Faye Dunaway wears a Rolex Lady-Datejust

Diana Christensen runs entertainment programming at the UBS network, and when the anchor Howard Beale melts down on live television and threatens to kill himself on air, she sees not a crisis but a format. She pitches her executives a nightly show built around Beale's breakdown, run out of the entertainment division rather than the news. On her wrist through Network is a two-tone Rolex Lady-Datejust: fluted bezel, two-tone Jubilee bracelet, the classic steel-and-gold Rolex of the 1970s.

Faye Dunaway won the Best Actress Oscar for Diana, one of four Academy Awards the film took. Paddy Chayefsky's 1976 script imagined a television business willing to monetize a man's collapse for ratings, and Sidney Lumet shot the satire straight. It stays on her wrist in nearly every scene, catching the light as she gestures from behind her office desk and again in her scenes with William Holden's Max Schumacher.

The Lady-Datejust does not turn up in films often. Rolex introduced the model in 1957, and it has been a common watch on women's wrists, including in the corporate world, ever since.