The New York Times - USA (2020-12-07)

C4 N THE NEW YORK TIMES, MONDAY, DECEMBER 7, 2020

“Mank” concludes with its title character
(played by Gary Oldman) telling reporters
the acceptance speech he would have deliv-
ered: “I am very happy to accept this award
in the manner in which the screenplay was
written, which is to say, in the absence of Or-
son Welles.” (As recounted in Richard
Meryman’s 1978 biography of Mankiewicz,
he really did devise an after-the-fact accept-
ance speech close to those words, although
he also enjoyed a teasing correspondence
with Welles at that time.)
For Welles scholars, the idea that Man-
kiewicz alone wrote “Citizen Kane” is an old
falsehood, and its continued repetition may
testify to the staying power of the film. “It’s
the greatest film ever made, it has the long-
est track record of representing what cine-
ma can be, and who’s responsible for mak-
ing it that way is a continuing story,” said
Harlan Lebo, the author of “Citizen Kane: A
Filmmaker’s Journey.”
Any controversy began in 1940, Lebo
said. Welles, known for his spellbinding
stage and radio productions with the Mer-
cury Theater in New York, was making a
much-watched arrival in Hollywood, hav-
ing signed at age 24 to direct his first pic-
ture. He told the gossip columnist Louella
Parsons that he had written the forthcom-
ing “Kane.”
“Herman immediately flips, is threat-
ening to sue, wants to make sure he main-
tains credit,” Lebo said.
Mercury Theater’s radio writers typical-
ly didn’t get credit, and Mankiewicz had
waived his claim to authorship in his con-
tract with the company. Welles could have
pressed for full credit of “Kane,” Lebo
writes, but his lawyer advised against the
publicity of a dispute, and a shared credit
was ultimately agreed to by both writers.
The “Mank” producer Douglas Urbanski
said that Welles’s lawyer, L. Arnold Weiss-
berger, had left credit contractually vague.
“If they got Herman the drunk who didn’t
deliver,” Urbanski said, “there was no way
they were going to give it, quite rightly, and
if he earned it, Orson was going to do what
he ultimately did.” (He acknowledged that
some of Weissberger’s communications cut
against this theory.)
The question of who wrote what has sur-
faced periodically but lives on mainly be-
cause of Pauline Kael, the critic for The New
Yorker. In 1971 she wrote a two-part essay in
which she asserted, quoting Mankiewicz’s
secretary Rita Alexander (Lily Collins in
“Mank”), that “Welles didn’t write (or dic-
tate) one line of the shooting script.”
Fincher told The New York Times Maga-
zine that the essay, “Raising Kane,” pro-
vided the germ of an idea for the screenplay.
Kael’s essay is widely regarded as a mis-
step in her work as a journalist. She was ac-
cused of not having spoken to Welles or
Kathryn Trosper, his assistant when “Kane”
was written, and of ignoring archival ma-
terial that might have complicated the arti-
cle’s contentions. She was even accused of
using, without credit, the research of How-
ard Suber, a professor at the University of
California, Los Angeles.
Peter Bogdanovich raised all these
charges in 1972 in an Esquire essay, which

itself has an air of mystique surrounding its

authorship. “I did all the legwork, research

and interviews, and the byline carried only

my name, but Orson had taken a strong

hand in revising and rewriting,” Bog-

danovich wrote in 1997. Brian Kellow’s biog-

raphy of Kael suggests that the critic, who

died in 2001, chose not to respond to Bog-

danovich’s charges.

For all this, today there is relatively little

argument over who wrote what in “Citizen

Kane.” In research published in 1978, Robert

L. Carringer examined seven drafts of the

screenplay in great detail and concluded

that the writing Mankiewicz had done in

Victorville, Calif., during the period de-

picted in the film, “elaborated the plot logic

and laid down the overall story contours,”

but that Welles, principally, transformed

the script “from a solid basis for a story into

an authentic plan for a masterpiece.”

Carringer, who in a recent interview pro-

fessed no interest in seeing “Mank,” de-

scribed the differences between the two

writers’ perspectives. Mankiewicz, he said,

was a narrator. “You have a character —

well, you have to say his age, family situa-

tion, economics,” he said. Welles, on the

other hand, “hated that. So at every point

possible, he created alternative ways of do-

ing things.”

Mankiewicz’s contributions were essen-

tial and in some cases drew on his own ex-

periences. Kael and Meryman both note

that as a drama critic at The New York

Times in 1925, Mankiewicz passed out

drunk while writing a review, just as Jed Le-

land (Joseph Cotten) does in “Kane.” (The

Times ran a notice indicating the review’s

absence.)

But Lebo, who has done his own analysis

of the scripts and posted various versions of

the screenplay online for easy comparison,

noted that even the closest thing we have to

a final script — the Museum of Modern Art,

which holds one of two known copies of that

draft, calls it the “Correction Script” — is

still filled with strange things that didn’t end

up in the movie.

“The final film is not really at all like the

final script,” he said. “Every script goes

through revisions during production, but

this one much more than most, and what

Orson Welles did to it, probably literally at

the last second during production — just as

he did with his theater productions — that’s

what made the movie the movie we remem-

ber today.”

Even at the time, some cinephiles per-

ceived Kael’s essay as an effort to discredit

the auteur theory, the then-ascendant no-

tion that the best directors were responsible

for the stylistic imprints of their films.

“She picks the guy who is the epitome of

the auteur in America and tears down his

one great achievement that everybody can

agree on,” said Joseph McBride, who wrote

three books on Welles and acted for him in

“The Other Side of the Wind,” a film belat-

edly completed in 2018. “But there’s a mis-

understanding about the auteur theory,

too.” The French critics who devised it

“were accounting mostly for directors who

didn’t write scripts, like Raoul Walsh, and

how they could put their imprint on films

that they hadn’t written.”

That point is made in “Mank” when Wel-

les (Tom Burke) angrily responds to Man-

kiewicz’s demand for credit by saying, “Ask

yourself, who’s producing this picture, di-

recting it, starring in it?” The critic Andrew

Sarris, in an April 1971 retort to Kael’s essay,

noted than even if Mankiewicz had written

every word, Welles was no less the auteur of

“Citizen Kane” than he was of his 1942 adap-

tation of “The Magnificent Ambersons,”

whose “best lines and scenes were written

by Booth Tarkington.”

While Urbanski said that Kael’s argu-

ment had been discredited by historians, he

added, “You could equally say that our film

is 100 percent accurate if, and here’s the if,

you accept that you’re looking at it through

Herman Mankiewicz’s alcoholic perspec-

tive, because that changes everything.”

Mankiewicz, he said, was the “motor” of a

movie that functions on several levels.

McBride, who defended moviemakers’

right to dramatic leeway, nevertheless

views “Mank” as a gross distortion and a

missed opportunity to capture what was al-

ready an interesting relationship between

Mankiewicz and Welles. “They both worked

on it, they both contributed their talents and

they were better working together than

they were alone,” he said. “You could show

that. It wouldn’t detract from Mankiewicz’s

genius and Welles’s genius.”

To Fincher, the point of “Mank” isn’t who

wrote what. He said through a representa-

tive: “It was not my interest to make a mov-

ie about a posthumous credit arbitration. I

was interested in making a movie about a

man who agreed not to take any credit. And

who then changed his mind. That was inter-

esting to me.”

Suber, now a professor emeritus, spoke

almost nostalgically of how this debate has

endured. When he began his “Kane” re-

search for a seminar in 1969, he said, “I was

simply interested in how a great screenplay

— I’ve never questioned whether it was a

great screenplay — how it came into exist-

ence.” In retrospect, he said, the debate

over the authorship of “Citizen Kane” be-

longs “in the same category as debates over

who wrote Shakespeare’s plays or did

Homer exist?”

Giving ‘Citizen Kane’ a Byline

CONTINUED FROM PAGE

Gary Oldman, center, as

the Herman J.

Mankiewicz in “Mank,”

with Adam Shapiro, left,

and Joseph Cross. The

theory that Mankiewicz

alone wrote “Citizen

Kane” is not new.

