Filmmaker Sidney Lumet (born 1924) has made some of America's most memorable movies, including Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, and Network. His films have received more than 50 Academy Award nominations. Often called "an actor's director," Lumet is known for...

The black comedy film Network (1977) explored a brief period of populist indignation presided by President Jimmy Carter during which distrust of big government and multinational corporations pervaded America's post-Watergate consciousness. A...

Network is a 1976 satirical New Hollywood film about a fictional television network, Union Broadcasting System (UBS), and its struggle with poor ratings. It was written by Paddy Chayefsky and directed by Sidney Lumet, and stars Faye Dunaway, William...

Channel to dedicate nearly $3 million each year Independent Film Channel has formed two new companies that will co-produce and provide funding for up to seven independent films a year. IFC Productions, which will be based in New York, will provide...

TOKYO When it comes to movie production in Japan, the major studios are minor players and the rulers of the small screen are among the princes of the box office. Japanese commercial networks typically make more films a year than the three...

All of the current cable news channels are rife with so much fluff that it's often difficult to discern what the real news is. I would like to see a new kind of cable news channel that only carries serious news. They could give it...

Local TV stations broadcast shows from three different categories: local origination, syndication, and network affiliate content. Most people recognize the local origination stuff when they see it. It consists mainly local news, weather, and sports, along local talk shows and the occasional community-oriented special program.However,...

Network is a furious and infuriating tangle. Is it a brilliant shocking corrosive satire on America's dwelling in screened imitations of reality, or is it a snake devouring its own tail? Is the satire cleansing or only huckster raillery, responsible anger turned into self-contempt or the cynicism that ravishes every ideal? It is a reckless but literate film, incoherent and pretentious, piercing yet evasive. It is itself very like TV, the monster it mocks…. Network is thunderously written and a...

[After] zealously attacking the labyrinthine bureaucracy of metropolitan hospitals in Hospital, Paddy Chayefsky has now turned his fervor toward the inner workings of a large television network [in Network]. Chayefsky has dubbed his fictional network the United Broadcasting System, a self-enclosed world of corporate clashes and power struggles which heartlessly creates and destroys its own lifeblood. Television as a scapegoat for contemporary dehumanization and dying democratic values is an unwieldy metapho...