Transcript
Because of the movie that we are talking about today, we will be talking about Suicide. It is a theme that is heavily featured in this movie, and I just wanted to give a warning to any of our more sensitive listeners. Hey everyone, and welcome to Movies and Mainframes, the podcast that is going to explore and discuss the representation of technology in media. I am your host, Andy, and with me today, I have two people. Two, I'm just going to say it guys, two of my very best friends. First up, we got JP in the house. How are you doing today, JP? Awesome. And we also have Tim Harrison in the house. He's waiting. You've got to say something. Oh, hey, how's it going? That is his voice. We are actually in his house right now. Just of note for me, this is the first time I've recorded the podcast in person, face to face. We are all drinking adult beverages. We are going to talk about the movie that we watched today, but quickly, a little background. I've known these guys since high school. Me and JP went to the same high school together. We had mutual friends. We were friendly, but I feel like we didn't become true friends until we started working at the television station together. That's right. Once, because in high school, we were friends of friends and hung out enough, but then once we got to start to work together at the TV station, we started going and exercising together at 24-Hour Fitness, learning both moves, training ourselves to do that, failing miserably at the calf lift on the machine and falling out of bed the next day because we pushed ourselves too hard, smoking outside the gym while everybody else was inside exercising. Exactly. Finishing a workout and walking immediately to Taco Cabana to get some breakfast tacos. Good times. I started working at the television station in 1998. Right before I graduated from high school, so that would have been in May, and JP, you started January of 99. I've known Tim. I met Tim for the first time when I was 17 because my older brother, Robert, we were roommates. We were roommates for a brief period of time and remember going over to their house, watching random movies. For some odd reason, I still have a memory of watching, what's that alligator movie with Matt Dillon? Albino Alligator. Oh, my goodness. It was a terrible movie, but I still have it. Directed by Kevin Spacey, right? Yes. Yeah. What? What year was this? This would have been 1997, 1998. I hadn't worked at the television station yet, but I met him. Your brother worked at the TV station and I did as well. Is that how you met Robert? Because I forgot you had lived there. I met Robert through the TV station and I moved in with Steve. Do you remember Steve Kahn? Yep. So Steve Kahn worked there. I got in at the TV station because of all these dudes when I was in 1996. I would say 96. Yeah. Because when I joined, you had already been there for a couple of years and JP joined basically six months later. It was only three years after you, I guess. I feel like you had been there a lot longer. Yeah. And so from the years of 1998 to 2013, we all worked at the station at the same time. So just over 15 years. We lived the news. We lived the news. And since we worked in television news for so long and the fact that we are not IT professionals, we did not have careers as IT pros or anything like that, we decided the movie that we were going to watch today, we could be experts on. And that is why we picked 1976's The Network, directed by the great Sidney Lumet and starring a ridiculous cast. I think most of these people have Oscars. It stars William Holden, Peter Finch, Faye Dunaway, Ned Beatty, Robert Duvall, who just crushes it in this movie. And on top of that, anybody who has a line in this movie is somebody. Even if you don't know their name, you can go, oh my God, that's the guy from Spies Like Us. Oh, that's the, you know. That's the guy from My Cousin Vinny. That's the other lawyer from My Cousin Vinny. I have a note that is right here. If you can, you guys can see it, you guys can't hear it. It says, hey, Lance Henriksen. Lance Henriksen? I missed him. He's in the movie. I don't know that one. I do have a line in here that goes, he's from My Cousin Vinny. Yeah. Lance Henriksen. Oh, it's the lady made from Two and a Half Men. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Who is Lance Henriksen? Lance Henriksen is one of the lawyers or the agents that's doing it when they're in the Black Panther-esque, the ecumenical. Oh, right. Yeah, yeah. He's on screen left. He's just hanging out. It's just Lance Henriksen in the movie for some reason. Oh, this dude, I looked him up right now. Yeah, Bishop. Bishop, yeah. Yes, because I did see Bishop. I wrote that note down too. Yeah. I didn't remember his name. Yeah, yeah. Bishop. Yeah, it was the Leo DiCaprio meme pointing to the TV. Yeah. Yeah. Hey, look, look. I'm like writing notes down here like, these are old people I know, but you guys know these movies way more than I do. I'm writing it down like, Bishop, what did you do for my cousin? Well, let me read a quick synopsis of Network, and we will jump into our discussion. It says, In this lauded satire, veteran news anchorman Howard Beale, played by Peter Finch, discovers that he's being put out to pasture, and he's none too happy about it. After threatening to shoot himself on live television, instead, he launches into an angry televised rant, which turns out to be a huge ratings boost for the UBS Network. This stunt allows ambitious producer Diana Christensen, played by Faye Dunaway, to develop even more outrageous programming, a concept that she takes to unsettling extremes. So, Tim, I'm going to start with you. You chose this movie. Yes. What is your relationship to the Network? Are you super familiar with it? Have you watched it a ton? I haven't seen this movie in forever. I remember seeing it when I was younger, maybe in college. Study film. And I remember it being a lot more outrageous at the time. So, like, now when I watch it, it's like, well, yeah. Yeah, this movie's crazy to watch from today's lens. Yeah. So, yeah, I don't really have it. Because I'm still at the TV station. I still am. I'm the head of production there. And so, I chose this movie because I haven't seen it in forever. And I wanted to see if it was still hilarious. Not quite as hilarious as I remember. But it just seemed like a documentary almost. Yes. I will say, so that when the movie opens, the one thing that is amusingly accurate is when he announces that he's going to shoot himself. I haven't heard about that story. And they're all just hanging out in the control room. And then they're like, wait, what did he say? That's totally what would happen. One hundred percent. One hundred percent. We all have the same note because one of the problems, I've seen so many movies and TV shows that deal with television production. And one of the things that I hate most about it is that it's always presented as too professional. Right. Everybody is on top of their