▶︎ "Mank" was released on Netflix on December 4, 2020
The second most famous thing Hermann Mankiewicz wrote was not a script. This is a 1925 telegram to the writer Ben Hecht, who quoted this phrase in his autobiography, Children of the Century, and has since been quoted by countless Hollywood historians:
"Are you willing to accept a weekly pay of $300 to work for Paramount Pictures, all at an all-inclusive cost?" The $300 is a piece of cake. There are millions of people who want the job, and your only competitor is an idiot. Don't let it get out. ”
In David Finch's Mank, the telegram is given a different destination, to his younger brother Joseph, who is 11 years younger and destined for a brighter Hollywood future." Joe"Mankiewicz. In this story about Herman Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman), his work in Citizen Kane, and the studio era, the telegram still appears intact.
Shot in black and white, Mank's widescreen look is more like Finch than RKO, often with a smoky silhouette aesthetic, like the newsroom scene in Kane. But the goal was clearly not to make a movie that looked exactly like 1940, or 1930 or 1934, because a lot of the action took place in lengthy flashbacks. Instead, the film sets its sights on a past as weary as Mankiewicz himself, breaking down a person's story into overlapping pieces, like Mankiewicz's greatest work.
There is a saying (often thought to have come from Honoré de Balzac, although he did not put it so bluntly): "Behind every great fortune, there is a criminal act." The studio-era version of Mank might be: "Behind every great movie, there's a betrayal." "And Citizen Kane, the greatest of all the films, also has a lot of betrayals.
In the film, newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hirst describes Hearst as a desert of justice in Citizen Kane, while Hearst (Charles Dans) can say that he was betrayed by a writer who was a regular visitor to his palatial home in Saint-Simeon.
Marion Davis's reputation is badly damaged by the perception that Susan Alexander, the second-in-command drunk in Citizen Kane, is based on her, with Amanda Seyfried playing her in a more like Jane Harlow's Cabaret character than the real Davis, who has a muffled voice and a famous off-screen stutter. But Seyfried makes Davis as cute as her contemporaries claim, and Mank shows her being sacrificed by Herman Mankiewicz's unusually naïve assumption that people would realize the difference between the talented Marion and Charles Foster Kane's talentless lover Susan.
Manke believes that there are more betrayals behind Hollywood's golden age. Finch's films argue that this was actually a gilded age in which studio chaebols were so happy to squeeze the credit and salaries of their employees that you never knew which colleague might be helping them do.
Herman Mankiewicz
Only a brief mention is made of the childhood that shaped Herman, especially the brothers' fussy, demanding father. His father immigrated to the United States from Germany and was admitted to Columbia University in his 40s, eventually becoming a respected professor.
Herman was a child prodigy from every angle, passing Columbia's entrance exams at the age of 13. This is true of any standard, except for the standard of "Daddy" Mankiewicz. "Such a father," Herman said years later, "can make you either ambitious or desperate." Dad seemed to let Herman have both. As an adult, Herman measured himself by what he considered "real" literature, repeatedly trying to write a successful Broadway play until the satirical failure of "Meal Ticket" in 1937 made him concede defeat.
He began working as a journalist in the early 1920s, and his wits made him one of the youngest regulars at the Algonquin Roundtable. It was an informal luncheon gathering by writers, critics and actors at the Algonquin Hotel, sometimes including Tallurach Bankshead, Dorothy Parker and Hubble Marx. Mankiewicz worked as a theater critic for The New York Times and The New Yorker.
But even then, he earned a reputation for being unreliable. In 1926, Herman spent his first trip in California, and Harold Rosen of The New Yorker predicted in a letter to dismiss him: "Your personality prevents you from being integrated into an organization." ”
Drink alcohol, eclectic
All of Mankiewicz's demons were made into the film, and the number was quite large. The most important thing is his alcoholism, Sidney Ladenson Stern's book The Mankiewicz Brothers, which traces it back to a summer beer herrman drank during his work, when he was too young to work at Columbia.
Mank shows how alcohol dominated Herman's adult life, wandering around parties, production offices, and several writers' office buildings, and writing much of the first draft of Citizen Kane on a farm in Victorville, California, despite his attempts to control his consumption.
In the film, Orson Wells (Tom Burke) delivers a liquor cabinet filled with bottles filled with the sedative Second to ensure that Mankiewicz, who was bedridden in a full-legged plaster cast due to a car accident, could not drink until the end of the day. It seems like a fantasy that, in real life, Mankiewicz is hampered by the rancher's prohibition policy and the fact that his Scotch whisky is hidden by secretary Rita Alexander (Lily Koslin). He got into the habit of driving into town around 6 p.m. every day and having a drink with the editor and de facto nanny John Hausman (Sam Trauton).