NETFLIX

‘Mank’ suggests Orson

Welles got undue credit,

but scholars disagree.

There’s only one name in the title, but David
Fincher’s film “Mank” (on Netflix) features
a full gallery of movers and shakers from
the golden age of Hollywood. Set in the
1930s and ’40s, the behind-the-scenes
drama follows Herman J. Mankiewicz
(Gary Oldman) through the Sturm und
Drang of writing “Citizen Kane.”
The assignment was a big break for Man-
kiewicz, and the writer-director Orson Wel-
les (here played by Tom Burke) rocketed
into the first rank of filmmakers with the
artistry of his debut feature. As The New
York Times raved about “Citizen Kane”
upon its 1941 premiere: “It comes close to
being the most sensational film ever made
in Hollywood.”
“Mank” connects the dots between “Citi-
zen Kane” and its inspirations in Hollywood
and politics. Flashbacks retrace the brash
writer’s steps through studio writing rooms
and parties at the estate of the media mogul
William Randolph Hearst.
Mankiewicz was a hard-drinking trans-
plant from New York, a former journalist
and member of the Algonquin Round Table,
but he moved through studio circles, trad-
ing gibes and gambling debts with writers,
producers and executives. Hearst and his
paramour, the starlet Marion Davies, also
enjoyed Mankiewicz’s sharp company, but
the multimillionaire’s riches and influence
set wheels turning in the writer’s brain,
friendship be damned.
So the story goes in “Mank,” which also
fleshes out some political backdrop: a his-
toric 1934 contest for California’s governor
involving the socialist writer Upton Sinclair.
Here are some of the film’s real-life players:

William Randolph Hearst
Hearst (Charles Dance) parlayed a family
mining fortune into a media empire. By the
turn of the 20th century, his popular news-
papers were known for rabble-rousing, in-
fluencing world events like the Spanish-
American War. Hearst also ran for office,
representing New York State in Congress
but losing bids for New York mayor, gover-
nor and the Democratic presidential nomi-
nation. The rise and lonely fall of Welles’s
Charles Foster Kane in “Citizen Kane”
draws on tales of Hearst’s vast ambitions
and wealth, including his Xanadu-like es-
tate in San Simeon, Calif. — a pivotal loca-
tion in “Mank.” When the RKO studio
sought to release “Citizen Kane,” Hearst
(who had shifted into more conservative
views) mounted a brutal campaign to
stymie its wide release, aided by his prox-
ies.

Marion Davies

Davies (played by Amanda Seyfried) re-

mains little known to many movie fans to-

day and has long been considered the model

for Charles Foster Kane’s tone-deaf second

wife in “Citizen Kane.” In fact, Davies was a

charming comedian (“Show People,” “The

Patsy”) and vivacious social presence, but

Hearst, who rabidly supported her both fi-

nancially and through his news empire,

stubbornly envisioned her in serious dra-

mas. Davies opted for retirement in 1937 (at

age 40) and soon found herself helping

Hearst when his fortunes declined; the pair

remained together until his death in 1951.

Davies cheerfully bonded with Mankiewicz

and was reportedly unperturbed by “Citi-

zen Kane.”

John Houseman

In New York, Houseman (Sam Troughton)

had put on Welles’s innovative productions

as part of the Federal Theater Project and

then the Mercury Theater, which the two

founded. Houseman edited Mankiewicz’s

commissions for the Mercury Theater’s ra-

dio programming, and in “Mank,” House-

man shepherds Mankiewicz’s writing of

“Citizen Kane” in collaboration with Welles.

Houseman consequently became a star wit-

ness in the decades-long tug-of-war over

credit for the screenplay, which won Oscars

for both Mankiewicz and Welles. After

working with Welles, Houseman produced

films by Nicholas Ray, Vincente Minnelli

and Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Herman’s

brother. Later Houseman achieved a new

fame for performing, winning his own Os-

car for supporting actor for his turn as a

law-school professor in the 1973 drama

“The Paper Chase,” a role he also played on

the subsequent TV series adaptation. (And,

yes, he was the one in the Smith Barney ads

who praised making money the old-fash-

ioned way.)