game. They're at the control booth. They are listening. They're waiting and everything like that. And it's like, no, no, they're at the end of this show. This is one of the last segments. They're all goofing off back there. They're all just chatting. And yet he's like, oh, I'm going to at the end of next week, I'm going to come in here and I'm going to blow my brains out. And they're all just chatting. What I loved is right after that, the dude on the, because I read all these same notes and that the floor guy on the headset. Yeah. Because relaying the message, that dude is accurate. The way he would do that because he's scared. And this made me think of, because he's like, he basically is like, I think he's going to blow his brains out. I don't know what I'm supposed to do. And he's like freaked out about this. And it made me think of that time we had George W. Bush in the station before he was president and he was running for governor. We had John Wigley out on the floor and all this. And we were trying to get George Bush to sit in his chair because he was out and kept getting up and doing something. And we're about to go live on CBS News Sunday morning. And he's wandering off. John Wigley's in the mic, just going like, he won't sit down. He just keeps getting up and he won't sit down. That is exactly how this dude in this movie talked over the headset. So it's cracking me up. I was like, high fives. That's the most realistic part of it of this movie. Absolutely. So JP, had you ever seen this movie before? No. So I'll say, and I wrote my note at the top here. So I walked into this and I was born in 1980. I've seen a lot of great movies and classic movies of the period. But I, in my mind, for some reason, I was just like, yeah. And I don't know if this was on the list of one of the options that you have, but I was like, so this is like switching channels. This is going to be a comedy like switching channels. Burt Reynolds, Christopher Reeves. And I wrote at the top, this is not like switching channels. Like it was one minute in, he's like, I'm going to blow my brains out. So I had no idea what this was about. And it took a few minutes to right away where I went, okay, this is more serious. It's still funny. But yeah, had no clue what this was other than that line that he says, we're mad as hell and we're not going to take it anymore. I'd always heard that, but I never knew what it was from until I watched this. So top line it for me. What did you think about this movie? Eight is really on the nose. I wish I would have seen this even 20 years ago. Right. Like, because everything changed so much now I'm watching it. And you're just like, just like Tim said, like, yeah, it's too much like a documentary or what's happening now, or all of the stuff they're doing is like reality TV. And this is like, uh, the, the bank robbers going in there with shooting themselves on camera. That's YouTube. Like all of this is like, yeah, this is what TV is like. This is what local news is not local. This is what news is like. Yeah. So watching it now is weird going like, well, yeah. But how did y'all nail this 40 years ago? 50. Most. Yeah. Yeah. What was this? 76. Shiner than 75. So it's almost 50 years old. We're old. Yeah. I was born in 1980. Yeah. They nailed it back then. So it, it, it, it's weird watching it through that lens, I guess. Cause I didn't have any idea going into what this was about, but watching it after the fact now it's like, so you just made a, you made, you knew it was going to happen. Yeah. New. So the writer and the, and the director, they're both kind of came up in the television era. They did live television and that. So there, there was that, that crew of people like John Frankenheimer and Arthur Penn and all these directors, they did live broadcasts, not necessarily news, but there was like CBS play house. Exactly. Yeah. So they're doing dramas live on. So they, in the inherently know that world and they know what it is. And they didn't know when that do fail safe. He did do spill. Yeah, exactly. And that was a CBS play house. Right. Live broadcast. And he also did a version of television movie of the week. He did a version of 12 angry men. Also. That's right. This is when they would do, it's using live broadcast. They would do the live, uh, especially filming a play. Right. Gotcha. So you have, you know, a studio with a couple of different sets of like for fail safe, you have the cockpit set, you have the control room set and you have like the president's set and you're shooting. They're acting it out like a play live. They're in the control room. Cameras shooting. Right. So it didn't. And that reminds me then, cause I think they redid that while we were at the TV station. They did fail safe with George Clinton. It was a big TV event. That's right. Live again. Yes. And the other connection is George Clinton wanted to do the exact same thing for network. Oh. He wanted to do network the same style. And so to prep for the project, he showed network to a bunch of. Teenagers and young adults, and he did not get the reaction he wanted. He, they just like us watch it. And I think this was in like 2013 or 16, maybe. And so they watch it and they go, yeah, so this is, this is accurate. This, this is what news and media. So, you know, we see this every day. Oh yeah. It doesn't have any shock about you. It doesn't have any. It's not over the top. Exactly. It's not over the top. So the project was scrubbed and it was never, never came to fruition. It's not even as over the top. Like there are things on TV, on network TV that are farther than that now it feels like. So yeah, they go really far. Oh, I wanted to point out real quick. So on the part where, where the, uh, the guys are in the control room and they're, you know, how that is, uh, the shot of the newsroom when, uh, they first, not when he first comes to William, but it first comes in. There's a shot of the newsroom. There's a dude on screen, right? Sitting down at his desk and he's reading mad magazine. Nice. It's just off. Can I say, can I say off? It's just off. And I looked it up for you. It is the, because I know you're a huge fan of mad magazines, mad magazines, March, 1976 issue. So if you want to live what that guy lived, so that magazine would have been a magazine for just a year. Yeah. Because they had to reclassify themselves. They were a comic book for the longest time, but because of their, uh, the nature of the satire and subject matter, they had to switch to magazine in 1975. This is the everything podcast, but going back to talking about the control room. Uh, so yes, the control room aspect was crazy accurate with nobody paying attention. It's the daily grind, just like us, where, you know, you did, it's almost muscle memory at this point, you know, what's happening next. You have a rundown, you don't have to pay close attention. So you're just goofing off with the person next to you, talking to the graphics person, talking to a producer. The other thing that was, uh, shocking. The other thing that was shocking to me is whenever they showed the control room and the studio. Because my experience with the control room and studio started in 1998. This movie is almost 50 years old. And seeing it portrayed, I was like, holy shit, it is still exactly the same. Besides like a few layouts and the only difference is monitor technology. You know what I mean? Like, because they're like in the studio, I was super happy because I'm so used to movies and TV shows where everything is impeccably lit and just looks ridiculous in Hollywood. I was super pumped to see a studio that looked like a studio where behind the camera line, it's super dark. You can barely see because you don't want spill onto the set. And then the cameras still have the same footprint. I was expecting these huge tanks, but no, the cameras on the pedestal still have the same footprint. The only thing that was different was the teleprompter because they have that huge beast of a CRT monitor for teleprompter world. We went to LCD and LEDs later. And then the set was perfect with like quarter walls, just so it's in the background of a shot and false walls so technicians can go in and out. I really enjoyed it. And then whenever I was doing research for this movie, it's real. That's not a set they built for the movie. They wanted to shoot in a real studio. So they went to Canada at a Canadian television station and shot all of it. So it is 100% accurate because it was a working television studio. They wanted to shoot in New York, but there was no New York broadcaster that could give them enough time to shoot their movie because they're like, no, we have to be on the air in another hour. You can't do it. So they went to Canada. They were like, yeah, come on up. We don't care. And that's weird. And in that same thing about the sets being accurate, and I think you guys will appreciate this, in the scene when Howard Beale has his church thing, there's two rotating sets. Did you notice how they rotated? Exactly. There's a dude. Dude who's turning a pig. And so when we worked at the studio a long time ago, there was a rotating set. With three different backdrops. And that's how you did it. You would imagine like, I'm going to hit this button. No, it's dudes pushing it. And you have two and a half minutes to do it. And you have to change the lighting, move the cameras, spin the set, and make sure nothing wrong is in the background. Like close that chroma key or whatever it was. Yeah, some of that was even like you had a big pole and you had to bring a light down. You had to use a pole to pull a light down. Pointed at the green screen just in time. Hey, somebody yell at the sports producer to stop dancing in the background. What the hell is he doing back there? Hey, stop it. Oh, couldn't it always be one of the four people down there who had to drop at the last minute and duck behind the set and sort of run around just so you didn't see him? Because you had two and a half minutes to do all this spin around. No, this set. Yeah, I saw the guy spinning and I thought even in the control room, one thing that cracked me up was when we got, and everything's been way overhauled for years at the studio, but we got, I got there at 99 and I remember at first like the gooseneck microphones was like this is the exact same microphone and was this 1976? And same like the switcher. I mean, we didn't have quite as old a switcher as that, but that was what we were starting with. It was an old, it was the Grass Valley, right? Right. Yeah. I couldn't see. I did it. I couldn't see. Me too. Yeah. So one of the things was I was trying to find out what that switcher, that production switcher that they showed was. I assumed it was probably either going to be a Grass Valley or a Ross because I know they'd been around that long. So I started- And Canadian. Ross is Canadian. So that was my guess. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. True. And so I started looking up production switchers. I was like, oh, it could possibly be the Grass Valley 300. But then my research was like, no, Grass Valley 300 didn't come out until 1979. Which was revolutionary. That's the only reason I remember Grass Valley 300. But then I was doing all this searching for the production switcher. And then whenever I found out in the research that it's a Canadian television station, I was like, oh, I wonder if just like over in Europe, they call it a vision mixer. So I started researching vision mixer, like Googling that. And I couldn't nail down, like I couldn't find a picture that perfectly matched. But it looked like, yeah, some old Grass Valley that maybe had, it looked like it had maybe two or three MEs connected to it or something. So yeah, it was all, it looked like one of our old, I mean, you didn't have to do much back then. So this looked like even the kind that we'd put in the vans back in the day, right? Like the small Grass Valley. So it was a huge, when I remember looking- I noticed that it had some effects. There were some joystick effects over on the right side. So there were a few effects not utilized in this movie, but there were some mixed effects that were able to use on that switcher, obviously. Intro to this movie, you have the voiceover and it's setting up this character of Howard Beale. I was laughing, but everything in this movie I'm laughing at, but I'm laughing at because it's sad and true. And I love that they just condense Howard Beale's life into ratings and shares where he starts off with, you know, he's starting off with a 16 rating with a 28 audience share, but after his wife dies and he turns to alcoholism, he slips to like a 13 share and everything is like, Jesus Christ, man. Good Lord. What was he at the end of the movie there? Because they're all talking about how his ratings are so bad. I didn't really equate. Is it worse than before? No, no. At the beginning, by the end of the movie, his, that whole news hour, which is just this weird proto reality television show of him as the mad prophet against the corporate hypocrisies or you know, whatever it is that they say. And then you have the tarot card reader lady and then the wall street, uh, psychic and all this other stuff. At one point in time, he's like a 50 share it, but it is slipping, right? He's down to like the thirties whenever he's assassinated at the end. Cause I was trying to figure out how much he had dropped at that point. I didn't really, I couldn't really figure out. I didn't try to like anything. He's just not holding the audience anymore. And instead of firing him, they decided, Hey, assassinate him. We'll get some ratings and everything, which was no. And that's when they started up at the very beginning. I just, I thought that having never seen it before and they said, Oh, I'm going to kill myself in two weeks. I thought in two weeks they were just going to let him do it. I thought the right movie was going to be all right. And in two weeks we're going to realize that's our point to rating. So I obviously