Ned Beatty: Delivering One Great Performance After Another

Moviegoers all seem to have their favorite Ned Beatty moments. My colleague Brian Jay Jones (author of biographies of  Jim Henson, Dr. Seuss and other pop culture heroes) treasures Beatty’s comic appearance as Lex Luthor’s bumbling sidekick in the Superman movies. Others remember him portraying Judge Roy Bean and playing a key role in All the President’s Men. And of course he had one of the all-time memorable screen debuts, in the movie adaptation  of James Dickey’s bestselling novel, Deliverance.  As Bobby Trippe, one of four city-dwellers on a rafting trip in the wilds of Georgia, he suffers an excruciatingly painful comeuppance that viewers will not soon forget.

  Deliverance came out in 1972. It was followed by some 160 film and TV credits before Beatty’s death last week at age 83. Never a leading-man type, the short, round Beatty was prized as a character actor who could play goofy or scary, strong or weak, with equal dexterity. For years he was known as “the busiest actor in Hollywood.” When I was working at Roger Corman’s Concorde-New Horizons Pictures circa 1990, Roger’s wife Julie was filming a screen version of Gary Paulsen’s classic Young Adult novel, Hatchet. (In the film version, the title was changed to A Cry in the Wild, because Hatchet might give some fans of Corman’s horror flicks the wrong impression.)  It’s basically an adventure story about a teenaged boy whose parents have divorced. During his summer vacation, Brian is being flown in a Cessna bush plane to an outpost in the Canadian wilds where his father works in the oil fields. After the pilot has a fatal heart attack and crash-lands the plane, the young boy is stranded in the wilderness, with only his wits and a small hatchet to protect him from danger. The young actor, Jared Rushton, is mostly alone on screen, except for some friendly and some not-so-friendly animals. But I was astonished to see Ned Beatty signing on to play that unfortunate pilot.

 On the day Beatty showed up at our grubby offices, I chanced to meet him in the parking garage and couldn’t resist asking a few questions. Like—why would he want a small role in a Concorde film? Beatty explained, with a twinkle in his eye, that he had eight children to support. (He was ultimately married to four different women, with three of those marriages ending in divorce.) He also confirmed what I had read elsewhere, that Deliverance was originally intended by its studio as a relatively low-budget film. Thus all four central roles were to be played by unknowns with regional acting credentials. Beatty, who hailed from Kentucky and had performed all over the South, was cast, as was the equally unknown Ronny Cox. But when the budget was raised to allow for stars in the two biggest roles, Jon Voigt and Burt Reynolds came aboard, replacing the no-names that director John Boorman had selected. Out of such serendipity are great careers born.

 Perhaps Beatty’s most distinctive role came in 1976, as part of the film Network. In a landmark year for character actors, he was nominated for an Oscar as Best Supporting Actor, a prize that ultimately went to Jason Robards of All the President’s Men. Beatty’s role is confined to one long speech, a speech of such power and such frightening implications that it remains lodged in the mind. It’s a speech into which author Paddy Chayefsky pours all his vitriol against network television and corporate American in general. Thanks to YouTube we can re-watch it, savoring Sidney Lumet’s staging and Ned Beatty’s dramatic genius.

 

 

 

 

 

A Live Interview Turns Deadly: Seeking Stardom in Roanoke

We’ve all heard by now about the bloody doings in Roanoke, Virginia: of how a disgruntled ex-reporter at WBDJ-TV shot and killed two of his former colleagues while they were in the midst of an on-air interview. My first thought, other than profound sympathy for the victims and their loved ones, was that this sounded like one more reminder that Paddy Chayefsky’s Network – which predicts on-air death as a ratings draw – is alive and well.

But my thinking evolved as I learned more about the behavior of Vester Lee Flanagan II, who went by the professional name of Bryce Williams. This was a man who was determined to be noticed. Not only did he fax to ABC News a lengthy diatribe spelling out his grievances but he also managed to videotape the actual shootings, then posted them on Facebook and Twitter, where they were seen by thousands before the accounts were taken down.

