Paddy Chayefsky - Films

Films

After the success of Marty, he worked mainly on films. He received an Oscar nomination for The Goddess, loosely based on the life of Marilyn Monroe. Directed by John Cromwell, it starred Kim Stanley as Emily Ann Faulkner, a small town blonde who achieves fame in films but becomes emotionally disturbed and a problem to her producer, her director, and her husband played by Lloyd Bridges.

Gore Vidal adapted Chayefsky's teleplay The Catered Affair into a film of the same name. In 2008, it was adapted to a Broadway musical by Harvey Fierstein with music and lyrics by John Bucchino. It had a four-month run, receiving 15 Tony and Drama Desk nominations.

He expanded his 1953 teleplay, The Bachelor Party, for the 1957 film adaptation. Directed by Mann, the drama has characters who are questioning the concept of marriage, of commitment to one person and going day after day to the same dull job to support a family.

The Americanization of Emily

During the 1960s his credits included The Americanization of Emily, which featured James Garner, Julie Andrews, Melvyn Douglas and James Coburn, an anti-war comedy that remains both Garner's and Andrews' favorite of their films. Garner plays a naval officer so comically frightened under fire on D-Day that he actually runs the other way. Paint Your Wagon, a screen vehicle for Lee Marvin, was a lavish Western musical comedy. Paint Your Wagon director Joshua Logan said he "found Chayefsky to be close to a genius, but too close to stubborn."

The Hospital

He won two more Oscars, the first for The Hospital (1971) which featured George C. Scott and Diana Rigg. David Thomson describes it as a "lethally funny account of American social benevolence collapsing in its own bureaucratic chaos. Another review terms it "a scathing indictment of the medical community." (In 1980, after he was diagnosed with cancer, he refused surgery, claiming that he "feared retribution by the doctors" for his caustic portrayal of them in the film. He died the next year.)

Network

The film was followed by Network (1976), which featured Faye Dunaway, William Holden, Peter Finch (who posthumously was awarded an Oscar for "Best Actor in a Leading Role") and Robert Duvall among other cast members. For both of these films Chayefsky received Golden Globe awards. The film annoyed many television executives and news anchors, but it won the acclaim of most critics. It was nominated for ten Academy Awards, winning four, including Best Actress for Faye Dunaway. Peter Finch and Beatrice Straight also won for Best Actor and Best Supporting Actress, respectively, and it resulted in Chayefsky's third and final award for Best Screenplay.

In a powerful scene set in a conference room of imperial décor and intimidating proportion, Chayefsky presents his prescient articulation of the evolutionary force of a forthcoming global economy and corporate prominence in the political sphere. Business mogul, Arthur Jensen, (actor Ned Beatty) lectures newscaster Howard Beale (actor Peter Finch):

Jensen: “…We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business.”

Chayefsky provided actor Peter Finch with one of the most iconic movie lines in film history. Finch as the unhinged news anchor, Howard Beale, implores his TV audience to rise in unanimous protest against universal injustice. Waving his arms in vehement appeal, he instructs the public to take up the call, go to their windows and with him in unison yell out to the world:

“I’m as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!'

Although Chayefsky was an early writer for the television medium, he eventually abandoned it, "decrying the lack of interest the networks demonstrated toward quality programming." As a result, during the course of his career, he constantly toyed with the idea of lampooning the television industry, which he succeeded in doing with Network. The film is said to have "presaged the advent of reality television by twenty years" and was a "sardonic satire" of the television industry, dealing with the "dehumanization of modern life."