” speak loudly for their absent author, documenting the angst and animus that consumed him on this highly personal project.

Working in an era of paper, pencils and typewriters, Chayefsky seemingly committed to print every observation and self-criticism that he thought of. His “Network” archives provide a road map of the paths taken and not taken in its narrative, but they also reveal a visceral rawness that is scarce in today’s age of digital files and screenwriting by committee. They tell the story of an author’s struggles to determine what he wanted to say about a medium that would do anything for an audience’s attention.

And here’s the deal: You can read much of Chayefsky’s notes here. Amazing!

By an early “Network” treatment dated Dec. 5, 1973, Chayefsky had decided the story would be set into motion by a scene in which a news anchor character — one he variously referred to as Munro, Holbein or simply Kronkite (among other spellings) — would “crack up on the air at 7:00 p.m.” Maybe he would decry “some item of corruption in the Nixon administration,” put his employers “in a position where they have to make true some totally demented news story” or get “into a fistfight with Eric Sevareid,” the CBS commentator. The end result would be the same: “In Act II, crazy Walter becomes the hottest television sensation in the country.”

So he had the spine of his story from early on. But his process was a tortured one:

In a long handwritten note, across the top of which Chayefsky wrote, “THE SHOW LACKS A POINT OF VIEW,” he confessed to himself, “I guess what bothers me is that the picture seems to have no ultimate statement beyond the idea that a network would kill for ratings, and even that doesn’t mesh with the love story.”

With disappointment, he added: “I’m not taking a stand — I’m not for anything or anyone. If we give Howard a speech at the end of the show, what would he say? I think I would like to say something against the destructiveness of absolute beliefs. That the only total commitment any of us can have is to other human beings.”

So for any of you who get down on yourself when your story doesn’t readily come together — which is all of us! — take solace: Even the great Paddy Chayefsky had his own doubts.

Read the whole NYT article. I look forward to the opportunity to review Chayefsky’s notes, a great way to peer into the mind of one of the greatest playwrights and screenwriters of all time. As Aaron Sorkin says in ending the NYT article:

“If you put it [Network] in your DVD player today you’ll feel like it was written last week,” Mr. Sorkin said. “The commoditization of the news and the devaluing of truth are just a part of our way of life now. You wish Chayefsky could come back to life long enough to write ‘The Internet.’ ”

You can read the NYT article here. And as a reminder of what a brilliant wordsmith Chayefsky was, here is The Speech: