Word: mad
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...wants to yank Beale off the air, but Diana Christenson (Faye Dunaway), the network's head of programming, senses enough viewer interest in a nutty anchorman to boost the ailing network into Nielsen heaven. The news department becomes part of Christenson's entertainment empire, and, as the "mad prophet" of the air waves, Beale gains 60% of the audience and puts the double-whammy on such stolid, sane types as Walter Cronkite and John Chancellor. "Howard Beale is processed instant God," Christenson gushes, "and right now it looks like he may just go over bigger than Mary Tyler...
...that's not all. Now every pro wrestler worth his salt in Barbados cheese is hopping like mad on the merry bandwagon bound for stars and Dallas...
...from the window of a Dublin flat, and through women's eyes. This view of the Easter Revolution was cynical enough to cause riots when it first was staged. In O'Casey's portrayal, the Irishmen in the Citizen Army died shitting with fear; their wives went mad trying to keep them safe at home. The only heroes in The Plough and Stars are those who neither fight nor spout rhetoric: Fluther Good, the working man whose honest dignity defies the British to do their worst, though he is terrified of gunshot; Bessie Burgess, who nurses Nora through losing...
...then, when he crosses them up and announces that his trouble is that he has "run out of bullshit," they would not instantly cut him off the air; that the resulting publicity would cause the network to reverse its decision and put the man on as a regularly scheduled Mad Prophet of the airways; that emboldened by this success, the executives would grant a weekly slice of prime time to a revolutionary group something like the Symbionese Liberation Army so they can stage their heists before a slack-jawed mass audience; that meantime the Mad Prophet would be taken over...
...current trends go unchecked? All of that is true enough, but the real problem is that Chayefsky has betrayed his own truest instinct about the medium. At one point he has William Holden, the news executive who functions as the movie's superego, inform Faye Dunaway, the ratings-mad exec who is its id, that the trouble with TV is that it reduces everything to banality. That may well be true. But at every turn Chayefsky's plot invests television with a sinister power to cloud men's minds, not through stupefying reductionism but by heated exaggeration...