'Mank' script: Netflix film may echo Pauline Kael's 'Raising Kane'

“In the eight weeks between the time the Victorville material passed into Welles'  hands and the final  draft  was completed, the Citizen Kane script was transformed, principally by him, from a solid basis for a story into  an authentic plan for a masterpiece. Not  even the staunchest  defenders of Mankiewicz  would deny that Welles was principally responsible for the realization of the film.  But in light of  the evidence, it may be they will also have to grant him principal responsibility for the realization of  the script.” — Robert L. Carringer, "The Scripts of Citizen Kane," 1978.  

By RAY KELLY

New Yorker critic Pauline Kael argued in her now-discredited "Raising Kane" in 1971 that Herman J. Mankiewicz was the true author of Citizen Kane and the movie’s young producer-director-star, Orson Welles, was undeserving of co-writing credit on the Academy Award-winning script.

Kael's shoddy research was quickly questioned by Peter Bogdanovich, Joseph McBride, Andrew Sarris and others. Seven years later, scholar Robert L. Carringer debunked Kael's claims by citing script revisions and decades-old notes. Carringer concluded Mankiewicz's "principal contributions were the story frame, a cast of characters, various individual scenes, and a good share of the dialogue. … Welles added the narrative brilliance — the visual and verbal wit, the stylistic fluidity, and such stunningly original strokes as the newspaper montages and the breakfast table sequence. He also transformed Kane from a cardboard fictionalization of (William Randolph) Hearst into a figure of mystery and epic magnificence."

Nearly 50 years after "Raising Kane," the battle over authorship will be revisited in David Fincher’s upcoming Netflix film, Mank.

Based on a script draft leaked to Wellesnet, screenwriter Jack Fincher, the director's late father, places his thumb heavily on the scale in favor of Mankiewicz. It is uncertain how faithful the Netflix film will be to this draft revision, which is dated September 5, 1994. (Jack Fincher died in April 2003.)

Given that the title of the 120-page script is Mank, it should not come as a surprise that Fincher's story focuses squarely on the acerbic, hard-drinking Mankiewicz. Welles is a secondary character, who is heard mainly on the telephone, spoken of by others and not given a substantive scene until the final pages, where he is depicted as explosive and an opportunist.

Mank is set in Victorville, California, where the veteran screenwriter is working on a first draft of Kane with John Houseman and secretary Rita Alexander at his side. There are flashback scenes with such notables as brother Joe Mankiewicz, Eddie Cantor, Irving Thalberg, Louis B. Mayer, David O. Selznick, and, of course, William Randolph Hearst and Marion Davies.

Initial reaction to Mankiewicz's first draft of Citizen Kane is delivered in Mank by Houseman, who calls it “a hectic hodgepodge of talky episodes. A collection of fragments that leap around in space and time like a bag of Mexican jumping beans.”

Halfway through Mank, Houseman warns that Welles will seize credit for authoring the screenplay, something Mankiewicz seems resigned to under the terms of his contract.

Soon after, Welles telephones Mankiewicz to say he liked the draft, though it needs work. Welles tells him he has sent notes and will “run everything through my typewriter again.” This is the entire extent of the writing credit for Citizen Kane that Mank gives to Welles. There is no mention of the weeks of preliminary script discussions between the Hollywood newcomer and veteran screenwriter before Mankiewicz's arrival in Victorville. Mank does not depict Welles' own work on the script concurrently and later.

In Mank, Welles arrives in Victorville near the close with an offer to “relieve” Mankiewicz of the rewrite duties and pay him a handsome bonus. But Mankiewicz lets Welles know he wants full screen credit for his writing, which he considers to be the best of his career.

In an exchange Jack Fincher describes as taking place between two “wily poker players,” Welles reminds Mankiewicz of their agreement. He predicts that Mankiewicz will lose in Screen Writers Guild arbitration and be regarded in the industry as a man who breaks his word.

Mankiewicz counters that while he is a renegade, Hollywood will support him over an outsider like Welles.

In a fit of rage, Welles trashes a liquor cabinet, which prompts Mankiewicz to say he will recreate that fury in the scene where Charles Foster Kane discovers his wife Susan Alexander Kane is leaving him.

A resigned Welles accepts that Mankiewicz will challenge him for authorship, but adds with what Jack Fincher describes as a "small smug smile of triumph":

“All right, Mank. If you know this town half as well as you think you do, no doubt you’ll get your screen credit. But ask yourself: Who is producing this picture? Directing it? Starring in it? Who’s putting Citizen Kane on the screen with his creative vision not yours. Why Mank, when I am finished with Kane no one outside this industry will ever remember you had anything to do with it.”

In the remaining pages, the audience learns the Citizen Kane screenplay proved to be an Oscar winner.

In what could best be likened to a Mankiewicz wet dream, an adoring Academy Award audience cheers the announcement of his name and that roar all but drowns out the mention of Welles' own.

The script ends with a beaming Mankiewicz clutching his Oscar and being photographed at his California home, while Welles is chided by a reporter in Rio de Janiero that his only Oscar win for Kane had to be shared with Mankiewicz.