took a different approach, but that's where I thought they were going with that. But even like when he says that, I even wrote down this note here, but he's like, that is another dumb thing. But he's, he says it and uh, they go, okay, well we're going to break and we're going to come back up after this at, and why did they come up? Like this was to me, but they're like, all right, he's still, he's still there and work fighting to pull him off. And they're like, what are we going to do? All right. Stand by camera two. Well, three, two, one, take two. Like why? Just sit in black. Just, just leave. You don't have a weatherman. You don't have a weatherman. You don't have a commercial you can run. Just stay in black. Yeah. But they counted down there. What are we doing? Automation doesn't exist. And they take camera two and they're like fighting him and wrestling him off the air. Like what? So that was the one, like if you're talking about like, well that's a fail, like any of us would have gone, no. Don't take it. Master control. Run another break. Run another commercial. Stay in black. Go to the weatherman. Cut to it. Anything. You can go anywhere. And I know they didn't have traffic cams back then, but you could stay in black. Yeah. Just stay in black. Yeah. I mean, especially if you're worried about FCC regulations and everything, stay in black rather than have a crazy guy cursing on air. We can't have five seconds of black on the air. What are we going to do? Yeah. Control room. Very accurate. Very accurate. I thought their depiction at the very beginning of the movie of the newsroom was very accurate. That was the biggest like, Oh, it has completely transformed. I did like their inclusion of the daily, you know, producer and news director sync with like stacking, stacking the day's news. Essentially still happens. Exactly. Except they do it on, they do it on teams now. Oh, so they do it on, they don't have a physical meeting anymore. Oh really? So they're all in the, they're all in the building, but they all just, they all stay at their own. Yes. They all stay at their own desk. It'd be better if they were all at the big table on me, on teams. Yeah. There are certain people that are out of the building, so it's just easier for them to like screw it. Let's just do it on teams. And they all, so the news director's in his office, the producers are all at their stations and there are some reporters out in the field that can only, so it's just easier for them to all do it that way than to gather around the computer for the ones that are out of the building. So, so essentially that still happens, just not in person. Compared to 1976 to now the newsroom itself, like aesthetically has completely changed because there is in the, in network so much like shelves and shelves of reference material, which are now just computers. So if you're doing a story on like, you know, uh, the New York apartment code violation story or whatever, Oh, a computer will let you know what those codes are looking that stuff up, but no, they have to have an actual reference. So I took note of, so there's a, there's a microfiche in the background of one. There's books, there's newspapers, there's typewriters everywhere. Uh, and then one thing, this is going to sound kind of dumb and mundane, but there are pens and pencils everywhere, everywhere. I noticed that I can't find a pen or a pencil in, in where I work to save my life. I have to go ask somebody took my pen because I only have like one or two, right? Because if I have more than that, then they all disappear even faster. So I have to go ask the secretary, are you going to have another pen? There was a moment where they're in that meeting and they were talking about, uh, the segment times like, Oh, so we'll do that. That's, that's going to be 52 seconds or whatever. And they're all writing it down. I was like, geez, they got to write down the segment times. Did you notice the, uh, the, in the, the, uh, at the beginning in the, in the, uh, control room and there's the script lady has a stopwatch. Yes. Yeah. She's like, yeah, now that's all computers. That's all a program. They hit a space bar, hit space bar. That's the next time. Oh, the story's up to hit space bar. Even back when we were doing it back then before the computer piece, cause we kind of were in there at the point when it was like, there was some computer stuff, you're transitioning. We just had, was it, I don't know if I'll still do this, but master control would just, it was really just, just get the show finished before the end of the show, finish timing everything. So that when you got to the last segment, master control is just counting up to go. All right. You've got 12 seconds left. I can say this fairly confidently in the last 10 years, anybody that works at, as a producer, if you plucked them and said, you're in 1976 now time, this show, they couldn't do it because it's all done for them right now. So we're talking about the switchers and the TV technology and all that. So as a director right now, it is all it, all of it, the whole thing. There's a small switcher off to the side and the small switcher, we go in and we tell it, Hey, switcher, I want you to do X, Y, Z. When I, when I do, when I do something, I want you to do this. And so it's basically a bunch of codes. And when I, so when we do a show, we code and it's, it's air quotes code. It's not like a, like a hacker is coding. It's not like that. It's basically, you have a bunch of commands that say, this is take camera one and you drag it into the rundown. And then that is on a display on a computer. And then you just spacebar through it now. So in that time and during your time, you would sit in front of the switcher and you would physically hit the button. So you would say standby one and JP would hit one in preview and then he went to take and one would go over to the program side. It's on air. Now, uh, you just build the show, build the show, spacebar through and spacebar through it. That sounds awful. Do you even touch a switcher anymore? I don't have to, I don't touch a switcher. So no, I don't touch a switcher. I can, if there's a, like a very special build, then I have to know how to build that. You build that, you save it, and then you put that into the thing so that you can use it from here on out. Once you build it, once you build it, once you're done, you're ready to go. So 1976 movies, almost 50 years old at this point. And just how a lot of the themes and things that they touch on just still haven't changed 50 years later. Like I wrote down, uh, nothing has changed. Uh, the show pitch meeting with Faye Dunaway's character with that producer, and she's reading off the synopsis of these new shows that could possibly be greenlit and go to production and saying like lady cops or the new lawyers from Harvard. It's like, I'm pretty sure those shows actually still exist. They've, I mean, all the shows that are on right now have existed for the past 50 years in some iteration. And then we