Louis B. Mayer

Mayer (Arliss Howard) ruled over MGM as

a tough-as-nails studio head. From humble

beginnings in penny arcades, he helped cre-

ate a golden age in Hollywood with stars

like Greta Garbo and Clark Gable and clas-

sics like “The Wizard of Oz” and “Singin’ in

the Rain.” Mankiewicz began at MGM as a

screenwriter, only to lose the gig after fail-

ing to quit gambling: Supposedly, he leaned

forward to place a bet at one game, looked

up and locked eyes across the room with his

soon-to-be-former boss. In “Mank,” the im-

posing MGM capo plays benevolent patri-

arch to his staff of thousands and supports

both Hearst and Frank Merriam, the candi-

date for governor in 1934 against Upton Sin-

clair. From a family of Ukrainian immi-

grants, Mayer would grandly claim the

Fourth of July as his birthday.

Ben Hecht

Hecht (Jeff Harms) wrote the screenplays

for “Notorious” and “Scarface” as well as

co-writing the play “The Front Page”

(adapted as “His Girl Friday”). Hecht came

from the quick-witted New York circles

once frequented by Mankiewicz, who tele-

grammed his friend an oft-quoted invitation

to Hollywood: “Millions are to be grabbed

out here and your only competition is idi-

ots.” In an ensemble scene in “Mank,” Hecht

and Mankiewicz join a murderers’ row of

contract screenwriters for a conference:

the Broadway comic genius George S. Kauf-

man; the humorist S. J. Perelman; and two

Hecht collaborators, his “Front Page” co-

writer, Charles MacArthur, and Charles

Lederer, a nephew of Marion Davies. They

pitch the Paramount producer David O.

Selznick and Joe von Sternberg, the direc-

tor for whom Hecht wrote the pioneering

gangster story “Underworld.”

Joseph L. Mankiewicz

Joseph Mankiewicz (Tom Pelphrey) di-

rected “All About Eve,” “The Barefoot Con-

tessa” and “Cleopatra,” among countless

other credits as a writer or producer (“The

Philadelphia Story”). He also happened to

be Herman’s younger brother, but although

Herman helped him get his start in Holly-

wood, it was Joseph who rose to greater and

more stable fame in the Hollywood firma-

ment. He would win four Oscars, two each

for directing and writing “A Letter to Three

Wives” and “All About Eve.” The brothers

shared the experience of growing up with

an exacting father, a Columbia professor.

Irving G. Thalberg

Thalberg (Ferdinand Kingsley) founded

MGM with Louis Mayer at the astonish-

ingly young age of 24 (after running Univer-

sal Pictures at age 20). Aptly called the “boy

wonder” of Hollywood, he died prematurely

in 1936, having overseen hundreds of suc-

cessful films. In “Mank” he wields power

alongside Mayer and coldly tries to bring

Mankiewicz into line with the studio’s sup-

port of Merriam for governor, an effort the

writer resists. Thalberg did produce faked

newsreels purporting to portray ordinary

people opposed to Merriam’s socialist oppo-

nent, Sinclair. The executive is commemo-

rated at the Oscars by the Irving G. Thal-

berg Memorial Award for excellence in pro-

duction.

Upton Sinclair

Sinclair (Bill Nye) is well known as the au-

thor of the meatpacking exposé “The Jun-

gle.” (His book “Oil!” was freely adapted as

“There Will Be Blood.”) But Sinclair also

ran for governor on his EPIC platform (End

Poverty in California). After warm-up runs

in 1926 and 1930, Sinclair garnered more

than 800,000 votes on his next attempt, in

1934, advocating socialist policies in a state

reeling from the Depression. He lost to Mer-

riam, who was aided by negative campaign-

ing partly coordinated by Mayer. “Mank”

spotlights Sinclair giving a stump speech

that catches the attention of even Mankie-

wicz, who for once is struck silent.

Who’s Who in ‘Mank’: A Guide to the Real-Life Players

By NICOLAS RAPOLD

Marion Davies

Louis B. Mayer

Irving G. Thalberg

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