By Farran Smith Nehme (Sight & Sound)
Translator: csh
The translation was first published in "Iris"
The second most famous thing Herman Mankiewicz wrote was not the play, but the 1925 telegram to the writer Ben Hecht, quoted in his autobiography, Son of the Century, It was later sung by countless Hollywood historians:
"Would you accept £300 a week to work at Paramount Pictures? Everything paid up front. Millions of people are vying for it here, but your competitors are all idiots. But Don't let this get out."
In David Fincher's "Mank," the telegram is sent to a different destination - brother Joseph Joe Mankiewicz, eleven years younger than Herman, destined to have A brighter path to Hollywood. That message is still intact in this about the film, which tells the story of the writer, his work called Citizen Kane, and everything about the studio era.
The style of Mank’s widescreen images is closer to Fincher than RKO, a misty, silhouetted aesthetic reminiscent of that editorial scene in Citizen Kane. But Fincher's goal was clearly not to make a film that looked entirely 1940, 1930, or 1934, when much of the plot was conveyed through lengthy flashbacks. Instead, the film focuses on Mankiewicz's weary past, dismantling one's story into overlapping segments, as Mankiewicz's greatest works do.
There is a saying (usually signed by Honoré de Balzac, though he doesn't say it so directly): "Behind every great fortune there is some kind of crime." Change the words to Mank's studio era, and it becomes: "Behind every great movie, there is some kind of betrayal" - and behind the greatest of them all, Citizen Kane , there is also a lot of betrayal.
In Citizen Kane, the newspaper tycoon, William Randolph Hearst, is an impoverished and languid character. In Mank, Hirst (Charles Dance) can claim to have been betrayed by a writer who frequented his mansion in San Simeon.
The alcoholic Susan Alexander in Citizen Kane is said to be a Marion Davis, and because of that, her reputation has been badly damaged. Marion Davis, played by Amanda Seyfried, is more reminiscent of Jane Harlow's showgirl than the real Davis. The latter speaks in a low voice and suffers from a famous stutter offscreen.
Seyfried makes her seem as lovely as her contemporaries say, "Mank" shows what she has lost in the story of Herman Mankiewicz, who uses that unusual , naive expression, transforming her into different roles. He believes that people will realize the difference between the brilliant Marion and Charles Foster Kane's mediocre lover Susan.
"Mank" even points out that there are more betrayals hidden behind Hollywood's golden age. In Fincher's films, it's really a Gilded Age. The studio tycoons gleefully squeeze money out of their employees' salaries and compensation, and you never know which of your co-workers will help.
The film only briefly mentions Hermann’s formative childhood—especially the brothers’ stubborn, critical, and strict father, an immigrant from Germany who eventually became a well-respected professor.
A child prodigy by any measure, Herman passed the Columbia University entrance exam at age thirteen. However, the criteria here do not include Mankiewicz's "daddy" criteria. "This kind of father," Herman said years later, "will either make you very ambitious or very hopeless." Papa seems to have two influences on Mankiewicz. As an adult, Herman compared his work to what he considered "real" literature, repeatedly trying to write a successful Broadway play. In the end, the ironic 1937 play titled "Meal Tickets" failed, which led him to admit his defeat.
He was a journalist in the early 1920s, and his ingenuity made him one of the youngest regulars at the Algonquin Roundtable, an informal daily lunch gathering of writers, critics and actors at the Algonquin Hotel , whose members sometimes include Tallulah Bankhead, Dorothy Parker, and Hubble Marks. Mankiewicz has worked for The New York Times, and he is also a drama critic for The New Yorker.
Even in the field of literati, his reputation seems to be unreliable. In 1926, when Herman first lived in California, Harold Ross of The New Yorker fired him with a letter that predicted: "Your personality prevents you from fitting into an organization."
Alcoholism is exceptional
All the Mankiewicz-esque demons are in the movie, and they're very frequent. Above all, the alcoholic demon, Sidney Radenson Stern, in "The Mankiewicz Brothers," traces Herman's alcoholism to the beer he sipped during a summer job, Because he was too young to work at Columbia University.
