Years active: 1966 - 1974 (started around 21 years old; 8 years in the business)
About Christine Chubbuck
Christine Chubbuck was an American television news reporter who worked for stations WTOG and WXLT-TV in Sarasota, Florida. She is the first person to die by suicide on a live television broadcast.
An urban legend states that Chubbuck's suicide inspired Paddy Chayefsky's script for the 1976 film Network. In Network, news anchor Howard Beale (Peter Finch) claims he will kill himself live on-air. Dave Itzkoff, author of Mad as Hell: The Making of Network and the Fateful Vision of the Angriest Man in Movies, claims this is false, as there was no mention of Chubbuck in any of Chayefsky's papers. However, a later draft of the screenplay includes Beale saying he will commit suicide “right on the air ... like that girl in Florida,” but the line was later removed. When shooting Kate Plays Christine, director Robert Greene stated that everyone he met in Sarasota believed that there was a connection between Chubbuck and Network. Greene stated “But I don’t mind that it’s wrong ... It’s about how her story reverberates in all these other ways. That being not quite true seems completely appropriate.” Nonetheless, the claim that she influenced the film Network is often passed off as true.
In 2003, Christopher Sorrentino published "Condition", a short story based on Chubbuck's suicide, in the literary magazine Conjunctions.
In 2016, two films about Chubbuck played at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival. The first, Christine, was directed by Antonio Campos, and starred Rebecca Hall as Christine Chubbuck and Michael C. Hall as George Peter Ryan. The second was the documentary Kate Plays Christine, which depicts actress Kate Lyn Sheil's preparation for the role of Chubbuck in a hypothetical film.
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