Sometime during the rickety, rollicking production of Orson Welles’ The Other Side of the Wind in 1974, the 1942 Oscar statuette for Best Original Screenplay (which Welles had won for Citizen Kane) disappeared. Only three decades later did cinematographer Gary Graver reveal that he’d placed the Oscar, blasphemously used as a prop for The Other Side of the Wind, in his storage. “Here, keep this,” Welles had told him. And so he did. The filmmaker’s daughter, Beatrice Welles, then sued Graver, and sold the statue herself. Because her father had “loathed everything that [the Citizen Kane] Oscar represented,” she argued, “To sell the one thing that had no value to him, but was of great value to others, perhaps was not so bad after all.”
This award, however, held immense value for the other winner, the screenwriter and producer Herman J. Mankiewicz (nicknamed “Mank”), who threatened Orson Welles—with rumors and a later-withdrawn appeal to the Screen Writers Guild—for the screenwriting credit he’d already contractually waived at the start of their collaboration. The joint win for Citizen Kane temporarily rejuvenated Mankiewicz’s Hollywood career after an extended period of unemployment. (In 1939, he’d broken a promise to MGM co-founder Louis B. Mayer to “completely stop gambling,” and was subsequently fired.) That year, Welles did not attend the Academy Awards, where his name was booed at every mention. Instead, he joked about it in a telegram: ”Mank, you can kiss my half.” What David Fincher’s Mank (based on a screenplay by his father, Jack Fincher, with additional revisions by David Fincher and screenwriter Eric Roth, here credited as a producer) presents is the story of Mankiewicz’s haggled portion of the prize, preceded by years of mouthing off, scribbling in notebooks, and copious drinking.
The film’s opening explains that through his two-film contract with RKO Pictures in 1940, a twenty-four-year-old Orson Welles was “given absolute creative autonomy, would suffer no oversight, and could make any movie, about any subject, with any collaborator he wished." With total authorial freedom, he chooses Mank (played by Gary Oldman), an alcoholic gambler whose Hollywood notoriety we can glean by the apparent ubiquity of his nickname across Tinseltown. Mank arrives at the North Verde ranch in Victorville prepared for him by Welles (Tom Burke) and his associate John Houseman (Sam Troughton), where bottles of liquor have been replaced with Seconal. After sixty days of writing, he produces the rough draft of an acerbic screenplay titled American, a tenuously coded attack on newspaper tycoon and politician William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance), the model for Charles Foster Kane. The screenplay turns out to be the greatest thing Mank has ever written, and this inspires him to demand the “wunderkind” Welles—here caricatured as a haughty “showman,” complete with beard and cape, filmed from a low angle—for credit.
After discussing the idea of a multi-perspective approach to the life of one powerful man, the real Welles and Mank decided on Hearst as their template after scraping other possibilities like Howard Hughes and John Dillinger. (“We got pretty quickly to the press lords,” Welles recalls.) Mankiewicz’s interest in Hearst was at least partly personal: He and his wife Sara were once regular attendees of Hearst’s parties in San Simeon. There, Mankiewicz entertained both Hearst and his mistress, the actress Marion Davies, with whom he “bonded over their shared alcoholism.” But what Mankiewicz intended to write about Hearst was no simple screed. According to John Houseman’s biography Unfinished Business, Mank, “a former newspaper man and an avid reader of contemporary history”1:
“[...] had long been fascinated by the American phenomenon of William Randolph Hearst. Unlike his friends on the left, to whom Hearst was now an archenemy, fascist isolationist and a red baiter, Mankiewicz remembered the years when Hearst had been regarded as the working man’s friend and a political progressive.”
Historian Robert Carringer’s 1978 study of the “seven complete drafts of the Citizen Kane'' scripts (the definitive answer to the long-belabored debate of Kane’s authorship) states that the first draft of the screenplay by Mankiewicz and Houseman (which Mank depicts as the only draft, removing any mention of Welles’ concurrent revisions and regular visits to Victorville) drew upon stories about Hearst from both public knowledge and published biographies2. These external repositories of information are nowhere to be found in Mank. Advised by Houseman to “tell the story you know,” Mankiewicz looks inward, drawing from memory.