"Mank" shows how alcohol dominated Herman's life as an adult, teetering at parties, at the production office, at his writer's apartment and at his ranch in Victorville, California (despite his attempts to control his drinking), He wrote most of the first draft of Citizen Kane at the last location.
In the film, Orson Welles (Tom Burke) delivers a liquor cabinet full of sedatives to ensure that Mankiewicz, who is bedridden in a car accident, does not drink until nightfall. It seems like an imaginary, in real life Mankiewicz is hindered by the rancher's prohibition leasing policy and secretary Rita Alexander (Lily Collins) from sipping her scotch. He and his editor (actually Baum), John Hausman (Sam Troughton), have grown accustomed to driving into town for a drink every day around six o'clock in the afternoon.
This was the most temperate period Herman Mankiewicz had ever seen, barring a failed attempt to quit drinking through psychoanalysis in the late 1930s. Even so, among his vices, alcoholism has rivals. Compulsive gambling has been an underappreciated form of Hollywood's self-destruction: whether it's Mickey Rooney, Chico Marx, Paramount CEO BP Schulberg, or the "Mank" portrayal Former Paramount executives David O. Selznick, Toby Leonard Moore — all played a big role in their eventual tragedies.
Herman barely got into Hollywood in the first place, losing his ticket money to a $2 limit poker game. He had to go further down the abyss to get the money back, and he even had to borrow money to make the journey. Mankiewicz became Paramount's highest-paid writer at one point, not because of his work, but because he persuaded the office to get a five-hundred-dollar-a-week raise, which went straight to Ben Hecht to compensate Herman Loss on poker.
But while settling down, Mankiewicz wrote a bewildering series of works, including Joseph von Sternberg's "The Last Order"; directed by Nancy Caro, one of Hermann's many platonic lovers "Laughter" before the censorship period; and "Million Dollar Legs," which is a very hilarious work starring WC Fields.
Over time, however, Mankiewicz gained popularity. His charisma and latent kindness made him beloved by many in the industry, though alcoholism became a growing burden. His penchant for one-liners seems to be an instinctive impulse, and when asked about the day-to-day duties of MGM executive Benny Tu, who monitors wind changes in his third-floor office, he said.
This statement is widely circulated. Sometimes, the reason they spread it was simply because he was Mankiewicz. Mank also made a near-suicidal decision, which Fincher's film accurately conveyed: He showed a draft of Citizen Kane to friend Charles Ryder -- also Marion Davis' nephew.
In 1939, the unkind Louis B. Mayer agreed to re-hire Herman at MGM. Part of it is thought to be due to his sympathy for Herman's wife, Sara (played by Tuppence Middleton in the film), a popular woman who is loyal to her recalcitrant husband. famous. A few days later, Herman looked up after a game of poker in the studio's commissary and caught Louis Mayer's gaze, and he lost the job.
None of this appears in the new film. When they met for the last time in San Simeon in the early 2000s, Meyer (Ellis Howard) told Herman that he hired him to thank Hearst. But in the film, Mankiewicz gambles in the writer's room, a scene that plays on Herman's famous bad luck. When he first played poker, he was called to meet the boss.
"Mank" links Herman's heightened distaste for Meyer (he also hates Meyer's suave, handsome assistant, Irving Saulberg, played by Ferdinand Kingsley in the film) with politics, which may Somewhat far-fetched. But among other secret dealings, there is a subplot that deals with Upton Sinclair's 1934 run for governor of California.
"Manke" shows Meyer and Saulberg designing the anti-Sinclair "fake news," a Great Depression-style, alarmist documentary, written, cast and filmed by the studios. It did happen, but Herman's relationship with a studio photographer who was tormented by his decision to direct the documentary appears to be fictional. There isn't much evidence that Mankiewicz despised bosses for different reasons than others: their greed, their alleged lack of culture, their arbitrary and domineering power.
