(Dave Itzkoff’s article appeared in The New York Times, 11/21; via Pam Green.)
Even the cast and creators are working out what the stage adaptation of the prescient 1976 film means right now.
One recent Friday afternoon, Bryan Cranston came bounding through the downstairs lounge of the Belasco Theater wearing little more than a bathrobe. He broke character briefly, offered a genial smile and calmly declared, “I have to go get crazy.”
Then he dashed up the stairs and onto the stage and sat behind a desk there. Resuming the role of a television news anchor who is coming apart at the seams, Mr. Cranston prepared to deliver a fiery monologue in which he urges his viewers, who are as angry and frustrated as he is, to stick their heads out their windows and scream, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!”
This is the most potent moment in “Network,” the prescient, Academy Award-winning 1976 film, written by Paddy Chayefsky, about a fictional last-place television station that has lost its moral compass and staked its future on a deranged anchorman named Howard Beale.
[Bryan Cranston Wants More of Us to Get ‘Mad as Hell’]
Photo: New York Times
