The Apartment: A Screenplay Analysis

THE APARTMENT
Screenplay Analysis by: 

Petros L. Ioannou

The Apartment is a 1960 film with a script written by Billy Wilder to be later directed by him also. As per usual Wilder continues his magic on paper and screen in this film. The Apartment is a romantic comedy and whilst not the first it did set something of a standard for the genre, which many films have oft tried to reach but few have ever done so. The copy of the script I’m working with shows it written in a most unusual manner, though not unfamiliar to me as Sunset Boulevard was written in the same way. A two column spread across the page made it a little confusing to read at first because it sometimes felt hard to see which part I should be focusing on, but after ten or so pages I adjusted to it. This unique style seems to have been a trademark of Wilder’s and interesting as it is, it can be a little disorienting for the reader. The script itself is a fairly lengthy one coming in at roughly 104 pages of double column script making it unusually long for a romantic comedy given the standard page-per-minute estimates. The film itself runs for just over two hours showing how unusual it is, given most in this genre only last for an hour and thirty minutes generally speaking. However not a second is wasted in this screenplay and every scene counts.

The story follows C.C. Baxter, C for Calvin, C for Clifford, but everyone calls him Bud. Actually they don’t. No-one in this entire screenplay calls him Bud, and there’s a very good reason why; he’s no-one’s bud, just a means to an end for everyone to walk all over him. What we have in Mr. Baxter is a man who is a walking definition of a spineless corporate drone. A man who will let people walk all over him in order to get a promotion and climb up the corporate ladder. He wants to be the man in the power suit with all the cash he can get, and he’s willing to be pushed around by everyone and anyone in order to get that promotion. Baxter is no-one’s “bud”.

We see this from the very moment the film opens; Baxter is letting Mr. Kirkeby use his apartment to have an affair with a woman named Sylvia so his wife doesn’t find out. Baxter is forced to stand in the street whilst he waits for Kirkeby to do his business and leave.  The question right from the start when reading this screenplay is why on Earth is Baxter letting Kirkeby do this? At first it seems like he’s just being a “good friend” as that’s what Kirkeby refers to him as when he’s trying to shovel Sylvia out of the titular apartment. We learn later that Kirkeby is actually one of four managers, Baxter’s superiors, at the insurance company he works for whom he lets use his apartment for extramarital affairs. First of all, let me just stress that I find the fact he works at an insurance company very important to showing the character of Baxter. It’s not like his dreams are to become the head of a talent agency, or become first pick in a professional football team, he’s working in what is famously one of the dullest industries on the planet and yet he’s willing to compromise his integrity to get ahead and rise on that dullest of corporate ladders because THAT is his dream, to be the man in charge, perhaps so that he can be the one stepping on people and not the other way around. Baxter will let all four of these men defile their marriages in his home so he can climb that ladder.

It works for a while and the four managers all give Baxter glowing recommendations to Mr. Sheldrake the company director. An interesting side-note is that this is actually the second time I’ve seen a Mr. Sheldrake in a script written by Billy Wilder, the previous having been Sunset Boulevard, a minor role as a film studio executive. It’s an interesting note that shows even great writers like Billy Wilder have the same ticks as people like myself including in-references to their own work, having always included the word ‘Elysium’ in some form or another in each script I write. It shows that no matter how far you go back writers have always been trapped in their own worlds and realities when writing a script, even if no-one but themselves will notice it. Mr. Sheldrake however in this screenplay has a much larger role than the Mr. Sheldrake in Wilder’s film from ten years prior. This time Sheldrake is the walking definition of sleazy corporate executive. He’s a womaniser and a right bastard. Sheldrake finds out about the famous apartment and decides he won’t fight the promotion Baxter is receiving if Baxter will let Sheldrake use The Apartment too.