Aside from the fact that in the late 1930s, Herman Mankiewicz tried to quit his addiction through psychoanalysis, but ultimately failed, this was his most restrained behavior to date. Even so, alcohol competed in terms of his vices. Pulsating gambling has been an underrated means of Hollywood's self-destruction, with millicie Rooney, Chico Marx, Paramount CEO Schulberg and former Paramount executive David Schulberg. Characters such as O. Selznick (Toby Leonard Moore) play an important role in the final act.
Herman almost failed to get into Hollywood at the beginning because he lost a $2 prize while playing poker in Chicago. In order to earn back the money, he fell further into trouble and had to borrow money to complete the journey. For a time, Mankiewicz became Paramount's highest-paid writer, not for his work, but because he persuaded the front desk to give him a $500 a weekly raise, which went directly to Ben Hector to pay Herman for his poker losses.
After settling down, Mankiewicz wrote or worked on a dizzying array of films, including Joseph von Sternberg's The Last Order (1928); Nancy Carroll starred in the delicious pre-canonical film Laughter (1930), one of Herman's many platonic crushes; and Million Legs (1932), an extremely interesting film by W.C Fields.
However, as the decade passed, Mankiewicz was also welcomed. His charm and potential kindness meant he was loved by many in the industry, but alcoholism became a growing burden. His witty remarks almost became an impulse, as he replied when asked about the day-to-day duties of MGM executive Benny Toy, who watched any north wind emerge from his office on the third floor.
Comments like this are everywhere. Sometimes, Mankiewicz himself is the reason they do this, as Finch's film accurately shows, Manke made the near-suicidal decision to show the draft of Citizen Kane to his friend Charles Leder, who was also Marion Davis's nephew.
In 1939, Louis B. Meier agreed to reuse Herman at MGM, some say, in part out of sympathy for Herman's wife Sarah (Tapence Middleton in Mank), a good woman known for her loyalty to her intractable husband. A few days later, the work was over, and herman was playing poker in the studio office, looking up and catching L.B's eyes.
None of this appears in the new film; their last encounter at Saint-Simon takes place in the early 2000s, when Mel (Aris Howard) tells Herman that he hired him to do Hearst a favor. But in the film, Mankiewicz gambles in the screenwriting room, praising Herman's infamous bad luck; he is called to meet him by his boss the first time he plays cards.
Manke's association with Politics of Herman's particular antipathy towards Meyer (and Owen Salberg, Ferdinand Kingsley's handsome little brother who plays Meyer) may be somewhat exaggerated. Among other behind-the-scenes deals, there is another minor plot involving Upton Sinclair's 1934 campaign for governor of California.
"Mank" shows Meyer and Salberg deploying anti-Sinclair's "fake news," the Great Depression: an alarmist newsreel, written, cast, and filmed by studios. It did happen, but Herman's relationship with a studio photographer appears to be fictitious because of his decision to direct the newsreel. There is little evidence that Mankiewicz despises his bosses for the same reasons as everyone else: they are greedy, they call a lack of culture, they are tyrannical and arbitrary.
Herman's political positions in real life have always been inconsistent. He was so prescient and so hot that in 1933, less than two months after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, he wrote an anti-Nazi film script, Mad Dogs of Europe. But the film was destined never to be made, and a few years later, Mankiewicz began to embrace Charles Lindbergh's isolationist stance, even as he privately acknowledged Lindbergh's anti-Semitism.
Herman wasn't a signer or a joiner, and that quality was that for him and his brother Joe — screenwriters for Comet Beauty (1950) and Cleopatra (1963) — saved a lot of trouble in the postwar era, and when your name appeared on the wrong petition it could end your career. Herman's side does appear in the film, and when Joe turns around to persuade him to join the nascent Screen Writers Guild, Herman responds with a famous comment that the Screenwriting Guild should know that they need a quote in their name.
In real life, it was Dorothy Parker who approached Herman to join. It's worth noting that the female screenwriters didn't appear in Manck, not even frances-marion, the co-writer of Herman's blockbuster Dinner at MGM Studios; the only woman in the screenwriting room was a secretary dressed in spike-shaped noodle costumes.
Garbage outbreak
When Mankiewicz received the telegram, his friend Ben Hecht was penniless, unable to find a job, and his rent was in arrears for two months, lying in bed reading Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It's an early sign of why Hecht became one of the writers who saw Hollywood's decline. Soon, Hecht found his place in Hollywood, making a lot of money alongside other Mankiewicz newcomers such as Bellman, Garrett, Jabs and Johnson.
