Clooney Breaks His Own Big Story, A Live 'Network'

Clooney told the AP that when he screened the film for a group of "young people," none of them recognized that it was a dark satire:

"I couldn't understand it, [then] I realized that everything Chayefsky wrote about happened. . . . And so, suddenly, the idea that the anchor is more important than the news story, and that you'd be doing sort of reality-based shows, all happened," Clooney said in the interview.

"And when you have that great speech with Ned Beatty," as the chairman of a corporation trying to take over the network, "sitting there going, 'There is no U.S.A. and Soviet Union, there is only Xerox and IBM,' you realize all of those things were true, or came true."

Early in the film, when Beale is told he skews too old, he and news division head Max Schumacher (played by William Holden) get fractured at a bar, and Beale jokes he'll kill himself on the news the next night:

Schumacher: You'd get a hell of a rating, I'll guarantee you that. A 50 share easy. . . . We could make a series out of it. Suicide of the Week. Oh hell, why limit ourselves? Execution of the Week.

Beale: Terrorist of the Week.

Schumacher: I love it! Suicides, assassinations, mad bombers, Mafia hitmen, automobile smash-ups. The Death Hour! A great Sunday night show for the whole family. We'll wipe [expletive] Disney right off the air.

* * *

Which brings us nicely around to the news we got yesterday from someone at your-tax-dollars-at-work PBS network, that the late-night interview show "Charlie Rose," syndicated to more than 200 PBS affiliated stations nationwide, will be hosted Friday by the newly ex-CEO of Walt Disney Co., Michael Eisner.

He's going to interview John Travolta.

* * *

UPN announced yesterday it will give a full-season order to its new sitcom "Everybody Hates Chris," narrated and executive-produced by Chris Rock, whose life "inspired" the series about a teenager growing up as the eldest of three children in Brooklyn during the early 1980s.

So you're reading about it today because in one of those incredible coincidences that make you think there really is a Cosmic Grand Master Plan, this is the exact day the show is airing again!

When it premiered, the ballyhooed "Chris" snagged nearly 8 million viewers -- UPN's biggest audience ever for a comedy broadcast. And it beat the season debut of NBC's "Friends" spinoff, "Joey," in the same half-hour.

In its second broadcast, the show's audience shrank to about 6 million, which still is a really good comedy number for UPN, and let's not forget "Joey" snagged only 7.5 million that night.