NETWORK. 1976. DIRECTED BY SIDNEY LUMET.

NETWORK. 1976. DIRECTED BY SIDNEY LUMET.

151. INT. ARTHUR JENSEN'S OFFICE An enormous office with two walls of windows towering over the Manhattan landscape and through which SUNLIGHT streams in. ARTHUR JENSEN is rising from behind his massive desk --

JENSEN Good afternoon, Mr. Beale. They tell me you're a madman. CAMERA DOLLIES to include HOWARD just coming into the room. HOWARD (closing the door behind himself) Only desultorily.

JENSEN How are you now?

HOWARD (as mad as a hatter) I'm as mad as a hatter.

JENSEN Who isn't? Don't sit down. I'm taking you to our conference room which seems more seemly a setting for what I have to say to you.

He takes HOWARD'S arm and moves him to a large oaken door leading out of JENSEN'S office --

JENSEN I started as a salesman, Mr. Beale. I sold sewing machines and automobile parts, hair brushes and electronic equipment. They say I can sell anything. I'd like to try and sell something to you -- They pass into --

152. INT. THE CONFERENCE ROOM - C.C. AND A. BUILDING The overwhelming cathedral of a conference room remembered perhaps from an earlier scene where Frank Hackett gave his annual report. When last seen, it was in pitch darkness, but now the enormous curtains are up, and an almost celestial light pours in through the huge windows. Being on the 43rd and 44th floors, the sky outside is only sporadically interrupted by the towers of other skyscrapers. The double semi- circular bank of seats are all empty, and the general effect is one of hushed vastness --

JENSEN Valhalla, Mr. Beale, please sit down --

He leads HOWARD down the steps to the floor level, himself ascends again to the small stage and the podium. HOWARD sits in one of the 200 odd seats. JENSEN pushes a button, and the enormous drapes slowly fall, slicing away layers of light until the vast room is utterly dark. Then, the little pinspots at each of the desks, including the one behind which HOWARD is seated, pop on, creating a miniature Milky Way effect. A shaft of white LIGHT shoots out from the rear of the room, spotting JENSEN on the podium, a sun of its own little galaxy. Behind him, the shadowed white of the lecture screen. JENSEN suddenly wheels to his audience of one and roars out:

JENSEN You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won't have it, is that clear?! You think you have merely stopped a business deal -- that is not the case! The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back. It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity, it is ecological balance! You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations! There are no peoples! There are no Russians. There are no Arabs! There are no third worlds! There is no West! There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multi-variate, multi-national dominion of dollars! petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars!, Reichmarks, rubles, rin, pounds and shekels! It is the international system of currency that determines the totality of life on this planet! That is the natural order of things today! That is the atomic, subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And you have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and you will atone! Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale? (pause) You get up on your little twenty- one inch screen, and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and A T and T and Dupont, Dow, Union Carbide and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state -- Karl Marx? They pull out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories and minimax solutions and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments just like we do. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably deter- mined by the immutable by-laws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale! It has been since man crawled out of the slime, and our children, Mr. Beale, will live to see that perfect world in which there is no war and famine, oppression and brutality -- one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused. And I have chosen you to preach this evangel, Mr. Beale.

HOWARD (humble whisper) Why me?

JENSEN Because you're on television, dummy. Sixty million people watch you every night of the week, Monday through Friday.

HOWARD slowly rises from the blackness of his seat so that he is lit only by the ethereal diffusion of light shooting out from the rear of the room. He stares at JENSEN spotted on the podium, transfixed.

HOWARD I have seen the face of God! In b.g., up on the podium, JENSEN considers this curious statement for a moment.

JENSEN You just might be right, Mr. Beale. NARRATOR That evening, Howard Beale went on the air to preach the corporate cosmology of Arthur Jensen.

I found the script on the Internet

In 1972 Ned Beatty played a different role in the classic Deliverance. Directed by John Boorman.