have, uh, when she points out that all the horrible stuff that's happening in the world, like, you know, with oil prices going up, assassinations, this and that, but some anchor makes the front page because he just lost his mind a little bit and, uh, corporate conglomerates cutting news divisions. So they make a profit and everything. It's like, it's 50 years later and it's still everybody complaining about the same stuff. They even, there was like a, uh, the way the woman was when she was pitching these two to Faye Dunaway. She kept saying the same thing, grizzled subject. Like a crusty, but whatever it was, crusty, but benign. That's it. Crusty, but benign person does that. Next show. Don't want it. Well, a crusty, but behind does this. I'm like, okay, don't want it. Next show a crusty, but. A crusty but benign, I was like, oh my God, this is every show right now. Yeah, still cracking me up. This movie was a success, everybody loved it, but there were a handful of bad reviews and a lot of the bad reviews pointed out that it's just a cynical look at media, it's a cynical look at broadcasting, that this would never come to fruition. Have more faith in the system and it's just like... When did all this start? I'm watching it, again, this is before my time, I was born in 1980, but I'm watching it and I did wonder, but when did all of it start? Because everything... Exactly, right after the movie came out. Everything that they're talking about, obviously, all of the... Executives saw it as more of an instruction manual. Yes, this movie is labeled now and at the time as a satire. The director, Lumet, and the writer, Patti Chayefsky, they were like, no, this isn't satire, this is happening now, this is real. We are documenting what is happening now and everyone's like, oh, you silly. Oh, so they already saw enough of this, like you were mentioning earlier, they knew enough about how this goes on in the live broadcast. Chayefsky did a lot of research, he met with an NBC exec for research on this, he met with NBC exec, David Tebbit, attended programming meetings, did a bunch of research, so they never looked at this as satire. They were like, no, this is happening now, this is a problem, but let's make a black comedy about it and everything. Watching it now, 25 plus years later, and just being older, lived my life and also having a career in television, I know I didn't have an appreciation for it back then that I do now, because yeah, it's just like we talked about already, it's just crazy how it's not shocking. They're just watching the development of what we are in today. It's a weird watch, that was me watching, and when it ended, I didn't even know what to feel. It ended and I was like, that was weird, that's life. An interesting thing to me was the, so obviously the murder at the end, when they kill Howard Beale, a spoiler, they cut to the television monitors. I didn't know about that. So they cut to the television monitors, and the thing that struck me is that it's, hey, here's Howard, here's the shot, here's the shot, there's all the networks are doing it, and then slowly commercials creep in. Exactly. And that reminded me, because we all worked 9-11, and 9-11 is a very huge tragedy, and we took all the commercials off, and we just ran news constantly. And then when we tried to run some commercials, people flip their shit. They call into the station and we, how dare you in this solemn blah, blah, blah. But then over time, slowly, no matter what, they're going to get that money, and they're going to roll those commercials. And they eventually rolled the commercials, and there you go. Because yeah, this happens pretty much immediately, they're rolling the commercials. Yeah. I wrote the note, love the assassination ending paired with commercials, just furthering the warped, altered reality of viewing an event through a screen. And that it just, and just like, and I'm guilty of it too, just the being desensitized to everything, if you're just watching it through a screen, you can look at horrible atrocities on a daily basis now. And you get to a point where you have to compartmentalize and just go, well, I have my life I have to get on to. And then when you pair it with a horrible atrocity, and then literally the next second, it's like, hey, Sonny B, it's just like, what is going on? It's this warped reality that lives within the box. And so I love that it ended that way where it was just like, and he's just more fodder for ratings and viewership and everything. It was making me think of, as you're saying some of this, when I left the TV station, and part of it was like, I had gotten desensitized to it, but I remember watching stuff, and I would go home feeling bad every day because the news was so sad. You get to the last segment, you get to do the water skiing squirrel or the rodeo clown, rodeo monkey riding the dog, but I was sad every day when I left. And it was things like, I'll use the worst example, when we were at the TV station, not calling anybody out, making that station ID or the four second teaser. And it was the quote of, there was a kid, or a person who drowned, and the ID that was written for coming up tonight at 10, a man gets in over his head. And to be fair, that guy got in a lot of trouble for that. Right. And he should have. That was, though, this is whatever, the mid 2000s or sometime. But that was the story. A person drowned and died. And the teaser was a person gets in over their head at the pool or the lake or whatever it was. And we're at 10. I'm like, no, he didn't get in over his head. He drowned. That's somebody's kid. That's somebody's father. That's, I don't remember if it was a kid or an adult at this point, but that was the kind of stuff that made me feel gross. Whichever makes you laugh the best. You have to. That's what it was. Because you guys own a workshop, this drowning tease we have in over your head. We have a treading water. Is that two on the nose? And then adults go with the first one. And this is, I think someone forgot to bring their floaties. For all of us. And this is what's so crazy. But behind the scenes, like working the shows, if you listen to our headset chatter, all the stuff that we were saying back then, we were making jokes anywhere we could, because how else do you get by day to day? Dude. There's a certain amount of gallows humor that you have to employ. You won't make it. There's so many instances of me walking through master control and seeing that changed my life and is seared into my brain because it's coming in through some live feed. That's not going to even make the news, but hey, somebody recorded it. It needs to be sent out to stations or recorded. It's like, cool. Yay. I'm glad I just saw a beheading after my dinner break. What the hell is going on? There was like TLC, the left eye crash. Remember there was like footage of something after that. There was all kinds of stuff. This actually brings me into thinking of when I'm a kid and I'm in the 90s, there was all the faces of