I capitalise The Apartment above because I believe The Apartment is a proper noun here. It’s a character all on its own with its very existence being a part of New York City and the high-rise life that exists there. Every one of Baxter’s neighbours has an Apartment to themselves for the most part, they scold him  believing him to be a sleaze ball himself; bringing home a different woman each night. Each person is stuck in their own little world set as Writer Wilder called it “Apart” from each other. That’s why this film is called The Apartment, it’s not just because of the location, The Apartment is a character in itself as much as the Taxi in Taxi Driver or the suit in Iron Man. The Apartment sets people up in their own little worlds where they can judge other people’s worlds without all the facts and from a distance still safe in their havens, set ‘apart’ from each other. The Apartment is the location for the moral corruption of C.C. Baxter, he is no-one’s bud; he’s their Pimp and his Apartment has become a glorified brothel.

Sheldrake uses The Apartment to have his affair with Ms. Kubelik; the elevator operator that Baxter has a crush on also. The irony being that Baxter is letting people step all over him so he can get a promotion and become the kind of man that women like Ms. Kubelik would want to be with, a man of authority in a power suit, like the one he buys right after his promotion. When he finds out Baxter is devastated but continues to let Sheldrake use The Apartment. Ms. Kubelik is constantly trying to break free but finds herself always drawn back to the womanising Sheldrake as Ms. Kubelik is not the first affair he’s had. In fact sleazy Sheldrake has had one with his secretary and many others as the secretary recalls, it sort of reminds me of a soccer team’s squad rotation. This drives Ms. Kubelik to attempt suicide inside The Apartment. It’s over the next few days that Baxter helps her recover physically, emotionally and mentally. It is here that Baxter’s moral corruption takes a 180 and makes him stand up for himself. He was willing to forgive her when she stood him up to be with Sheldrake on their “first date”. He was willing to let Sheldrake take The Apartment over and use it as his love next. He was willing to take the scolding of his neighbours and a beating from Ms. Kubelik’ brother in the face. But now he’s had enough!

After Sheldrake loses his family because his secretary tells his wife the truth after she was fired, Sheldrake becomes a bachelor but continues to string along Ms. Kubelik like the rotten bastard he is. This culminates finally in him asking Baxter to use the very site of Ms. Kubelik attempted suicide; The Apartment, for a rendezvous with her. He declines, specifically stating that he won’t let him go near the apartment again, “Especially not with Ms. Kubelik”. This is the crux of the film, after being walked all over, getting his promotions and new suits and a fancy paycheck by letting his very existence become meaningless. He’s had enough, and he’s not standing up for himself as much as he’s standing up for Ms. Kubelik, that’s how much he cares about her. She inspires him to take a stand and quit his dull meaningless corporate job and stop being a drone and become and individual. To me this moment is as complex as all episodes of Star Trek and The Borg in terms of questioning individuality combined. In a few seconds he breaks free of the shackles of being just one of eight million people living in New York and becomes an individual who is willing to literally “stick it to the man”, here he is embracing the 1960s as they roll in on the New Year, a new decade has begun, one that had been forming slowly throughout the 1950s as we’d seen in films like On The Waterfront and Rebel Without A Cause, one of liberal individuality and Baxter has embraced the times with them, Ms. Kubelik. She finds out about what Baxter said to Sheldrake and runs to The Apartment. He declares his love for her and she doesn’t respond but tells him to “Shut up and deal!” the cards that she was uninterested in at first when he was taking care of her but now wants to play. She is now interested in him, not sleazy Sheldrake.

The Apartment is an exceptionally well written script and shows the quality of Billy Wilder’s writing throughout. It’s such a different script from Sunset Boulevard and demonstrates just what a talent he is. I’ve always been able to admire someone who’s able to  switch genres at the drop of hat and succeed marvellously at both and a Noir to a Romantic Comedy is about as dramatic a switch as can be. When questions of individuality, standing up for oneself and an almost prophetic message about the coming decade of free-liberal-thought as opposed to the corporate world where money means all of the closing decade where everyone is referred to as Mister, Misses, Miss, all by their last names and impersonal. The Apartment exemplifies all this and so much more in probably the best romantic comedy ever written.

