Reel Beach: Faye Dunaway’s Oscar win immortalized by photographer Terry O’Neill

By BERNIE FLETCHER

The Academy Awards will be Golden on March 15. It looks to be a heated rivalry for Best Picture Oscar as Sinners faces off with One Battle after Another, the story of an ex-radical played by Leonardo DiCaprio. The film includes the scene of a revolutionary group robbing a bank with echoes of the kidnapped heiress Patty Hearst from 1974.

The holdup is reminiscent of a similar event in the dark satire Network which finished filming in Scarborough 50 years ago in early February of 1976. The heiress is played by Kathy Cronkite, the daughter of news anchor Walter Cronkite.

Network would go on to win four Academy Awards, including Oscars for Peter Finch, Faye Dunaway and Beatrice Straight. The American networks wanted nothing to do with the film so the production shifted north of the border to the CFTO Studios in Agincourt.

The famous “I’m as mad as hell” speech was delivered by news anchor Howard Beale (Finch) in January 1976 in the Scarborough station’s news studio.

The script actually read “I’m mad as hell”. After two long takes the actor was too exhausted to redo the explosive outrage.

Finch died two months before the Academy Awards ceremony and was given the Oscar posthumously.

An iconic photograph (at right) captured Faye Dunaway lounging at the pool of the Beverly Hills Hotel early the next morning after her Oscar win. Renowned photographer Terry O’Neill would marry Dunaway in 1982, but divorce in 1987.

Faye Dunaway later said, “In Terry’s picture, success is a solitary place to be”.

O’Neill felt that the image depicted Dunaway in a “really reflective mood”.

“It’s all about moments. Or making them happen.”
— Terry O’Neill

Fast forward to 2013 and I am in the small town of Avebury, England with my brother. We visit the ancient stone circle and go to lunch at a nice pub.

A kindly, older gentleman asks if we would like to join him for lunch. His name is Terry and we share small talk about travels.

As we are about to leave, Terry notices my camera and mentions he could give us some tips: get outside, fill the frame with up close and personal, candid images. He takes amazing photos.

A year later I am in a Yorkville art gallery looking at a wonderful exhibit of celebrity photographs by The Man Who Shot the Sixties, Terry O’Neill. I am stunned.

The modest man in the pub had photographed the famous people of the 20th century from the Queen to Nelson Mandela, Winston Churchill, Ali, Elvis, Elizabeth Taylor, Paul Newman, Brigitte Bardot, Audrey Hepburn and Frank Sinatra.

“I’ve always gotten close to people. They take me into their hearts.”
— Terry O”Neill

O’Neill changed how photos were taken, no more stiff, stuffy portraits, moving the Beatles outside at Abbey Road. In 1964 he even photographed the Rolling Stones at the very same Avebury Stones.

Terry O’Neill passed away in 2019 at age 81. I wish I could have asked him about Faye Dunaway, the mercurial actor who won that Oscar for her blistering role in Network some 50 years ago.

In 1995 Dunaway was back in a Scarborough studio to play a countess in Road to Avonlea. You can catch the documentary Faye (2024) on Crave/HBO.

It’s been said that “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes”.

In the mid-1970s Americans were still reeling from the Watergate scandal, political corruption, the war in Vietnam and protests in the streets. Network foresaw reality television and tabloid news.

The mad prophet of the airwaves, Howard Beale, declared, “I don’t have to tell you things are bad”.

This winter has felt like “one battle after another” but it’s been much too cold for us to open up our windows and yell “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!”

That quote is one of the most memorable in movie history, and it was delivered right here in Toronto.