Tom Shales

Paddy Chayefsky, who thrived during TV’s “golden age” of live drama, didn’t claim to be predicting the future when he wrote “Network” in 1976 – but the movie, now celebrating its 30th anniversary, may be the most prophetic ever made. It was set in “the present” – network anchorman Howard Beale is fired on Sept. 22, 1975, as the film opens – but Chayefsky took prevailing trends and extended them to outrageous extremes that now, unfortunately, don’t seem all that extreme or outrageous.

Like the fact that a fourth network called UBS is acquired by a giant global conglomerate, CCA, whose executives are determined to turn the network’s curiously prestigious news division into a profit center. They order Beale’s firing and thereby push him over the edge into madness – madness that turns out to be such a crowd-pleaser that Faye Dunaway, resplendently cold-blooded as the head of the entertainment division, gets Beale a prime-time news hour to rant and rave.

It’s a reality show, a couple decades ahead of its time, replete with footage shot by media-wise domestic terrorists, one of them a Patty Hearst figure played by Walter Cronkite’s daughter Kathy (yes, really).

Beale’s news hour is only a tad trashier than NBC’s lurid “Dateline,” with its sideshow cast of alleged child molesters, or those awful murder mystery editions of “48 Hours” on CBS. Among other ironies: Beale, as part of his breakdown, uses a common barnyard epithet, the first half of which is “bull,” on the air, causing a sensation. Robert Duvall, as the ruthless new UBS president, scoffs, “The FCC can’t do anything except rap our knuckles.” Chayefsky couldn’t know that during reactionary Dark Ages to come, the FCC could indeed do more – like fine UBS $50 million or more for the utterance of that one word, even though ad-libbed by a lunatic.

“It’s not satire, it’s sheer reportage,” director Sidney Lumet says on the 30th anniversary two-disc DVD of “Network,” which includes a clip of Chayefsky himself on Dinah Shore’s old talk show. In defense of the film’s dark satirical stance, Chayefsky tells Shore, “It’s murderous, but it’s not brutal.”

Chayefsky contributed two iconic phrases to the language that survive three decades later: Beale’s rabble-rouser “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this any more,” which in a thrilling sequence New Yorkers shout from their apartment-house windows; and “Because you’re on television, dummy,” which Beale hears first from a voice in a dream and later from Ned Beatty as the CCA megaboss. There are no more nations, states, or political theologies, Beatty tells Beale; there are only corporations that grow larger and larger in size, fewer and fewer in number. My, what an imagination that Chayefsky guy had.

The movie got 10 Oscar nominations and scored four wins. The best actor Oscar so deservedly won by Peter Finch for playing Beale had to be awarded posthumously; he died not long after the film was released. “Network” was meant to be a comedy, but it grows less funny – though more entertaining – each time an anniversary rolls around.

I tried to get an interview with Chayefsky at the time – his office number was listed in the New York phone book and he answered the phone himself – and though he declined, we chatted for about half an hour. Asked why he got out of television, he told me he grew weary of a business in which “you have to be hysterical all the time.” Anger and outrage became him, and wherever he is now, I seriously doubt he is “resting in peace.”

As for “Network,” it’s fantastic, it’s bombastic, it’s Comcastic! And its shelf life seems unlimited.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences in Beverly Hills will screen “Network” Aug. 28 at 7:30 p.m. Admission is $3 for members and $5 for nonmembers.