Fargo: A Screenplay Analysis

Fargo

Screenplay Analysis by: Petros L. Ioannou  

Fargo is a 1995 film written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen; colloquially known as “The Coen Brothers”. Right off the bat I’m going to say something many might consider controversial, even blasphemous; I am not a fan of the Coen Brothers. I think they’re really, really overrated but that Fargo and The Big Lebowski are excellent films. In this case I’m going to be saying what I really love about Fargo and why I think it’s such an excellent screenplay by two writer-directors who generally speaking I really dislike. I was not fan of Burn After Reading, I think No Country for Old Men and True Grit are highly overrated and The Ladykillers is one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen to the point that in the cinema I actually walked out, which I didn’t even do during The Last Airbender, a film I consider to be an insult to writers, directors, actors, cinema as an art form, the viewing public, God and the universe. So despite my dislike of the Coen Brothers as writer-directors, I love two of their films, my favourite of which, is Fargo. 

The story is a zany and bizarre one. It’s about a man named Jerry.  Jerry is a desperate but greedy bastard who wants money and will do anything to get his hands on it, even something this despicable. He hires two criminals to kidnap his own wife so that they can con reward money for her rescue but then things go wrong and the proverbial shit hits the proverbial fan and splatters all over Jerry’s not so proverbial plans and the humour for the audience kicks in. For all the rage-hate I have for the Coen’s this is their trademark, taking something to almost slapstick extremes with such a dark overtone you’re sometimes laughing out of sheer horror. The same kind of humour that would go on to influence films like The Hangover. I think this and Lebowski are the only two films they execute it successfully in and Fargo does it brilliantly.  

Looking at the language in the film it’s very interesting. Most films will write in Standard English or Received Pronunciation to make it clear and then the director and/or actors will make the role their own. There will occasionally be a slang term thrown in here and there to show off the characters personalities but this film has dialect running all the way through the film’s characters. Clearly the Coens thought about this meticulously when they wrote and it shows in the impressive language of the screenplay as nearly every character seems to have not just a unique dialect but a unique speech pattern and voice of their own that leaps off the page. I find this very impressive as it’s something that’s very hard to do. 

The characters aren’t the only great thing about the script; the plot is excruciatingly detailed, painstakingly plotted and very, very, twisted, both in the literal sense and the moral sense of the word. Fargo simply put is an excellent screenplay and by far the best of the Coen brothers rather average resume in my personal opinion, which is also another reason it stands out. It’s a masterpiece of a script that captures atmosphere, character in plot in the script without getting confusing, something that for most writers is bordering on the edge of impossibility. 

Inception: A Screenplay Analysis

INCEPTION

Screenplay Analysis by: 

Petros L. Ioannou

Inception is a 2010 film written by Christopher Nolan to be directed by him.. It was released hot on the heels of the film that hurled Christopher Nolan from “good director” to “this director can do no wrong”, an adaptation of the Batman franchise, “The Dark Knight”. The Dark Knight grossed over a billion dollars making it at the time the fourth highest grossing film of all time. As such Nolan became so well received as a director that he was given a virtually unlimited budget to create a completely original concept film. Now as far as I can find, this has only happened once previously in history, with James Cameron, who after Terminator racking $500m at the box office got $175m to make Titanic and then after that smashed the box office to the point that is made well over double Jurassic Park, the top grossing film of all time, he was given the money to make Avatar, the highest grossing film of all time to this date grossing nearly a billion dollars more than even Titanic. So you can imagine the faith that Warner Bros had placed in Christopher Nolan after his success with The Dark Knight. Inception was an original concept that could either turn out to be the next Titanic or Avatar or it could be a complete flop.

Well, it didn't make the kind of money that Avatar or Titanic, in fact it didn't actually even reach the box office gross of The Dark Knight. It reached similar critical acclaim, with Inception being nominated for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay, both of which it lost out to The King’s Speech. It made $825m at the box office, a huge success also but still not quite as much as The Dark Knight, a film that’s often considered one of the biggest Oscar snubs in history. Now I will make often comparisons to The Dark Knight in this analysis; the reason being is that both were massive budget action films, written and directed by the same man with similar critical and financial success. On a basic screenplay basis Inception is unusual for Christopher Nolan as he usually co-writes his screenplays with his brother Jonathan Nolan, even adapting Memento a short story by Jonathan. This is Christopher Nolan’s first solo attempt at an original screenplay for a bigger budget film, his first and only other attempt was “Following” a British Neo-Noir, so obviously a much smaller scale movie.  I find it quite interesting to compare and contrast the screenplays of Inception and The Dark Knight to see the differences; the first of which is obviously that Inception is an original screenplay and The Dark Knight is an adaptation of an existing work.

