Buy this book.
I really mean it. I’ve read it but can’t quantify it. No “Good,” “Not So Good,” cute snarking can cut it when it comes to reviewing this “behind-the-scenes story of the making of the movie Network, which transformed the way we think about television and the way television thinks about us.”
Of course, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out the ultimate irony of the Amazon listing of a book titled Mad as Hell: The Making of Network and the Fateful Vision of the Angriest Man in Movies.
Namely, that nowhere on the sales page other than the reviews are we told that the writer of NETWORK, the real-live angry man who did indeed change everyone’s perception of TV, was genius TV and film writer Paddy Chayefsky. When Howard Beale, the news anchor character played by Peter Finch pours out his frustrated and furious vitriol he’s speaking for Chayefsky.
But then, publishers – and most writers in other media – never have understood what it is we really do.