The Hermann Mankiewicz New York Writers Fresh Air Fund is a nickname for the Mankiewicz recruitment campaign, which Waschkovich himself, at the expense of Paramount's B.P. Schultzberg. Stern observed that these New York journalists carried their sharp wit and cynicism with them, and as a result they became "one of Herman's more enduring contributions to the Golden Age of Hollywood cinema."
Another of their contributions is the contempt for the mediums they work on. Hector, the most talented of them, was the most snobbish. "The explosion of garbage," he called the films, "dulled Americans' minds and prevented Americans from becoming cultured people."
Hecht claimed that his screenplay "only takes a Pinocle game to complete," but there is no doubt that it has outspired his literary works. Even his play City of Crime (co-written with Charles MacArthur, briefly starring John Churchill in Mank) did not survive the Revival period, but rather survived Howard Hawke's gender-reversed film version of Girlfriend Friday.
Ben Hecht's attitude towards studio-era Hollywood, both Mankiewicz and Manke felt the same way. Screenwriters are tireless salaried, producers are greedy playboys, and when they don't undermine political reform, most actors appear as over-dressed mutes. It's a frustrating thing for those who can easily name almost every real-life character in a few good, even great, films made in Mank (including Marion Davis, of course).
Admittedly, the uncertainty of the studio era about which work came from which workers increased the dissatisfaction of writers; playwrights and even theater critics controlled their output. For example, Herman's name doesn't appear in The Wizard of Oz, and Mank is reminiscent of a work of clouds. However, it's almost certain that he came up with the idea of contrasting the gray, dark brown State of Kansas with the OZ State, and if anything, it was a genius move.
One of the few honors he received after Citizen Kane was the beloved 1942 baseball drama About Lou Gehrig, The Pride of the Yankees; but a few years later, the discredited co-author Richard McBaum claimed that Mankiewicz drank too much to contribute more, which sounded sad.
Mankiewicz is known in the industry for his "enhanced" dialogue wizards. But whether or not he deserves credit for it, how do you point out years later that he had a specific impact on the film, even if it saved an entire scene or sequence? Does his screenwriting credit indicate more or less commitment than he did as producer of marx's immortal Pranks (1932) and On His Toes (1931)?
Of course, Citizen Kane is different. Mankiewicz spent years attending Dinners and weekends in Saint-Simon, having plenty of opportunities to study its fickle master. Like everyone else, he liked the unsnobbish Marion Davis, and the two shared experiences of alcoholism forged a connection as they struggled to hide their collections to avoid opposition from Hearst.
Herman had a lot of repressive thoughts—about a lonely childhood, about journalists, about loyalty and arrogance. During his stay in Victorville, Mankiewicz poured all his thoughts into a 325-page script titled "The American," a lavish title that seemed to confirm that a film had too much material to accommodate. In Mank, his brother Joe tells him. "It's the best thing you've ever done." For Herman, this confirmation is already superfluous.
"Mank" shows that Herman signed the contract and accepted the bonus, on the condition that Wells was credited exclusively, but once the work was completed, Herman reneged on his word. The film suggests that in this case, it was Wells who pushed forward the script, "I'll just type it with my typewriter," he told Herman.
People who admire Citizen Kane can choose whether or not to accept the scene. Those who have read the surviving manuscripts and records of RKO excavated by scholars such as Robert Callinger and Harlan Loeb, or the papers of Joseph McBride or Jonathan Rosenbaum on the subject, will almost certainly not do so.
Richard Merriman estimated in his 1978 biography, Manke, that Herman's contribution to the final screenplay of Citizen Kane was 60 percent, plus his later revisions to the script. Critic Pauline Kyle, in her article Raising Kane, described it as almost 100%, which even John Hausman thought was too much. More importantly, Haussmann adds, "Citizen Kane is Orson's work, just as "Off the Mountain" is the work of John Ford, albeit written by Dudley Nichols."
Let's go back and look at the telegram, and we see that Manke is preaching the myth of a small town full of idiots, but myth is myth. First, Herman's main rival in history is still Orson Wells, who is the least fool-like person.
In a 1978 interview, Merriman said of Herman: "I wonder how he reversed his career as a writer towards the end of his career as a writer. Manke's answer was that, like Dorothy returning from OZ, Herman Mankiewicz was always capable of writing such good things; it was Hollywood that dragged him down, perhaps, but it was Hollywood that gave him immortal status.
Translated from: Sight & Sound