All of which reminds me of a book published by biographer and film historian Neal Gabler back in 1998. Gabler’s Life: The Movie begins by focusing on a movement he calls the Entertainment Revolution. Says Gabler, “the desire for entertainment—as an instinct, as a rebellion, as a form of empowerment, as a way of filling increased leisure time or simply as a means of enjoying pure pleasure—was already so insatiable in the nineteenth century that Americans rapidly began devising new methods to satisfy it.” If nineteenth-century Americans craved entertainment, how much more did it appeal to their mid-twentieth-century descendants, who could flick on their radios and television sets whenever they took the notion. And one of the century’s most popular political figures, Ronald Reagan, succeeded with the public because – as a professional movie actor – he knew just how to tap in to America’s love of stories with good-guy heroes and happy endings.

Though Reagan’s appeal was that of a man in a white hat, some seriously flawed human beings have also sought public attention as the leading actors in big public dramas. And, to a certain extent at least, the mass media have helped them make their case. Gabler points out that Timothy McVeigh, later to be convicted for the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, was actively courted by news sources to tell his story. The result was a soulful photo on the cover of Newsweek; he also negotiated for the right to choose among such celebrity interviewers as Barbara Walters, Diane Sawyer, Dan Rather, and Tom Brokaw, with the program to be aired during a ratings-sweeps week.

Gabler informs us that “John Lennon’s assassin, Mark David Chapman, had left a tableau in his hotel room—a photo of Judy Garland with the Cowardly Lion, a Bible inscribed to Holden Caulfield (the protagonist of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye), a photo of himself with refugee children—that he thought would suggest a motive behind his crime. In short, he was providing a theme as well as an act.” And we learn that Arthur Bremer, who in 1972 would shoot and paralyze presidential candidate George Wallace, explicitly viewed himself as an actor in a film, “so much so that while stalking President Nixon, his initial target, he missed the chance to kill him when he raced back to his hotel to change into a black suit.”    

Social media, of course, makes it all the easier to become an overnight celebrity. Now Vester Flanagan is just that. But of course he’s dead . . . and so are two journalists who were unlucky enough to cross his path.

Mad as Hell: Paddy Chayefsky Confronts Today’s Headlines

It’s fun imagining how Paddy Chayefsky would have reacted to the dire North Korean threats against The Interview, a silly Hollywood comedy. And I wonder how he would have felt about Muslim radicals beheading their hostages on camera, then posting the gory footage to YouTube. Yes, Chayefsky gained fame writing such gentle romances as Marty and Middle of the Night. But In the view of Dave Itzkoff, author of this year’s Mad as Hell: The Making of Network and the Fateful Vision of the Angriest Man in Movies, Chayefsky was best motivated by sheer fury: “His outraged simmered in his spleen and surged through his veins, collecting in his fingertips until it pushed his pen across paper and punched the keys of his typewriter.”

Network, from 1976, zeroes in on a fictitious TV network whose veteran newscaster, Howard Beale, undergoes an on-air crackup. His rant that the viewers of America should open their windows and scream, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore” unexpectedly elevates him into “the mad prophet of the airwaves,” an idol of millions. But as he continues to veer out of control, a shrewd head of programming decrees he must be taken down, as dramatically as possible.

Itzkoff makes a good case for Chayefsky’s prescience. His Howard Beale character -- the role won the first-ever posthumous Oscar for Peter Finch -- is in some ways a direct forerunner of TV pundits like Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck, both of whom proudly acknowledge that they too are “mad as hell” at the state of the world. Head programmer Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway), who will stop at nothing to ensure high ratings, has set the pattern for generations of real-life network folk. (In this year’s Nightcrawler, Rene Russo’s rabid news-director character seems to have learned her trade directly from Diana.)   

Central to the movie’s plot is the breaching of the sacred wall that once separated a network’s news division from its entertainment offerings. The commodification of the news broadcast -- the expectation that the evening news will prove its worth as a money-maker -- is today of course all too real. Chayefsky even foresaw the rise of reality television. Early on, when an inebriated Beale threatens to kill himself during his nightly news spot, his equally soused journalist buddy Max Schumacher (William Holden) enthusiastically endorses the plan: “Hell, why limit ourselves? . . .  I love it. Suicides. Assassinations. Mad bombers. Mafia hit men. Automobile smash-ups. The Death Hour. Great Sunday night show for the whole family. We’ll wipe that fucking Disney right off the air.” 

