The internet is filled with facts, both true and otherwise. In Film Trivia Fact Check, we’ll browse the depths of the web’s most user-generated trivia boards and wikis and put them under the microscope. How true are the IMDb Trivia pages? You want the truth? Can you handle the truth? We’re about to find out.
Claim: On March 19, 2026, film critic Oscar Goff posted the following on Bluesky, “Ever think about how these two movie characters are based on the same person?” Underneath the text was a picture of Ralphie (Peter Billingsley) from A Christmas Story and Howard Beale (Peter Finch) from Network, implying they were both based on Jean Shepherd.
Rating: Mostly true.
Context: Let’s get the easy one out of the way. A Christmas Story is a composite work based on Jean Shepherd’s 1966 short story collection, In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash, particularly the essays “”Duel In The Snow,” “The Counterfeit Secret Circle Member Gets The Message,” “My Old Man And The Lascivious Special Award That Heralded The Birth Of Pop Art,” and “Grover Dill And The Tasmanian Devil,” tales Shepherd had spun over the years as a radio broadcaster. He was a credited screenwriter on the film, directed by Bob Clark, and served as its narrator. While the misconception that A Christmas Story was a memoir always irked Shepherd, who insisted that the film was fiction, Ralphie is Jean’s alter ego, and the Parker family was based on his Midwestern upbringing.
Network‘s Howard Beale, on the other hand, is a thornier story. In an interview with the Television Academy in 1999, director Sidney Lumet said, quite confidently, that Beale was not based on a particular person but rather a “composite of people [screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky] knew.” The film was “pure reportage” to Lumet and Chayefsky—though Max Schumacher (William Holden), Lumet explained, was based on NBC News anchor John Chancellor, who, like Shepherd, was friends with Chayefsky.
Based on how long Network was gestating inside the screenwriter, a “composite” is probably the best explanation. In his 2016 book, Mad As Hell: The Making Of Network, author Dave Itzkoff charts Beale’s creation, beginning with Chayefsky’s first attempts at Beale’s “mad as hell” monologue in 1958. So began the 20-year process of writing the screenplay. Beale would first take the form of Eddie Grisham, a struggling newsman in the 1968 spec script called The Impostors, which would try to “use the mechanisms of television to criticize television itself.” When Chayefsky finished the script, he and Howard Gottfried, one of the writer’s key collaborators, his regular producer, and from whom Howard Beale got his given name, met with the head of CBS. “We’re sitting there, and he looks us in the eye and he starts laughing,” Gottfried said. “And he says, ‘You don’t really think I’m going to do this, do you?'”
Beale acquired various influences over the years. Chayefsky even considered naming the character Kronkhite or Kronkeit, based on the face of television news broadcasting: Walter Cronkite. Another real-life analogue was Christine Chubbuck, the anchor who became the first person to die by suicide on live television. Months after her on-air suicide, Chayefsky wrote a line for Beale in which he vows to “blow my brains out right on the air, right in the middle of the seven o’clock news, like that girl in Florida.”
Still, there is clearly some Jean Shepherd in the final version of Howard Beale. Goff tells The A.V. Club that he recognized the connection after hearing one of Shepherd’s monologues on Ken Freedman’s WFMU show, which he said reminded him of Beale’s “mad as hell” speech. It’s a position that Shepherd biographer and “night person” Eugene B. Bergmann has been arguing for years (in a very Shepherdian move, Bergmann rebutted Itzkoff’s book in an Amazon review). In Bergmann’s book on Shepherd’s life and art, Excelsior, You Fathead!, he reports that Chayefsky asked Shepherd “permission to use a variation on his ‘hurling invectives'” for Network, and those invectives really make the clearest case for Beale as Shepherd.
In addition to being an influential and inventive broadcaster, Shepherd was a prankster who would call upon his audiences to “put your radio on your windowsill” as he would shout pre-written abusive and violent scenarios into society. “Put your radio on your windowsill now!” a conspiratorial Shepherd ordered. “Do it now! Now! The loudspeaker pointed out—toward the neighborhood.” After telling the listener to turn out the lights or pretend to be watching TV, Shepherd would hurl the invective. “This is the third time you’ve come home drunk again! What about the kids? I ask ya, how long is this going to go on?” Shepherd would yell, before saying “Okay, now get that radio back inside,” changing tone, and pretending to be a “make-believe poolroom” show.
Now, the only real connection between Shepherd’s “hurling invectives” and Howard Beale’s “mad as hell” speech are the commands to scream out the window. But Beale’s Network speech does sound like one of Shepherd’s calls to action: “I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it, and stick your head out and yell, ‘I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore.'” Sure, it isn’t a perfect one-to-one. Beale’s version is an attempt at harnessing the rage at modernity that his audience follows through on and raises the anchor up as a messiah. Shepherd created small-scale controlled comedic chaos, a chance to break up the noise while connecting to his “night people.” He certainly seems to have been one of the inspirations for Howard Beale, but let’s get those radios back inside before anyone notices.
Do you have film trivia that you’d like fact checked? Email us at [email protected].
Keep scrolling for more great stories.