Mad as Hell: The Making of Network

I’m readin a little book called “Mad As Hell: The Making of Network” by Dave Itzkoff.

I think we all remember the famous “corporation speech” but the book mentions some revisions to the scene that were made by writer Chayefsky.
Just thot it was interesting:

“…Chayefsky’s monologues did not necessarily go through as much revision as his dialogue. The only substantial edits made to a speech given to Arthur Jensen, the chairman of UBS’s parent company, the Communications Corporation of America (CCA) that wins Beale over to his ‘corporate cosmology,’ were for length. At the top Chayefsky amputated a long windup in which Jensen argues that human suffering is not only unavoidable but a natural and necessary element in the reaction that produces progress: “Our generation fought two world wars in which we killed thirty more million men to uphold their dignity,” he was to tell Beale. “We have barely endured two world-wide depressions, and this year alone, twenty-five million people will starve. There’s something less than efficient about all that.”

At it’s end, Chayefsky lopped off a section in which Jensen lays out his vision for a ‘world of orderliness, Mr. Beale, a planned and programmed world without war and famine, oppression and brutality, crime and disease, one massive global tutelary corporation where all men can serve their specific functions, their necessities provided, their anxieties tranquilized.”

From its midsection Chayefsky cut a portion where Jensen observes that mankind may still ‘get hit with a tidal wave now and then, an earthquake, a tornado, and we still depend somewhat on natural snow for our ski weekends but on the whole we control nature. We control everything.” But he left behind the very next line in which Jensen gives his grand summation: ‘You have meddled with the inexorable” – no make that the primal – “forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won’t have it, is that clear?!’…”

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