death and traces. Oh, yeah. VHS is around. Bud Dwyer was the scariest, craziest thing I'd ever seen in my life. What year was that? I'm older than you guys. Bud Dwyer was 88 or something like that. I never saw that. I'm a little older than you guys. I saw the Bud Dwyer tape in college and that me up for weeks. Dude, I still see it. You mentioned that name. I can 100% accurately see that video and I've only watched it once. Adult man. That was just like, oh, my God. This was 12 years before that, at least. While they were filming this movie just recently, the woman Christine Chubbuck had committed suicide on air in 1974. They shot this movie a year after that happened. From my research, there were references to her in the script, but they cut it out because they felt it was too macabre. Paddy Chayefsky used that as a ... I mean, that was the whole igniting the like, oh, what if somebody just announced that they were going to kill themselves on air and do ratings based off of it? It was the inciting incident for the script. Oh, wow. One thing I read in my research that I found very interesting, Sidney Lumet, the director, worked with the cinematographer. And at the very beginning of the movie, compared to the end of the movie, they worked on a very complex lighting scheme, where at the beginning of the movie, they wanted everything to be natural lighting. Remember when Howard Beale and ... Why am I blanking on the actor's name? Holden. William Holden. William Holden's character, they're outside drunk and talking and everything. It's all 100% natural lighting. The studio's natural lighting. And as the movie progresses, they get into actual studio lighting because they wanted the setups to get more rigid and robust because they wanted the movie itself to be a victim of television, where they wanted everything to become perfectly lit, where they point out to the scene where Robert Duvall and all the other board members are planning the assassination. And it's a stark little- Yeah, but it's lit like, you know, in a TV movie and everything. Everything is, by the end of the movie, everything is too perfectly lit. And I was like, wow, the foresight into that and just even having that thought, it was like, oh, that's really applause. That's awesome that you go from a naturalism to the hyper-realism of bringing things through the medium of television. Because I'm a huge nerd, I also bought the Blu-ray with the commentary and watched the commentary. He describes that he wanted, since every character in the production, every main character is corrupt in some way, he also wanted the picture to literally become corrupt as it went along. So corrupt in the sense that you're talking, that it becomes slicker and slicker and more corrupt. It corrupted by television. The one that there were a bunch of like, as it went on, a bunch of shots that were just like, what, this is awesome. But the one, I don't know why, it just stood out to me crazy, but the Ned Beatty scene. And the way they lit it, and they have the green lamps there, and they shot this and they just keep getting tighter. And like Ned Beatty does this whole, like one minute long speech, just one shot. And then they cut back the reverse shot of, what's his name? The Howard Beale. Howard Beale, yeah. And he cut back to Beale, and then they cut back to Beatty, but they're a little bit closer, then cut into Beale a little bit closer. And they do this back and forth and back and forth. They keep getting a little bit closer, but the shot after he closes the curtains in that boardroom and makes it dark, just like what you're saying, and it's just like. It's just sinister. So dark and sinister, punching in and the trail of lights leading right toward Ned Beatty of the lamps. Like that shot was great. Like to me, I was just like geeking out on like, this is so good. Like they let the shot sit. They don't do that nowadays. They would have cut a million times. Just let them act. Let them do the thing. And we're not gonna change these shots up. We're just keeping this shot. We're just getting closer and closer. Brilliant, I love it. Speaking of that scene, they weren't happy with the original actress. So Ned Beatty had one night to prepare for that scene. And they just shot for one day. And he's only on screen for like five, six minutes. Five or six minutes, yeah. Academy Award nomination. What? I was wondering, because when I did see him, because he literally worked a day and a half on that movie of like, hey, we want you to do it. Can you please prep for tomorrow's shoot? Had all night to go through it, the four page monologue. That dude comes in, crushes it, and gets an Academy Award nomination. And they purposefully dressed him to look like Roosevelt. Teddy Roosevelt. He says in the commentaries, Teddy Roosevelt, who is the business president. Because Teddy Roosevelt felt like you ran the country like a business. And that's how you should do it. I watched this movie so long ago. I remembered the broad strokes. But going back to it, I just honestly completely forgot. And it's no shock because one of the Oscars, this one was Best Original Screenplay. But I had forgotten just how well written this movie is. And there's so much documentation on Paddy Chayefsky. So I'm not going to bother anybody with it right now. But while I was watching it, I was like, it was like an Aaron Sorkin movie. Yes. And in my research, it was like, Aaron Sorkin cites this movie as a huge inspiration. And it's one of the other reasons that this movie, the few bad reviews it did get were, this seems like an Aaron Sorkin movie. Exactly. Before he was even on the scene, they're like, you know what, this feels like not enough walking through halls. That's what we're missing. But no, a New York Times reviewer, Pauline Kael, one of the problems she had with this movie was that none of the characters are distinctive. They're all the same. And I will, in some sense, agree with that because this, for me, is a prime examples of, it's a writer's movie. Like for me, Chinatown isn't Jack Nicholson's movie. It's not Roman Polanski's movie. It's Robert Towne's movie. It's the same reason, well, Quentin Tarantino is the director of his movies. But Quentin Tarantino's movies, everyone speaks like Quentin Tarantino. The only difference is what the actors bring to the table. And with Patti's script on this, yes, everyone has Patti's voice, but it's up to Faye Dunaway or Robert Duvall to bring their cadence and their nuance. And I will agree, it's just like an Aaron Sorkin movie where everybody speaks like Aaron Sorkin, but if the script is good enough, which I think in Network's case, it is, it propels the action forward because there's no action in this movie. There's those set pieces. There's no, you know, and so the... and so the dialogue and the stakes of each scene of like, I mean, every scene has stakes where it's like, I'm being fired, I'm being rehired, I'm getting a divorce, I'm in love with you. Like every scene has big emotional stakes and every