Flashbacks are labelled as such by typewritten scene headings (“EXT. PARAMOUNT STUDIOS - DAY - 1930 - FLASHBACK”) that jounce across the scene. Mank returns to the start of Mankiewicz’s introduction to Hearst and his circle, which includes Louis B. Mayer (Arliss Howard) and producer Irving Thalberg (Ferdinand Kingsley). His burgeoning friendship with Marion Davies (Amanda Seyfried) and his loose cannon of a mouth immediately make him a mainstay at Hearst Castle, even as his cracks teeter on the edge of insult. According to the film, Mankiewicz’s dissent and subsequent condemnation of Hearst has to do with the 1934 California gubernatorial election. Further left than his cohort but hardly a leftist, the ambivalent Mankiewicz makes it known that he sees little wrong with the End Poverty in California (EPIC) movement of socialist author Upton Sinclair (Bill Nye the Science Guy), who Mayer decries as a “lousy Bolshevik.” And although there’s very little evidence linking Mank to Sinclair, this slightest of sympathies causes some friction between Mank and his MGM compatriots, who’ve received money from Hearst to produce anti-Sinclair newsreels in support of Republican incumbent Frank Merriam.
Mank serves its election subplot with a pile of plain quips should anyone miss the film’s timeliness, including Mankiewicz’s declaration that the propaganda produced by MGM “isn’t news and it isn’t real” (quite literally, fake news). In the 2011 foreword to her book on Citizen Kane, Laura Mulvey writes that the film gained renewed topicality for its “rhyming” relationship to “the recent upsurge in conservative politics supported by Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News in the US”3. Mank, with its electoral politics spoiled by mogul money, and its focus on a man who endorses neither party and wishes only for the fairness of democracy, invoke the fatigue of the undecided who hold a broad stance against corruption instead of a pointed rage. And as much as it later becomes a source of some guilt that then impels him to put pen to paper, Mankiewicz wears his inactivity as a badge of individuality: he refuses to buy into MGM’s anti-Sinclair fund, but also turns away from Sinclair’s rallies.
Shot in black-and-white by cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt, Mank maintains its period accuracy with “scratches and digs and cigarette burns” and “clouds [drawn] into open skies” digitally added, one frame at a time. The film, as Fincher puts it, should “feel like it was found in the UCLA archives—or in Martin Scorsese’s basement on its way to restoration.” With the one exception of its anachronistic 2.39:1 aspect ratio (which, as critic Glenn Kenny points out, is “the wide-gauge celluloid format not introduced to audiences until 1953”), Mank’s gauzy glamour is sensibly arranged. Expectedly, Fincher carefully catches each beam of light as it spills in through the windows and lands correctly on a shirt or a sheet of paper. Messerschmidt tellsVariety that the film does pay homage to the work of Citizen Kane cinematographer Gregg Toland, especially his use of deep focus. That being said, although Mank does showcase very similar flourishes in its tale of Mankiewicz’s feuds with phonies and cronies, the film’s use of deep focus barely conceals its shallow perspective of the truth as a basic accumulation of facts.
Following the stock market crash in 1920, Charles Foster Kane hands over the New York Inquirer to his guardian, the banker Thatcher. As he steps away from his empire, a sullen stack of papers, Kane turns his back to us and walks towards the window. With each step, he shrinks beneath the towering skyline; once again, he’s become a small child. (As Welles remarks in 1941, “Casebooks of psychiatrists are full of these stories.”) In Mank, deep focus is not a vehicle for any compelling subtext about Mankiewicz as a flesh-and-blood being, but for more gravitas (faces at a party, cast and crew on a set) surrounding him as a historical figure who, in Fincher’s words, “never got his due.” This unimaginative assembly resembles Fincher’s last black-and-white film, his 2013 music video for Justin Timberlake and Jay-Z’s “Suit and Tie,” a glamorous work that does little else besides puff up the charm of Timberlake.
