Network/Trivia

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Beam Me Up, Scotty: The actual line from Howard Beale's rant is "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!" Often misquoted as "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not gonna take it anymore!" Also, Beale doesn't shout it out the window; only his viewers do, although their wording differs slightly... which makes this case of Beam Me Up, Scotty understandable.
  • Fake American: Australian Peter Finch as Howard Beale.
  • Hey, It's That Guy!: Alan Breck Stewart is Howard Beale.
  • Retroactive Recognition: Amusingly, You can spot a young Perry White among UBS's news staff.
  • Unintentional Period Piece: Although it could just as easily apply to the present day. Many of the changes to the station in general and the news in particular were meant to be overblown exaggerations of then-current trends, now they're things that happened thirty years ago and standard industry practices (other than the open terrorist connections and assassination).
    • The movie's whole message of television and corporations as these amoral, unstoppable and dehumanizing things is kind of a 1970s thing. To be sure, private media conglomerates and ratings chasing are still things, but nowadays its more straightforward profiteering and yellow journalism. In other word's, Diane ruined media because she's a soulless automaton, Rupert Murdoch does it because he likes money.