Schumacher is speaking ironically, but Diana is all too happy to turn a motley band of radicals who call themselves the Ecumenical Liberation Army into TV stars. Since they’re fond of filming themselves committing bank robberies and the like, she proposes to feature them in a real-life Mao Tse Tung Hour, in which they will commit actual crimes on a weekly basis for the titillation of the viewing public. (Network’s funniest scene in is the one in which they and an Angela Davis-type who serves as their liaison hotly debate with Diane the details of their subsidiary rights and distribution deals.)

Just think what Diana Christensen could do with the enterprising thugs of ISIS. Or, for that matter, Kim Jong-un. North Korea’s head honcho was understandably miffed that The Interview climaxes with his assassination, but he might love being the star of an American reality show. How about calling it Keeping Up with the Kims, or The Real Supreme Leader of Pyongyang?

Nightcrawler: If It Bleeds, It Leads

On Thanksgiving Day, I’m not sure I’m thankful for the 24-hour news cycle. Not long ago, as I was stuck in L.A. traffic, I kept hearing teasers on my favorite radio station: the verdict by the Grand Jury regarding the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, would be coming soon.  As the clock ticked on, and my car inched its way homeward, suspense mounted. Would police officer Darren Wilson be indicted, or walk away a free man? Would a growing crowd outside the courthouse react peacefully, or erupt into violence? By now we know the answers to those questions. I strongly believe in the right – and the responsibility -- of a free press to tell the public what’s happening in the world. Still, at times it seemed that journalists were holding their collective breaths, just waiting for a town to go up in flames. Which, of course, would make a great top-of-the-hour story.

The idea that news coverage influences current events is not a recent one. Back in the Sixties, young people protesting the war in Vietnam and advancing their own New Left agenda would chant, “The whole world is watching!” They were right, of course. Thanks to television and other forms of mass media, their message was circling the globe. Today, the Internet has made instant messaging all the easier. The demonstrators participating in the so-called Arab Spring knew they were performing for the cameras, and that their struggles against the status quo (captured on cell phones as well as by professional news videographers) would quickly gain world-wide attention. And now, sadly, the shrewd maniacs in charge of the so-called Islamic State have discovered that video is a dandy recruiting tool. They stage the beheading of a western journalist or aid worker, then distribute the graphic footage to the news media worldwide. Soon ISIS’s latest coup is the lead item on news broadcasts everywhere, and the bloody images become must-see attractions on YouTube. 

Almost forty years ago, a movie called Network raised many hackles. This bitter, brilliant film, directed by Sidney Lumet, held television news executives responsible for pandering to the audience’s lust for sensational stories. This was the movie in which a newscaster’s suicidal rant that “I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!” drives up the ratings of a fictitious TV network to astronomical heights, leading to an increasingly outrageous manipulation of news events for Nielsen’s sake. I haven’t seen Network in many years, but I suspect that  -- in this era of Rush Limbaugh and Fox News – it won’t seem much dated. Early this past year, Dave Itzkoff published Mad as Hell:The Making of Network and the Fateful Vision of the Angriest Man in Movies, focusing on the film’s Oscar-winning screenwriter, Paddy Chayefsky. I haven’t read it, but one of these days . . . .

Meanwhile, I went to see Jake Gyllenhaal’s new release, Nightcrawler. It’s made me want to watch Network again as a point of reference. In Nightcrawler, Gyllenhaal (who also produced) plays a feckless young man, desperate for work, who finds he can earn good money from a local TV news station by shooting close-up crime and accident footage that emphasizes blood and gore. A culture built on the fact that “if it bleeds, it leads” is happy to reward him, even if he violates laws and social norms to grab the most gruesome shots possible. One thing leads to another – but you wouldn’t want me to give the plot away, would you? 

Despite it all, do find something to be thankful for.