Inception is a very good film; it’s also a film which, much like Avatar, was hyped to shit before its release and very much during and as such as received something of a backlash for not living up to many people’s hype. However this does not detract from the fact that Inception tells and interesting story with some interesting characters, even with the flaws it has. Just as with Avatar I will defend this movie to my dying breath as I believe both are good films and certainly not ‘bad’ as many people seem to have developed the opinion of, Inception being a great one perhaps.

Dom Cobb is an expert at going into people’s dreams using an unspecified device. He’s an expert at reading people, all their subtle movements, which in this case are thoughts. He’s made a career of stealing information from people’s minds by subtly influencing their thoughts and by proxy their dreams. He mentions secrets and the “dreamer” will automatically fill a safe full of their biggest secrets. He’s also made a large number of contacts in this ‘industry’ over the years. All of this is in Cobb’s character introduction in the first five minutes of the movie. He’s also very smart and has a ‘reputation’ for being the best as he not only goes into a dream but a dream within a dream, which becomes further complex later on, as a trap to get rich businessman Mr. Saito to reveal his secrets to him that a private company has asked him to get. Cobb however is not a bad guy, despite his criminal activities it’s soon revealed to us that he’s been wrongly accused of a crime and can’t return. He’s a family man who loves his kids and his dead wife so much that she’s stuck in his subconscious mind. Mal his deceased wife is a character only inside the dreams. She now representing his doubts about reality and self-loathing for everything he’s done. We eventually learn that Cobb is accused of the crime of murdering Mal, despite the truth being that she killed herself. We learn that Cobb and his wife were experimenting with dreams and in the process ended up stuck down in “limbo” a shared dream space of nothingness for decades as time moves slower more dreams within a dream you’re in and limbo is a dream state four stories deep as it were. Mal became obsessed with the idea that her world wasn’t real and even when Cobb and his wife got out of limbo that idea, “the most powerful thing in the world”, is stuck in Mal’s head and she becomes driven by the idea that the world they live in is not real either and as such she kills herself trying to escape the dream. However the twist is that Cobb planted that idea himself; he is technically speaking responsible for her death, not in the literal sense that he murdered her with his own hands as the police believe but in the sense that he planted the idea that Mal’s world wasn’t real in an attempt to try and bring her back to reality. The idea of creating an idea inside someone’s mind is called Inception.

Inception is considered impossible to do as the subject is always slightly aware they’re dreaming and as such planting an idea inside someone’s mind can never be real as they’re always aware of it. Unless you go deep into their subconscious by going from a dream into a dream into another dream. Three levels down if the scenario is engineered well enough an idea can be planted even an artificial one and the dreamer will believe they came up with this idea themselves. Inception is also, as the title would show, the plot of the movie. Cobb is given a chance by Saito to have his record expunged and the chance to return to his children in America for the first time since Mal died. All Cobb has to do is go into the mind of a businessman who soon will control pretty much all the world’s energy supply and plant the idea of breaking up his father’s empire. He must perform an Inception, something that the last time he did it; cost him his wife.

So this is Cobb and his dilemma that will drive the plot; Cobb is an extremely well thought out character, he has an interesting past and over the course of the movie he will develop and learn to get over the death of his wife and the guilt that plagues him as he gets the job done for Mr. Saito. The supporting cast however are well set up but not very well developed. Arthur is his friend, confidant and possibly even protégé given their age gaps, he’s the ‘point man’, he’s smooth, he’s smart and he’s efficient with a unique class of taste as we see based on the design of both his created dream spaces. There is also Ariadne, the cute young college student who becomes a dream ‘architect’, who even develops a five second sub plot of romance with Arthur. She also acts as something of an audience surrogate, the person to whom all the information about this complex plot is exposited to. There’s also Yusef, ‘the chemist’ and Eames ‘the forger’, who is quite fun and cocky with something of a minor rivalry with Arthur. Fischer is the subject of inception; he goes through some development as he is incepted with the idea to break up his father’s corporate empire.

