Friday, Doug talks to New York Times culture reporter Dave Itzkoff about the lasting influence of the wildly popular and incendiary 1976 feature film Network. According to Itzkoff, the film’s legacy is due in large part to the genius of screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky, who poured into it all his angst, anxiety and paranoia. The result was a film that used one mass medium to indict another, while also assailing the degradation and emptiness of modern American life. His book is called Mad As Hell. (Rebroadcast)
Dave Itzkoff is a culture reporter at the New York Times, where he writes regularly about film, TV, music, theater and popular culture. He's also the author of Mad As Hell: The Making of Network and the Fateful Vision of the Angriest Man in Movies [Amazon|Indiebound]
