Paddy Chayefsky: Collector of Words brings thought-provoking insights into the life and work of the great screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky. Chayefsky is the only person to win three solo Oscars for Best Original Screenplay, for Marty, The Hospital and Network.
Those three films, along with the grievously overlooked The Americanization of Emily, the biting satire Wall Street (“Greed is good“) and the very trippy Altered States make up an essential body of work.
It’s hard to think of a film with more aching humanity than Marty. The titular character in Marty is a guy who no one notices, but Chayefsky shows us his yearnings, disappointments and inner pain in a searing and heartbreaking portrait. To bring that empathy to Marty and to spotlight the human foibles satirized in The Americanization of Emily, The Hospital, Network and Wall Street, Chayefsky had to be an uncommonly penetrating observer of human behavior. In Paddy Chayefsky: Collector of Words, one of Chayefsky’s colleagues says that he was “X-raying us all the time.”
Most folks see Network as Chayefsky’s masterpiece. Paddy Chayefsky: Collector of Words reminds that, as well as poking at the greed and cowardice of TV networks and the slide of television journalism into infotainment, Network probed the midlife crisis rocking the character played by William Holden and the impact on his wife, played by the Oscar-winning Beatrice Straight.
And, most of all, Paddy Chayefsky: Collector of Words shows us Network as a work of prophecy. The cynical executive played by Faye Dunaway directs her team to chase demographic research thusly:
Well, in a nutshell, it said: “The American people are turning sullen. They’ve been clobbered on all sides by Vietnam, Watergate, the inflation, the depression; they’ve turned off, shot up, and they’ve fucked themselves limp, and nothing helps.” So, this concept analysis report concludes, “The American people want somebody to articulate their rage for them.” I’ve been telling you people since I took this job six months ago that I want angry shows.
Guess who comes to mind? And when the exec makes a pitch to the network CEO (Robert Duvall), he responds with:
For God’s sake Diana, we’re talking about putting a manifest irresponsible man on national television.
Paddy Chayefsky: Collector of Words also brings us some nuggets: how the son of Russian Jews got and adopted the nickname Paddy, about his longstanding lunches with Bob Fosse at the Carnegie Deli, and about a mistaken line reading of one of the most iconic lines of dialogue in cinema history,
The director of Paddy Chayefsky: Collector of Words is Michael Miele, who also directed this year’s Bob Mackie: Naked Illusion. Miele lets us know in the opening titles that he agreed not to include discussion of Chayefsky’s family and personal life. No matter – it what Chayefsky put on the screen that counts.
Paddy Chayefsky: Collector of Words is streaming on HBO Max and on the HBO Max YouTube channel.