This November, we're preempting our regularly scheduled Best Movie You (Probably) Haven't Seen to celebrate the 50th anniversary of a movie everyone probably should see: Network.

When Network opened in November 1976, Paddy Chayefsky and director Sidney Lumet were satirizing a television industry increasingly driven by ratings, corporate ownership, and the pressure to turn news into entertainment. Their darkly comic vision pushed those trends to deliberately outrageous extremes, imagining what might happen when the pursuit of an audience became more important than journalism itself.

What seemed outrageous enough to be satire in 1976 can look strikingly different 50 years later. Network wrestles with questions about who controls the news, what happens when outrage becomes entertainment, how economic incentives shape what audiences see, and what happens to public discourse when attention becomes more valuable than truth. Its satire was rooted firmly in the television industry of the 1970s, but the questions Chayefsky was asking have only become more complicated in the decades since.

Winner of four Academy Awards — including acting Oscars for Peter Finch, Faye Dunaway, and Beatrice Straight as well as an Original Screenplay Oscar for Chayefsky — Network also gave us one of the most famous lines in movie history: “I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!”

Before the screening, former political communications strategist and Wednesday Movie Club host Jennifer Hoelzer will talk about the world that produced Network, how Chayefsky and Lumet made the film, and what the film has to say about media, messaging, public anger, and the increasingly complicated relationship between information and entertainment. Then we'll watch the film and open the room up for discussion.

DETAILS

Sunday, November 8th
1:30 - 4:45 pm

Stow • Munroe Falls Public Library
3512 Darrow Road
Stow, Ohio 44224

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