So what’s wrong with the cast? Well Cobb is really the only character is goes through any form of an arc, Fischer does also but that’s only because there’s a subject. Everyone else is really very superficial; any character that has minor development is almost discarded and never really looked into. Arthur and Ariadne’s relationship is dropped upon during the plot as they kiss but then never expanded upon. Arthur and Eames’ rivalry has a few comical moments such as the one with “dreaming a little bigger” and the grenade launcher but again is never really questioned or brought up. Let’s look at The Dark Knight for a second. We have Bruce Wayne; a man who lost his parents to a desperate thug with a gun, wrapped by guilt because of his fear and inability to act he travels the world learning how to fight, be a detective and upon returning to his home city of Gotham, takes on the symbol of the thing he fears most Bats. As such, Bruce Wayne becomes Batman; possibly one of the most complex and well written characters in literature and often not given the credit he deserves because he’s an adapted character from comic books. He develops in The Dark Knight as he tries to find a way to end his crusade and become a normal man with a normal life but slowly realises that’s never going to be possible when the love of his life is murdered by The Joker. As such Batman becomes an eternal symbol of fear for criminals in Gotham being not a man by a symbol who can be accused of murder and take the blame for Harvey Dent’s crimes. There’s The Joker, a psychopath who we never truly understand his back story but know he’s a psychopath who goes from robbing mob banks to finding his true purpose in tormenting Batman. Alfred, Wayne’s butler, goes from loving friend and confidant to hiding secrets from Bruce to protect him. District Attorney Harvey Dent; the white knight of Gotham who becomes the evil murderous Two Face after watching that same love of his life die literally seconds after agreeing to marry him. Finally there’s the incorruptible Lieutenant James Gordon who learns from Batman to do what is necessary, faking his own death to bring down the Joker, receives a promotion to Commissioner and learns that his actions in trying to bring down the mob have consequences, like the death of Rachel and the change of Dent. This is an amazing supporting cast and better written and developed than the Inception cast.

Now here’s the interesting question; is the lack of development in Inception’s supporting cast intentional? It could just be bad writing as some assume and shows that Christopher Nolan whilst a man with a talented set of ideas might need his brother Jonathan in order to full crystallise his ideas into more cohesive screenplays. Or it could be intentional based upon the ending. In the ending Cobb spins his spinning top “totem” but we never see if it topples or not leading us to wonder if Cobb is in a dream. Now if Nolan wants us to believe that Cobb is in a dream then the supporting cast don’t matter, as that’s what it’s like in a dream, you’re the focus of attention and no-one else really matters beyond the minor details. In this case it’s probably an amazing case of writing and huge risk; he’s intentionally letting the audience think the characters are underdeveloped to leave the hints that Cobb is dreaming. There’s also a ton of times that it’s hinted in the movie from Miles saying out of context in a conversation “Come back to reality, Dom.” To when he wakes up from using Yusef’s compound and tries to use his spinning top but it’s interrupted and we never find out and never see him use it again. This scene also comes right after someone saying ‘why would you care if it’s reality’ referring to a dream. His kids at the very end are exactly the same age as before as though no time as passed. It’s all these little hints that aren’t really noticed until you watch the film or read the screenplay a second or third time. Could he even be inside Mal’s dream and Mal has woken up by killing herself? Did she incept him? Afterall the spinning top’s exact weight and spin was known by her also and a cardinal rule is that no-one should ever know your totem or else its effects could become redundant in that person’s dream. It’s hundreds of little hints throughout the movie or the screenplay. They might even be a double bluff designed intentionally to make us feel like it’s a dream but actually reality.