single character gets at least one or multiple juicy dialogues that are yes, overdramatic, yes, chewing up the scenery, but you know, you need that in these types of movies because there's not gonna be a car chase later. That is the action sequences of I'm as mad as hell and I'm not gonna take it anymore or whatever, so it's just good. And one note for me is, dude, Robert Duvall is, I mean, everybody's good in this movie, but Robert Duvall is so damn good in this movie. And one of the notes that I wrote down that in my research I loved is they cast Robert Duvall because of his background in Westerns. In all their research and all their just experience working in television, heads of networks are always from the Midwest. They're not these coastal elites or anything like that. They're just these dudes from the Midwest who have a ton of money from corn or a ton of money from oil. So of course I'm running NBC because I know about television. No, you're just some shrewd businessman who knows how to castrate cattle or whatever like that. So I love it that they even thought about that where it's like, oh, well, let's get Robert Duvall because he's known for Westerns. That tuxedo is on point. Oh, yeah, and he's got the- High waters, the purple sleeves. He's got some pirate-like sleeves. High water, bell-bottom, tuxedo, pants. Whoa, and he is rocking that outfit. So anyway, yeah, and just yelling into a phone. Oh, yeah, yelling. And when he does that scene, and this is another control room thing. I don't know if you guys noticed this, but I thought this was a great touch. But he gets into that control room when he's in that tux and they're talking. Right, yes. You see, I don't even know if it was the control room as much as just it was a room- A room with equipment. Where there's a lot of equipment and you hear all the bands. So I wrote down that specific scene, the whining of all the TV equipment. And it's true, if you just go into certain rooms, it's just, wee, but you kind of tune it out. Yeah, you just kind of tune it, but in the- I didn't notice because I tuned it out. It is all there. It's all there, yes. I'm like, what? This is, every modern movie would turn all that off, and they kept it. And this goes on, it's like a five-minute scene the whole time. They didn't even like, oh, we're gonna set the scene and then drop it. No, the entire time, you hear bands, you hear- I legit tuned it out because you have to. No, it is a loud room. And I was like, check that box, you nailed it. This is all the sounds that you would hear in there. That scene, I wrote about that, I wrote that down specifically because of the noise. And then I noticed in that scene, there's either, I think it's a one-inch machine, but there's a one-inch machine. So it's one-inch tape, reel-to-reel, big, big piece of equipment. And then behind him to the right is a U-matic, which is three-quarter inch. So they're already starting to make the transition from the big one-inch, two-inch machine. So it went two-inch machines, one-inch tape. Then they started doing the U-matic tapes. And it was interesting to me that that was accurate because it's probably the television station in Canada. But television stations will often, they still do it, is they'll, what's the latest and greatest? They'll get a big budget and they'll buy that thing. And then they have all the, we got all these new cameras and then we got all these new decks and now it's just a computer server and all that stuff. We get all the new stuff. Here it is, great. And then in four years, Sony or Ross or whoever comes out and goes, you know what? We got something better. And then they have that. But because you spent all this money on this other crap, you keep that crap. And then you have a mix of the new and the old. So that room kind of represented like here's the, and I looked up the U-matic. The U-matic had been out since 1969, 1970. So it's already five or six years old, but the two inch, one inch, two inch tapes had been out much longer. So they're already sneaking, there's a U-matic tape in Robert Duvall's office, which would have been the latest and greatest because he's the exec. He's gonna have the best equipment in his office so that he can see or watch something that he needs to watch. But that whole thing with the technology that it's not just like, and now we have all this. It's never that. No, because when I started in 98, the control room still had black and white CRT reference monitors. When I started, which is two years before you, three years before you. We had one inch tape machines. That's exactly what that scene is. So that stuff that you're describing that you started in 1990, what? Eight. 1998. That same exact equipment is in 1976. So they never get rid of it. They do eventually. Yeah, we didn't get rid of it until it was in the 2000s when we got rid of it. I was running mass control overnight, still threading that stuff in the 2000s. And the other thing is that you have certain media that is trapped. So like eventually you get rid of the one inch machines and the two inch machines and the three quarter inch machines because you transfer all that information onto some new format, but eventually you can't anymore. So we still have walls of a beta cam SP. Oh, you still have those? They're walls of them because what are we gonna do? Are we gonna hire somebody to come in and transfer all that stuff and digitize it for us? Because we're not gonna do it because each tape and it's walls of these things. It's a year's worth. Commercials or? No, this is like VOs and sots and packages. So anytime a VO or a sot or a package back in the day, they would put it on a master tape for the month. Right. And then after the hour is filled up, it's one hour's worth of a month's worth of stuff. And you just have a coded reference guide to go find that. And so we have a database to find that. Hey, I need this. It's 1996 and it's this date and this month. That's on tape SP 192 and then they go up there to find SP 192. So we still have beta cam SP even though it's essentially obsolete because our media is trapped in the format. And how often do you need to go back to those tapes at this point? So you're just kind of not worth it to transfer. Exactly. We don't go back often enough to transfer wall, walls of this tapes. We don't go back. Just go back as needed. And then we also have, because at one point we were doing Blu-rays for storage. So there's a wall of Blu-rays. And so you have to have a Blu-ray. This will never go out. DVDs. You get a Blu-ray disc for a while. Future-proof guys. Blu-rays. This is the end of the line. And we did it guys. Put it down. So yeah, we have, so that back to the movie, they have these different format things in that room. That's very accurate because I mean, we still have different format things because your media gets trapped in a format. Yeah. And it's too much to this point. Exactly. Another note that I had was that I think the movie, it's supposed to be satirical, but it could not predict