The clockwork of Fincher’s shot-counter-shot sequences irons out Mank’s screenplay—devoid of the unblinking cruelty that accelerated Fincher’s equally talkative films like The Social Network and Gone Girl—into a literal relay of events that emphasizes, repeatedly, the legitimacy of Mankiewicz as a participant in and spectator of the legend of Hollywood. In 1949, Mankiewicz recycled the flashback structure for A Woman’s Secret, RKO Pictures’ noir film by Nicholas Ray about a singer (Maureen O’Hara) accused of shooting her protege (Gloria Grahame). The once-clever device fails to vivify a contrived main storyline: Each flashback, told by the singers’ pianist (Melvyn Douglas), seeks to redundantly prove her innocence, and of its viewers, the film demands unquestioning indignance. Any new idea or sensation falls through the cracks.
The same point can be made about Mank, where any gap becomes stuffed with comments about Mank and not much else, rattled off like lines from a Wikipedia page. As foil to the unruly Mankiewicz, his wife Sara (Tuppence Middleton) is a robot whose interactions with her husband loop with the repeated question, “Why do I love you?” His response, again and again: “Why do you love me?” In a brief aside to his secretary Rita Alexander (Lily Collins), Mank’s Victorville housekeeper Fräulein Frieda (Monika Gossmann) informs her that he rescued an entire village of Germans from the Nazis. The accuracy of this anecdote is not so obviously clear, and rather than complicate any judgment of Mank, statements such as these aim to cement approval of Mank because of these very complications. Yet Gary Oldman’s performance as the stumbling, mumbling, and very tired Mankiewicz cannot match up to the many words exchanged about him. Oldman had wanted to “pluck his hairline and have a false nose made” (Welles also had an affinity for fake noses). Fincher declined, insisting that “there can be no artifice between us and you,” and in addition to his usual hundreds of takes, he also required “an older style of acting, which was, you hit your mark, you say your line, you don’t bump into the furniture, you move on.” Limited to a flatter, more static form of expression, Oldman’s Mank is a husk whose genius only others can vouch for, anchored only by his superficial cynicism.
Jack Fincher’s initial draft of Mank was inspired by Pauline Kael’s since-debunked essay, “Raising Kane,” which claims Mankiewicz to be the genius behind Citizen Kane (plagiarised from the research of Howard Suber, then a professor at UCLA). Fincher tells Premiere that in the first version of the screenplay written by his father, the film “[denounced] the injustices suffered by screenwriters, eternally mistreated by directors, who did not hesitate to play on their position to take ownership of their work.” Fincher and Roth went on to specifically minimize the “anti-director” stance of this original draft, though the film still includes a number of Kael’s points, including an unsubstantiated rumor she reports from Nunnally Johnson that Welles bribed Mankiewicz. This overall flimsy depiction of Welles, held together by hearsay and cartoonish costumes, is neither a whimsical parody of Welles’ majestic ego nor a razor-sharp attack against it. Instead, Mank feebly pokes at the flames of what historian Joseph McBride calls the “anti-Welles bandwagon.” Though he rarely shows up on-screen, the legacy of Welles as an independent artist—who’d already gained a reputation for his left-wing theatrical productions, and would later flee for Europe ahead of the Hollywood blacklist—seeps into and spoils Mank’s portrait of Mankiewicz as the free spirit who falls victim to Welles’ whims.
