Mank (Blue Light, Flying Pictures, Netflix Studios, Panic Pictures, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The last movie my husband Charles and I watched together with his mother Edi on our recent vacation on Friday, August 1 was Mank, a Netflix co-production directed by David Fincher from a screenplay by his late father Jack (who died in 2003, 17 years before the film was made), and dealing with the fraught topic of just who wrote the screenplay for the 1941 masterpiece Citizen Kane. The controversy started in 1969, when Pauline Kael published a two-part article in The New Yorker called “Raising Kane,” which alleged that Herman J. Mankiewicz, a major Hollywood writer and producer in the 1930’s who was also a chronic alcoholic and drank himself into an early grave, was not just the co-writer with Kane’s director and star, Orson Welles, but was the sole writer. A lot of people who’d shared Kael’s skepticism about the French auteur theory that the director is the prime mover behind any movie and the writer just an incidental helping hand seized on Kael’s article as “proof” that film is really a writer’s medium and the director is merely the hired hand who follows the writer’s bidding. Actually, the infrastructure needed to make a major (or even not-so-major, though recent video technology has changed all that and put quality filmmaking in the hands of the masses again) film is so capital-intensive that it’s arguable that the producer and the producing studio are ultimately the guiding lights behind any film, and they essentially give orders to both the director and writer, as well as the actors, about what the project will be and how it shall be made.

Mank is essentially a biopic of Herman J. Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman), spined around his work on the Citizen Kane script but periodically flashing back to his earlier career, which began in 1930 when Paramount, which like the other major studios were desperate for people who could write literate dialogue now that sound films had replaced silent ones, was raiding the ranks of Broadway playwrights. In 1940 RKO Studios hired Orson Welles and gave him an extraordinarily generous contract, though it wasn’t quite as generous as the opening title of Mank makes it seem. The title says he was allowed to make any sort of film he wanted, without having to seek studio approval first. In fact the contract gave Welles the right to offer six stories to RKO for their approval; if they turned them all down RKO could offer Welles six stories of their choice for him to choose among; and if neither Welles nor the studio could reach agreement on any of these 12 stories the contract would be canceled. Another clause in the contract said that Welles himself would personally write the screenplays for each of his films, which became a major point of contention when Welles and his associate John Houseman (Sam Troughton), who after years working behind the scenes became a late-in-life star in the 1970’s as a character actor in the film The Paper Chase, brought in Mankiewicz. Fearful of being held in breach of contract if RKO’s executives found out he’d hired another writer, Welles and Houseman extracted from the desperate, alcoholic Mankiewicz a terrible contract which gave Welles’s company, Mercury Productions, all rights to his screenplay, including credit.

Houseman installed Mankiewicz in a cabin in the remote town of Victorville, California with the idea of keeping him away from drink long enough to create a script, which Mankiewicz finished and called American. It was a drama about a newspaper publisher who begins his career as a progressive promoter of the working class and its ideals, only to move Right politically over time. It drew a lot of its inspiration from the real-life career of William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance), whom Welles didn’t know but Mankiewicz had been close friends with until Mankiewicz’s alcoholism drove a wedge between them. Hearst was particularly hard on alcoholics since his mistress Marion Davies (Amanda Seyfried) was also fond of the bottle, and Hearst didn’t want drunkards in his presence for fear they’d slip drinks to Davies. The plot of Mank incorporates a lot of well-known anecdotes about classic Hollywood, including John Gilbert’s (Nick Job) legendary confrontation with MGM studio head Louis B. Mayer (Arliss Howard) over mothers. Mayer worshipped mothers; Gilbert’s own mother was a minor stage actress named Ada Adaire who had been so, shall we say, free with her affections Gilbert literally had no idea who his biological father was. In one argument, Mayer threatened to give Gilbert a D.I.Y. castration and Gilbert said, “Go ahead! I’ll still be more of a man than you!” There’s also a bizarre subplot inserted by Fincher Vater und Söhn dealing with Upton Sinclair’s radical 1934 campaign for Governor of California and the fake newsreels MGM produced, under the rubric The Inquiring Reporter, to trash his campaign and ensure his defeat by tarring him as a dangerous socialist.

While there’s an unmistakable similarity between the California gubernatorial campaign of 1934 and the Presidential campaign of 2024, in which Donald Trump posed as a friend of working people and then, once he was back in power in the White House, showed his (and his billionaire backers’) true colors in passing the “One Big, Beautiful Bill” that will (among other things) cut about 17 million Americans off of access to health care while running up the budget deficit to finance huge tax cuts for the super-rich – in both 1934 and 2024 ultra-rich people scared non-rich people into voting against their class interests – the film’s portrayal of Mankiewicz’s role in this goes against everything we know about his politics. The fictional Mankiewicz is appalled at the tactics MGM used against Sinclair and feels guilty that he suggested the fake newsreels just as a joke and they were assigned to an aspiring (and fictional) second-unit director, Shelly Metcalf (Jamie McShane), who grabbed the assignment and then felt guilty about it and responded by drinking and ultimately committing suicide. The real Herman Mankiewicz was Louis B. Mayer’s tool in helping found the so-called “Screen Playwrights,” a company “union” designed to prevent the actual organization of screenwriters into a real union, the Screen Writers Guild (though the film’s script includes Mankiewicz’s real-life snotty comment that any real writers would have put an apostrophe after “Writers” in the genuine union’s name). Despite the wrenching cuts between time frames (did the Finchers think that in order to pay proper homage to Citizen Kane they had to make their own movie non-linear?), I quite liked Mank.

For one thing, David Fincher and cinematographer Eric Messerschmidt shot it in red-filtered black-and-white, achieving the convincing “look” of a 1940’s movie. For another, they got a quite good actor, Tom Burke, to play Orson Welles; his reproduction of Welles’s famous voice is virtually uncanny (as we learn when the film features an outro of the real Welles from a transcribed radio broadcast from South America, where he was shooting a never-finished documentary called It’s All True, commenting on he and Mankiewicz winning the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, the only Oscar either of them won) and, though we see very little of him (mostly we just hear his voice on the phone), he’s tall, hunky and far from the bloated apparition Welles became in his later years. (The announcer who reads the names of Mankewicz and Welles as the winners is played by Herman Mankiewicz’s real-life grandson Ben.) My husband Charles liked another film we’d seen on the making of Citizen Kane, RKO 281 (1999), reviewed by me at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2018/11/rko-281-hbo-films-wgbh-tv-scott-free.html, better, but that film had its own set of problems, notably its portrayal of Welles as a political naïf who didn’t understand the power of media moguls like Hearst. The real Welles was not only aware of their power, that was the whole reason he wanted to make a movie about one; as he said in a statement he released in 1941, “[N]o industrialist can ever achieve in a democratic government the kind of general and catholic power with which I wanted to invest my particular character. The only solution seemed to place my man in charge of some important channel of communication — radio or newspaper.” I was also amused at the fact that neither actor playing Marion Davies (Melanie Griffith in RKO 281, Amanda Seyfried here) attempted the infamous Davies stutter. But even though Mank was irritatingly faithful to the Pauline Kael-derived line (i.e., lie) that the script for Citizen Kane was entirely Mankiewicz’s (including his boast at the end that he wrote the script on his own without Welles’s involvement), I quite enjoyed Mank.