Overall the question about the ending for me can be answered in one way. Does it even matter? Cobb is happy, he no longer cares, if it’s a dream or reality and really just Nolan screwing with us as I believe, Cobb is happy and no longer cares about dreams and reality, just that he gets to be normal again and I find that ending almost romantically beautiful in that sense. Inception is a movie much like The Dark Knight and whilst I favour The Dark Knight personally and think it’s a better film overall, Inception created an opportunity in Hollywood to create interesting science fiction films with original concepts that have high octane action as this and The Dark Knight do. It’s an excellent film really any way you look at it and even if it never quite reached the success of The Dark Knight, it’s certainly a film to be remembered for quite a long time.

Hope you enjoyed this Screenplay Analysis, please check back every Sunday for a new post. Also check out the previous Screenplay Analysis of "Network".

Network: A Screenplay Analysis

NETWORK
Screenplay Analysis by: 

Petros L. Ioannou

Network is a 1976 film about the “first known instance of a man to be killed because of lousy ratings.” It is an absurd jaunt into a satirical and yet extremely potent and spellbinding world written by three-time Academy Award winning screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky. The story revolves around a news anchor called Howard Beale who has an on-air meltdown and threatens to blow his brains out live on national television on the fictional UBS network. This in turn creates a series of events that lead to him becoming something of a television messiah to the people and leading the people around him to get dragged through his insanity crisis as we the audience get dragged into the insane world of television that Chayefsky created.

If there’s one way to describe the events of this film it’s “Snowball Effect”. One event leads to a bigger one, which in turn creates another bigger event, and starts a chain reaction that results in one of the most bizarre and insane scenarios ever played out on screen and yet one of the most powerful messages. From the very start we’re told about Howard’s life up to this point by the narrator. He was the number one news anchor in America until his wife left him, his ratings dropped, Howard began to drink and now his ratings have dramatically dropped and he’s been fired. Before the film’s even begun a snowball effect has started, he gets depressed because of one incident after another and it is something we can all relate to in our lives unless you’ve led a bizarrely perfect carefree life. He gets depressed from the mountain of stress that piled on him. Knowing from personal experience I know how tough that can be, stress can make you lose sleep, it can make you lose weight, it can make you lose your appetite and cause all kinds of havoc with your personal and professional lives and that’s what’s happened to Howard, before this film has even begun.  This is compounded by other people’s lives intertwining to enhance this snowball effect. How  Max’s problems with the restricting of the News Division leads him to angrily let Howard continue his “I ran out of bullshit” rant on the air, which in turn spikes the ratings and gets Howard on the show and begins the insane rise in popularity and his eventual death.

It’s strange; you can almost look at Howard’s personal journey as vaguely similar to that of recent events in history. In particular, the utter insanity and eventual firing that recently surrounded formerly TV’s highest paid actor, Charlie Sheen.  Sheen completely lost his mind, he ranted and raved in interviews and uStreams leading to him getting fired from the show. Sheen’s rants were indeed some of the most insane things we’ve ever heard spoken aloud, “I have tiger blood and Adonis DNA” or “I’m an F18 Bro, I’m tired of pretending that I’m not a total bitchin’ rockstar from Mars”, or my personal favourite, “Brrrr!!! Hold on stupid plane above with noise attached!! WINNING!!” Suffice to say Charlie Sheen really went off the deep end in a manner so bizarre not even a movie could write that kind of thing. Even Howard in Network is speaking an iota of sense in his madness, Sheen just went balls-to-the-wall insane. However what is very similar is the way their madness was used and abused to the benefit of gaining ratings. When Sheen was finally fired from his job on Two and a Half Men, he was replaced with actor Ashton Kutcher. At the same time Comedy Central hired Sheen to do one of their famous “roasts” with him, where an assortment of friends and other comedians mock him live on stage before he gets a rebuttal and decided to air it right after the first episode of Two and Half Men with Ashton Kutcher. Kutcher’s first episode gained the CBS show a 26.8 Million viewership, the highest the show had ever recorded, higher than any episode where Sheen was in the lead role, it was not however because of Kutcher, but because of Sheen’s madness and the fallout from which people wanted to see what happened. At the same time, Comedy Central got it’s highest ratings in the Cable Network’s history for Charlie Sheen’s roast. However since then the ratings for Two and a Half Men have rapidly dwindled. The madness Charlie Sheen almost seems like it’s what inspired the madness of Howard Beale only Network was actually written over thirty-five years before Sheen ever started crying that he was “Winning”, Sheen was only eleven years old when this movie hit theatres.

