Network begins on a real day, in a real city, with real network newscasters sharing real news.

We’re told it’s the story of Howard Beale, the anchor of the (fictional) United Broadcasting System. UBS would be the fourth network in a system of three — CBS, NBC and ABC.

Clips of the evening telecasts show us news of Patty Hearst having a court hearing, an energy proposal from President Ford and a broken truce in Beirut. But the lead story, from Howard Beale, is that shots were fired at President Ford in San Francisco.

This actually happened on that day. Sarah Jane Moore, a woman who the Secret Service had evaluated and released in early 1975 and who was arrested the day before on an illegal weapons charge, fired one shot at President Ford before being wrestled to the ground by a bystander named Oliver Sipple.

Howard Beale’s report underscores the chaos and confusion that often surrounds breaking news events:

Police arrested a man with a six-shot revolver in his possession, although there is some confusion about this. Our last reports indicate the attempted assassination may have been made by a woman. In any event, this is the second attempt on the President’s life in eighteen days, and we will have a comment to make about that later on in the program.

While we’re seeing Howard Beale talk about this matter of grave national importance, the voice over is more interested in Howard Beale’s personal life and ratings. This will be a constant theme throughout the film, that the trivia of the TV industry and personal lives is constantly overshadowing the massive social changes underway — as if we need the business data and soap opera to distract us from the horrors of the world.

For a film about television news, the characters in “Network” spend very little time talking or caring about it. Sure, there will be rants and opinions about the troubled times they live in, but it’s a movie nearly empty of political content. Presidents, terrorists, heiresses, they are all the same in the broadcasts that make up the film. When a populist political message takes hold at one point, the real powers that be immediately step in to deflate it — and get back to the real business of television, business.

The news for Howard Beale on this day is not that someone took a shot at the President, it’s that he was about to be fired. The news division lead Max Schumacher informed him of his two weeks notice while taking him out for drinks.

They are two old friends and they stay out late. Max shared a story and joke about the George Washington Bridge that he tells again later in the film — and I’m guessing Beale had heard it more than once before this night as well. The punchline of the joke concerns a cabbie who misinterprets a reporter’s request to be dropped off on the bridge as news that he might attempt to die by suicide.

Beale breaks the laughter by announcing that he is going to die by suicide … on the air. Paddy Chayefsky did not invent this idea. On July 14, 1974, a Sarasota, FL news reporter named Christine Chubbuck shot herself on air seconds after saying:

In keeping with the WXLT practice of presenting the most immediate and complete reports of local blood-and-guts news, TV-40 presents what is believed to be a television first. In living color, an exclusive coverage of an attempted suicide.

The film does not cite Chubbuck’s sad case directly, but Schumacher responds to Beale’s gruesome suggestion by telling him that he’d get “a helluva rating” if he did it on air. This leads to an extrapolation of the incident to a new style of news program:

MAX

We could make a series out of it. Suicide of the Week. Hell, why limit ourselves? Execution of the Week-the Madame Defarge Show! Every Sunday night, bring your knitting and watch somebody get guillotined, hung, electrocuted, gassed. For a logo, we’ll have some brute with a black hood over his head. Think of the spin-offs. Rape of the Week….

HOWARD

(getting caught up) Terrorist of the Week?

MAX

I love it! Suicides, assassinations, mad bombers, Mafia hitmen, murder in the barbershop, human sacrifices in witches' covens, automobile smashups. The Death Hour!

The darkness of this passage has multiple layers. We know that “Network” takes place in the real world, so we know that they know about the Chubbuck suicide. They are making light of a real-life incident. Then they are actually describing what television news had become, just repackaged. But the third, ironic level is that the rest of the movie will basically be about enacting these ideas, making real the ideas these old newsmen are kicking around in jest.

And then the opening title for the film comes up: Network by Paddy Chayefsky.