A screen card informs viewers that "Herman Mankiewicz died in 1953. Today Citizen Kane is widely regarded as the best movie ever made. Virtually everyone thinks that Orson Welles wrote it."

Wellesnet shared the script for Mank with film historian Joseph McBride, who has written three books on Welles, and Sydney Stern, author of the recent acclaimed biography The Brothers Mankiewicz.

After reading the draft, McBride cautioned the finished film cannot be fairly judged in advance based solely on a 26-year-old script, which he lauded for its portrayal of Mankiewicz, but sharply criticized for the depiction of Welles.

“We will see what happens to this story once the film Mank is complete and what the final form of the screenplay says. The 1994 version I have now read, written by the late Jack Fincher, father of the film’s director, David Fincher, provides a colorful and complex, multifaceted portrait of Herman J. Mankiewicz. ‘Mank' has always been one of my favorite Hollywood figures and screenwriting heroes, a brilliant and acerbic wit and a man with a vast stock of journalistic lore that greatly enhanced Citizen Kane. It’s somewhat ironic that Andrew Sarris credited me with being the first writer to give Mankiewicz his due for his work on Kane, with an appendix I wrote to my essay on the film in a 1968 book I edited, Persistence of Vision: A Collection of Film Criticism.

That said, it’s distressing to see that this 1994 script draft of Mank descends into simplistic and hostile caricature of Orson Welles. It portrays him as a shadowy, menacing figure out of the myth concocted by Pauline Kael, John Houseman, and his other enemies — and mostly heard as a voice in the script, rarely seen, like a radio villain. Welles is portrayed as having little to do with the first draft of Kane, which Mankiewicz wrote at Victorville, California, with the assistance of Houseman. But the Jack Fincher script omits mention of what Mankiewicz biographer Richard Meryman reports was ‘some five weeks of preliminary script discussions’ between Welles and Mankiewicz. Also ignored is Welles’s concurrent work on the script while Mank was working at Victorville. Furthermore, Welles scholar Robert L. Carringer has proven through extensive study of seven script drafts — something Kael apparently didn’t do — that Welles deserves his co-writing credit for the extensive work he also did before and after he received the full Victorville draft in reshaping and helping conceive the script in the form that went before the cameras.

When I was acting for Welles in The Other Side of the Wind in the spring of 1971, soon after Kael’s New Yorker article appeared, we were shooting a scene in the Coldwater Canyon area of Beverly Hills, the one in which I am thrown out of Jake Hannaford’s car. Welles pointed to a white ranch house in the background and told me, ‘Contrary to what you’ve read, that’s where most of Citizen Kane was written.’ That house, which Welles rented in his early years in Hollywood, is visible in the background of that scene in Other Wind.

But unfortunately, the Mank script by Jack Fincher finds it necessary to aggrandize Mankiewicz at Welles’s expense, as a credit hog and conniver who had little to do with writing the film, perpetrating that falsehood with dubious fictitious scenes and by omitting much of the actual history of Kane's writing. It is sad and offensive that such lies continue to be spread, as they also regularly are by TCM’s Ben Mankiewicz, grandson of Herman.  I hope that David Fincher’s film will not lower itself to such simplistic caricature in dealing with Welles, as if that is the only way to truly give the great Herman J. Mankiewicz his due.”

Asked by Wellesnet to read and judge Jack Fincher's 1994 script for its depiction of Herman Mankiewicz, Stern reacted favorably, saying:

"At first I was startled to encounter so many familiar lines — lines Herman Mankewicz actually spoke, stories I knew so well. Then I thought, why not?  If Herman Mankiewicz (aka Mank) offers you dialogue, you'd be a fool not to use it.

Those ripped-from-the-history-books Herman stories and witticisms are still entertaining, and in Jack Fincher's script they performed double duty as building blocks to create Mank, the character.

Despite its fictional elements, I thought Mank's Herman Mankiewicz did capture the contradictory essence of the original: endearing warmth, quick wit, and great wisdom combined with volatility, intemperate anger, and a seemingly limitless capacity for self-destruction.

Wellesnet has reached out to Netflix about Mank. A spokesman for the production was unable to verify how close the 1994 draft was to the actual shooting script.

Netflix has not yet announced a release date for Mank. (Filming wrapped in Los Angeles and Victorville earlier this year.)

Oscar winner Gary Oldman (Darkest Hour) will star as Mankiewicz with Tom Burke (BBC's  The Musketeers, Strike) portraying Welles. Other cast members include Tom Pelphrey as brother Joseph L. Mankiewicz; Lilly Collins as Mankiewicz’s secretary Rita Alexander; and Amanda Seyfried as Marion Davies.

Two decades ago, Mank was going to be David Fincher’s followup to his 1997 film The Game, and star his future House of Cards leading man Kevin Spacey as the veteran screenwriter. However, the project stalled because of Fincher's insistence that the movie be shot in black-and-white, just like Citizen Kane.

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