But it’s not just Sheen that Howard Beale seems to be like, he’s reminiscent of people like Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly. Unlike Howard Beale, these are real people, who genuinely think that what they’re saying makes perfect sense. But they’re really tools to the political machine, just like Howard becomes towards the end of the script, and for lack of a better expression “shit-stirrers”. People who throw all multitudes of “the truth” or what they believe is the truth at the audience, and reject any notion that they could possibly be wrong. And networks like FOX and MSNBC are perfectly willing to let them go insane live on the air scream at callers and tell people that there is absolutely a God because the “sun goes up, sun goes down, never a miscommunication”, for one simple reason. Ratings, these rants and raves bring in ratings just like Sheen did; and most importantly just like Howard Beale did in the screenplay for Network. Each of these commentators who spouts that they and they alone speak “the truth” be they politically inclined to the left or right considers themselves to be the man standing in front of the camera screaming “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!” But they’re not. They’re tools used for ratings, just like Howard Beale becomes. The film is almost prophetic in its presentation, a satire of present day news shows written thirty years before the present day. It’s as though Paddy Chayefsky travelled thirty years into the future, got mad as hell at the state of television news, got his ideas, travelled back and put pen to paper to write one of the most incredible screenplays ever written.

And yet even as I write this analysis of what is an incredible screenplay it’s brought to my attention the grandest irony in all of this. This is screenplay, with a political message about TV stupification, in film, now being broadcast on TV being taken away and having it analysed by a film student studying how to put something on the screen.

I could go on for hours about the political message of this screenplay, its prophetic nature and the grand irony in me, a film student writing a screenplay analysis on it. But let’s look at the characters for a moment outside of Howard. Everyone is a product of their generation; Diana is a cold calculating “programmed droid” who was raised by television who can’t deal with “primal doubts” that every human has so she simply ignores them and lets them build up as they slowly rot her from the core to the point that she willingly has a man executed for having poor ratings and doesn’t give a second thought to it, the world is a television show with three act stories for movie of the week. Then there is Max an older man going through a mid-life crisis, his traditional values feel askew in this confusing new world where his friends either go crazy, abandon him or die of a heart attack. He leaves his wife, his family and his life behind to be with Diana because nothing else makes sense in this world and he wants to be a part of the new one or least bring a part of his world into the new one that Diana represents and as with their relationship and his attempts to try and be a part of Howard Beale’s raving ranting ratings success, it is an abject failure because he does not belong in the new world. Finally there is one scene with the famous Arthur Jensen, the owner of the parent company that owns the parent company that owns the Network. He is the top dog of all top dogs, and in a single scene with a single monologue has more power and insanity burning through him than the whole of the rest of the cast. “It is the international system of currency that determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today.” – How prophetic this statement is. This film was made before the fall of the Soviet Union and that would be theisr own downfall. The political furore of this film and his character as he espouses it is incredible! “The World is a Business Deal.” How right he is as he continues to say that the “individual is finished..... people are as replaceable as piston rods”. How right is he? Howard Beale’s death has advertisements rolling over it. That should say it all.

Network is preachy, overbearing, unsubtle and yet very subtle, methodical, emotional. It stands on a soap box but does it through personal characters. It might just be one of the best films ever made, on par with Citizen Kane and The Godfather even. Rocky is my favourite films of all time. Taxi Driver is also an amazing film. But how this didn’t win best picture is absolutely BEYOND ME! It thoroughly deserved winning Best Screenplay however and it stands the test of time so well, it’s like prophetic gospel!