At least George Clooney's "Network" will be less silly than FOX

If you haven't heard by now, George Clooney is planning on producing a live remake of the 1976 film Network that will air on CBS, supposedly to air later this season. Clooney said he was approached to do this remake by CBS president Les Moonves, given his previous success with the 2000 live remake of the movie Fail Safe. It's an interesting combination: Clooney, who just directed the Edward R. Murrow pic "Good Night, and Good Luck." but is no fan of cable blowhards like Bill O'Reilly, working on a new version of a movie that pretty much predicted the wave of reality dreck and uninformed punditry that permeates the airwaves today.

I just viewed Network all the way through for the first time, and, boy, writer Paddy Chayefsky got a lot of things right. One of the greatest misconceptions of the film is that Peter Finch's character, increaingly insane anchorman Howard Beale (above), screamed his famous line -- "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!" -- at the end of the movie. Nope. He screams it in the middle, setting off a chain of events where the entertainment division, represented by Faye Dunnaway's shallow and ruthless programmer, Diana Christensen, takes over the news broadcast of the fourth-place UBS network. She turns it into a program with soothsayers, gossip mongers, and a raving Beale spouting off about the absurdities of life. When the corporate suits get to him, telling him that there the world is ruled by corporations, his nihilistic message loses him ratings points, leading to what I'll just say is a severe form of cancellation.

I'm all for seeing what this movie is going to look like stripped of its dated references, clothes, and set design -- for instance, Clooney is going to change the Black Panther-esque group courted for a reality-based show to a terrorist group -- but I just don't know what kind of impact this new version of Network is going to have. I mean, I can see the version of network TV that the movie showed seemed shocking to an audience that wasn't used to seeing anything more shocking than Farah Fawcett-Majors in a tight tennis shorts. But now? Well, let me quote Clooney himself, who showed the orignal movie to a bunch of people who were too young to remember that he used to be on The Facts of Life, and didn't even consider the movie to be a satire:

"Suddenly, the idea that the anchor is more important that the news story, and that you’d be doing sort of reality-based shows with heads of gangs and Sybil the Soothsayer all happened."