the profit over news. So did you watch any of the extra features with, did you watch the Walter Cronkite interview? No, I did not. So it was a Walter Cronkite interview in the features. And the interview is in the 90s. And Walter Cronkite is talking about how that it would never happen that you would make the news. And this is in the 90s. You would never make the news profitable because the people in the news department would probably revolt. He was an old school newsman by that point. And I don't think what he took into account was like, look man, if honestly, if there are 50 of you that say that you won't do this for profit, guess what? There's a hundred in the door that are gonna come in and do it for profit. And now the profit over news where, we're gonna make this newsroom profitable. It's not just about ratings because quite frankly, the ratings don't matter anymore. And to supplement that, they just ignore it. We don't care what the ratings are because the ratings aren't as huge as they used to be. And it's all slim margins. We don't get a 50 share. There's no, that's unimaginable. That's insane. So we're lucky if we get a six. But so then what I think the movie, where the movie couldn't predict was, we're gonna sponsor weather. We're gonna sponsor sports. The Sports Hour brought to you by. Gopniks Gold Line. Whoever. ABC best in line. There's a slate at the end of the news and the slate says, this was sponsored by these five companies. And it's not us, it's everyone. It's everyone does it. So it's not, I think they got the profit in the news thing wrong. I mean, sadly, so. You mentioned Walter Cronkite. Walter Cronkite was approached for the role of Howard Beale. They came to him and said, hey, we want you to play Howard Beale. And of course, Walter Cronkite's like, I'm good. I don't need to tear down the establishment that I'm a part of. But other of note, Lumet wanted Henry Fonda to play Beale. Henry Fonda turned it down. Jimmy Stewart was offered the role. He found it too. He, so Henry Fonda found it, the script to be too hysterical, not like funny, hysterical and like the mania and the messaging that it was putting out. Stewart turned down the role because of the language because he's all American Boy Scout. George C. Scott was turned down for the role because it was, I think it was the writer who wanted George C. Scott, but the studio turned to him. Right, he's in a hospital, which is also written by Betty Chayefsky. Exactly. Faye Dunaway wanted Robert Mitchum to play the role that William Holden played, but Robert Mitchum was not considered because he wasn't as urbane as William Holden. He was looked at as too gritty and too rough around the edges. I had to look up Robert Mitchum, the dude from Scrooged. Exactly. Oh, wow. That's your reference. I can't figure it out. Not, this is so much of my, if it happened between the 80s and mid 90s, then I immediately scroll and I go, oh, the guy from Scrooged, got it, that's it. Yeah, that's it, Robert Mitchum. I just, you talk about his name and I have to go Google him while you're saying it and I go, oh, Scrooged. All right, well, that's gonna do it for another episode of Movies and Mainframes. I wanna thank my guests, JP. Thank you, dude. And Tim Harrison. Hello, bye. But before we go, guys, is there anything y'all wanna talk about, anything you wanna promote? JP, I know you personally. Note to the listener, if you were listening to this podcast and you've heard the incredible intro music, it was personally done by JP himself. He is a music extraordinaire. He has tons of musical projects. Yeah, you can find him on Spotify. JP, I know you're actually going to be possibly working on an album soon or something like that. Is there anything you wanna promote or anything you wanna put out there in the ether for people to check out? Sure, I'll just say, so yeah, I did the song for the podcast here. And let's talk about that real quick because it cracks me up is because whenever this podcast was actually solidifying and like, oh, it's gonna be a real thing and we need to start recording and we need to start promoting it and putting it together, we obviously need a theme song for it. I had ideas in my head. And so I talked to JP because like I said, JP's a music extraordinaire, so I'm talking, and plus we just have a shorthand where we can talk in movie references and he knows exactly what I'm talking about. We're talking about, what do you want for the theme music? And I was trying to describe it and I was saying like, yeah, I want it to be this style with like fake movie quotes in it and this and that. And I'm trying to describe the style of music and then just out of nowhere, he goes, oh, so you want it to be Thomas Newman from Real Genius? And I was like, that's exactly what I want. Yeah, the song I know and we were doing it, I was like, oh, it's obviously Thomas Newman because you and I both love Thomas Newman. So yeah, no, the soundtrack for the podcast was super fun. I love doing that kind of stuff. So I do music like that, but also I play in a band called Built by Snow and we recorded some stuff and we're trying to hopefully get another album out again at some point soon. I have a band, it's a solo project called Velcro Wolf where I make posters and songs and albums and I have another project called No Cares and another one called Oh Look Out because I don't know how to stop naming bands. I always record new things. Tim Harrison, thank you once again. No problem. So, by the way, Tim is a comic artist. He's a writer himself. Is there anything you would like to- Honestly, I don't have anything. I would just say, just check out JP's stuff and watch TV. Yeah, watch TV because it's very important to me. I'll say it because Tim won't promote himself this way, but so he's one of the most creative guys that I know here, but he- 100 comic artists all shut up and video comedy skits with YouTube guys doing stuff with All Shut Up and Monkey Christmas. So yeah, if Tim won't- Yeah, or rent Blind Man. It was a- Don't do that. Oh, jeez. Go to monkeychristmas.com. There you go. I'll go to that. I'll go to Xmas. Either. Oh, yeah. I'll go to them all. Come in, Monkey Xmas. Look at you, Mr. Moneybag. You gotta get them .com names. No watch all that stuff, yeah and blind man just any of the stuff that's in business, it's fantastic. Absolutely No, watch all that stuff. Yeah, and Blind Man. Just any of the- Well again, thank you to my guests and thank you listeners for tuning in to another episode of movies and mainframes I want to hear from you. So please head over to THWACK.com look for movies and mainframes. Leave me a comment What did you think about network and you can always email me at movies and mainframes at solarwinds.com All right, and tell them to do like a smart list. Bye Stay in school. Don't do drugs. Be cool and they stay in school. Yeah for the teen listeners. Well, that's shut up So, let me get my tag For now, I am going to log off but until the next time I will see you later Bye everyone
