Deep SHT · Network (1976) · The Ending
Network (1976) Ending Explained: Why Howard Beale Had to Die
The Howard Beale death is a business decision, and the real ending is the four screens that keep playing after it
Written by
Paddy Chayefsky
Directed by
Sidney Lumet
Narrator
Lee Richardson
The short version
The Network Ending in One Sentence
The ending of Network (1976) is the narrator’s last line, and the film says it out loud so nobody can miss it: Howard Beale was the first known instance of a man who was killed because he had lousy ratings. After the Arthur Jensen meeting, Howard preaches Jensen’s corporate gospel on the air, the audience stops caring, and the ratings fall. Jensen will not let the network fire him. So the executives, in a meeting that sounds like every other meeting in the film, decide to have him killed on his own show, and the terrorists whose series they also produce do the job as Howard walks on stage.
That is the plot. The ending, though, is what happens in the ninety seconds after the gunfire, and it is the one place where the film changed the script’s last page. This short page covers the meeting, the four monitors, and what Chayefsky had written for those monitors instead.
The meeting
The Howard Beale Death Is a Business Decision
The scene that decides Howard’s fate is a programming meeting in Frank Hackett’s office. The numbers are bad, Jensen will not allow a firing, and so the room works the problem the way it has worked every other problem in the film. Lumet, on his commentary, says that is the whole point of how he shot it: a completely normal discussion of what is wrong with this program and how to fix it, with no passion and no humanity, just people dealing with a problem. Diana suggests the Mao Tse-Tung Hour’s terrorists could kill Beale as one of their shows. Hackett puts the question to the room like any other agenda item. Diana answers it.
I don’t see we have any option. Let’s kill the son of a bitch.
Diana Christensen, closing the agenda item — identical in every draft and the film
No crash of music
Network has no score, and Lumet gives this meeting as his reason. If he had hired a composer, the composer would have wanted a great musical crash under the line about having to kill Howard, and that is exactly what the scene cannot have; everything must play as normal, as ordinary. The one joke the film adds to the script’s version of the meeting makes the same point from the other side: an executive hopes Frank does not have any hidden tape machines in the office. In the summer of 1975, with the Nixon tapes a year old, that was the only kind of guilt a room like this could imagine.
The monitor bank
Four Screens That Keep Playing
After the gunfire the film cuts to a bank of four television monitors and stays there. Nothing on them is about to stop. These are the four voices playing at once over the last ninety seconds; read them together, because that is how the film plays them.
Screen 1: The UBS bulletin
“Shot to death tonight in a fusillade of automatic rifle fire.”
The network reports its own murder as a news item, in the same voice it uses for everything else. The bulletin names the Ecumenical Liberation Army and says their leader, the Great Ahmed Khan, escaped.
Screen 2: The mixer commercial
“We never compromise, so why should you?”
A Canada Dry spot cuts into the bulletin. The slogan lands as the last joke in the film, and it is at the executives’ expense.
Screen 3: The cereal commercial
“He won’t eat it. He hates everything.”
Two kids and a bowl of cereal. The boy who hates everything is the audience Howard lost, and the one the network is already selling to.
Screen 4: The narrator
“A man who was killed because he had lousy ratings.”
Lee Richardson’s narration brackets the film. Lumet says it pulls the picture out of the real and gives the audience permission to laugh; here it gives permission one last time.
Lumet says the person who put the sequence together was Lynn Klugman, who worked in television, played the script girl in the movie, and was a title designer. She chose the material, put it up on the four monitors, and the crew photographed the monitors. The ending is literally television watching television.
Television continues relentlessly on.
Stage direction, the last page of Paddy Chayefsky’s shooting script
Draft to screen
What the Script’s Last Page Had Instead
Chayefsky’s final page, identical in the undated draft, the November 1975 revision, and the shooting script, also ends on four monitors. But it tells you exactly when you are watching them: it is 7:14 P.M. on Wednesday, July 9, 1975, and the screens are showing the real network newscasts on CBS, NBC, ABC and UBS. The faces are Walter Cronkite, John Chancellor, Howard K. Smith and Harry Reasoner, plus a UBS substitute filling in for Howard, intercut with tapes of the previous day’s horror. Then the narrator’s line, worded almost exactly as Finch’s audience would hear it a year later, and the stage direction this page’s red banner quotes.
Why the real anchors had to go
On the page, the ending is a dated news event: a specific Wednesday, the real anchormen, the next evening’s coverage. The film takes out the date and the famous faces and puts commercials in their place. The effect is the opposite of a time stamp. Howard’s death does not become the top story on CBS; it becomes one more item sharing airtime with a mixer ad and a cereal ad, and the sequence could be any night. Lumet says the climax moves into fantasy only in the sense that it has not happened yet, but will; he closes his commentary by predicting a real death on a reality show, shown to you. An ending with Cronkite in it would have belonged to 1975. The ending the film has belongs to whenever you watch it.
The Khan in the audience
One more difference. In the script, just before the shooting, the camera finds the Great Ahmed Khan and some of his followers sitting in the middle of the studio audience, happily joining the communal chant that opens the show. The film does not show him there; it lets the bulletin tell us afterward that he escaped. On the page the joke is visual, the killer chanting along with the crowd. On screen the joke is procedural, the killer already reduced to a line in the coverage. Both say the same thing about where the audience and the assassins stand in relation to each other, which is side by side.
Shall we kill Howard Beale or not?
Frank Hackett, putting the item to the room
Quick answers
Network Ending FAQ
Who and why
Who kills Howard Beale in Network?
Members of the Ecumenical Liberation Army, the terrorist group whose footage the network has turned into a series. The executives arrange it in a meeting after Jensen refuses to let them fire Howard. The closing bulletin says two of the gunmen were apprehended and the group’s leader, the Great Ahmed Khan, escaped.
Why did the network want Howard Beale dead?
Because his ratings collapsed after he started preaching Arthur Jensen’s corporate worldview, and Jensen would not allow him to be taken off the air. With firing off the table, the only way to replace the show was to end it. The film’s last line states the reason without irony: he was killed because he had lousy ratings.
The meaning and the script
What does the ending of Network mean?
That the system Jensen described in the boardroom works exactly as described. Howard’s death is not a tragedy to the people who order it, or to the medium that reports it; it is a scheduling problem solved. The four monitors at the end, cutting between the bulletin and the commercials, are the point: television absorbs the murder as content and keeps going.
Does the ending differ from the screenplay?
In one place. Chayefsky’s last page dates the final monitors to July 9, 1975 and puts the real network anchors of that year on three of the screens. The film removes the date and the real anchors and runs commercials between the UBS bulletins instead. The narrator’s closing line and the meeting that decides Howard’s fate are the same on the page and on screen.
Go deeper
More on Network (1976)
The hub
Network (1976): The Deep SHT Screenplay Analysis
The whole film, act by act, through Chayefsky’s drafts and Lumet’s commentary.
The speech
The “Mad as Hell” Speech in Network (1976): Draft to Screen
Four passes from a pencil note to Peter Finch, and the ratings line that changed speakers.
The boardroom
The Arthur Jensen Speech in Network (1976): Selling Howard Beale the World
A sales pitch staged as a revelation, and what the film cut from it.
And for where all of it came from: Is Network (1976) Based on a True Story?