The reason for Mank’s depiction of Welles (besides David Fincher’s own opinion of Orson Welles as a man of “grimy immaturity,” whose latter half of his filmography was not “in the same league” as Citizen Kane) stems from a negative interpretation of Welles’ life as a “genius-artist-director” (a phrase that Kael uses as an insult). Fincher shares Kael’s disdain for auteur theory, which he shoots down as an idea “developed by critics who dreamed of becoming directors.” To him, the director is “the plaything of circumstances that escape any planning,” like Kael’s antithesis to the “‘artist’ director,” the “competent, unpretentious craftsman.” Not only does Welles represent an artist unbothered by industry interventions and mortal fallibility, to Fincher his divorce from and rejection of Hollywood does not stand for freedom but failure, what he concludes to be the “the disastrous impact of [Welles’] own delusional hubris.” The purpose of Mank, then, beyond its measure of Mankiewicz’s contributions to Citizen Kane and the extent to which he deserves recognition over the director, is to draw a line between those who leave (the self-sufficient charlatans and wasteful independents) and those who stay, whose labor might still be supervised and managed.
Orson Welles did go out of his way to lay out the symbolism of Citizen Kane’s “Rosebud” in a 1941 press statement, but he also famously said that “the Rosebud gimmick,” which he attributed to Mankiewicz, is “what I like least about the movie. It’s a gimmick really, and rather dollar-book Freud.” Tokens of secret meaning drive the dramatic action of Fincher’s films: a head in a box, a friend request never sent, a sugar storm. Mank begins with the mystery of Mankiewicz’s inspiration, but in line with the film’s theme of authorship, the central question is not “why target Hearst?” but “why fight for credit?” The film’s Rosebud is far from abstract: After a spat with Welles, Mank adds some last notes to the screenplay. Moments later, Mank transports us to 1942, where the Academy Awards rewards Mankiewicz and Welles with the Oscar for “Best Original Screenplay.” Cut to a shot of Mank, holding up his statuette. When asked why Orson Welles shares screenwriting credit, he grimaces, then finally responds with a joke: “That, my friends, is the magic of the movies.”
For David Fincher, the “movie business” is no magic trick. “It’s: Four. Hundred. Thousand. Dollars. A day,” he explains to the New York Times. “And we might not get a chance to come back and do it again.” His exclusivity deal with Netflix grants him four more years of delivering “medium-priced challenging content [...] the kind of cinema that actually reflects our culture and wrestles with big ideas” (Fincher’s words) with relative security. (This deal could hardly be likened to RKO Pictures’ two-picture contract with Orson Welles, but in each trailer for Mank, the word “Netflix” appears above a parodied replica of RKO’s radio tower logo.) Beneath its catalogue of flashy and familiar tropes, scrupulously garnished with relevance—the wretched but likeable underdog, the sordid operations of showbiz, an election gone awry—Mank contains not a single confrontation that might actually upend its own superficiality. Predictably, it develops like an awards ceremony with only one nominee.
In Jerry Lewis’ 1961 film The Errand Boy, the executives of Paramutual Pictures hire a starry-eyed, loose-limbed paperhanger Morty (Lewis) to spy on various departments and identify any areas of financial loss. To fulfill this task, he takes on every possible role required to hold the studio together, from grabbing candy jars from tall shelves to delivering boxes across the lot, and occasionally wandering through shoots where he’s not allowed. When one of Morty’s many workplace incidents is caught on film, the executives change course and set out to make him a star. Along with this miraculous change in fate, a mild irony settles in: though Morty could not find any proof that the studio was losing money, Paramutual Pictures’ losses lie in the fact that it had spent so much on anything but Morty. No amount of planning could ever compensate for a lack of talent. In fact, the studio’s hierarchy of labor had only further delayed their discovery, the box office numbers convincing the executives that absolutely nothing was wrong with the quality of their output. In other words, the company’s structure would always stifle any sporadic sprouts of artistry. Elsewhere in Paris, one year prior to the release of The Errand Boy, Orson Welles sighed and insisted: "I've always been more interested in experiment than in accomplishment. [...] I'm against posterity on principle. It's almost as vulgar as success."
1. Laura Mulvey, Citizen Kane, 2011.
2. Robert Carringer, “The Scripts of Citizen Kane,” Critical Inquiry, Winter 1978, Vol. 5, No. 2.
3. Mulvey.