Herman's political ideas in real life have always been inconsistent. In 1933, just two months after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, he wrote an anti-Nazi play called "Mad Dogs of Europe" with foresight and fervent passion. But the movie was destined to never be made. A few years later, Mankiewicz embraced Charles Lindbergh's isolationist stance, even though he privately acknowledged Lindbergh's anti-Semitism.
Herman was neither a signer nor a participant, which got him and his younger brother Joseph — the screenwriter of "The Comet" and "Cleopatra" — into a lot of trouble in the postwar period. At the time, if your name appeared on the wrong petition, it could end your career. This side of Herman does show up in the movie. When Joseph urged him to join the nascent Writers Guild, Herman responded with a famous comment: The Writers Guild should know that their name needs an apostrophe.
In real life, Dorothy Parker was the one who got Herman drafted into the army. Notably, there are no female screenwriters on Mank, not even Herman's co-writer Frances Marion when she wrote the MGM blockbuster "The Dinner Party." The only female writer in the writers room was a secretary with a shiny bun.
Garbage eruption
When Mankiewicz's telegram was received, his friend Ben Hecht had been lying in bed for several days, reading Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It was an early sign that Hecht was one of those writers who thought Hollywood was a ghetto. Ben Hecht has no money or job prospects and has been two months behind on rent. Soon, Hecht, like the other recruits Mankiewicz had recruited, found himself with a salary in Hollywood, including Samuel N. Behrman, Oliver H.P. Garrett, Edwin Justus Meyer and Nunnally Johnson.
The Herman Mankiewicz New York Writers' Fresh Air Fund, the nickname for his recruiting campaign, was funded by Paramount's B.P. Schulberg. With their sharp wit and cynicism, these New York journalists became "one of Herman's more enduring contributions to the golden age of Hollywood cinema," Stern remarked.
Another contribution they bring is contempt for the industry they work in. The most gifted of them, Hecht, slams the worst of snobs. "It was an explosion of trash," he said of the films of the time. "They eroded the minds of Americans and prevented them from being educated people."
However, Hecht's scripts have clearly and rightly surpassed his literature, although he claims that writing them "requires no more effort than a game of Pinar's poker". Even the most famous moment of his play "Front Page" (co-written with Charles MacArthur, in which the John Spencer-Churchill character briefly appears) is not on stage, but in In Howard Hawks' "Sexual Transformation" version of "Girlfriend Friday".
Both Mankiewicz and Mank share Ben Hecht's attitude towards the Hollywood studio era. The screenwriters are gloating gold harlots, the studios are greedy vulgars when they don't undermine political reform, and most of the actors seem well-dressed and dumb. It's a frustrating thing, after all, the characters in Mank have made a series of good, even great movies that go viral in real life (including of course Marion Davis ).
Clearly, the uncertainty of studio-era industry insiders about which work originated from which "worker" reinforced the dissatisfaction of the writers; playwrights and even theatre critics controlled their work. For example, Herman's name does not appear in "The Wizard of Oz," and "Manke" reverts to that smoky subtitle. But he almost certainly came up with the genius idea of contrasting the drab, tawny state of Kansas with the rainbow-colored state of Oz—if there is such a thing.
His few credits after Citizen Kane were the baseball movie Yankee Pride, which told the story of Lou Grieg. Over the years, though, uncredited co-writer Richard Maybaum has claimed in regrettable and specious ways that Mankiewicz was drinking so much that he may have contributed only a few pages.
Mankiewicz has a reputation in the industry for his ability to "polish" conversations. But whether or not that gets him byline, how can you point to his specific influence on the film years later? Even if he saves the whole scene or paragraph? Which of the works he signed as a screenwriter was more influential than the ones he signed as a producer (the Marx brothers' immortal "Mischief" and "Pride")?
Of course, Citizen Kane is very different. He had spent several years attending dinners and weekend parties in San Simeon, and he had ample opportunity to study its fickle master. Like everyone else, he liked the unsnobby Marion Davies, who shared some sort of bond with their drinking habits, and they both worked hard to hide their stash from their opponents, W.R. Hirst. they.
Herman had many repressed thoughts—a lonely childhood, a journalist, loyalty and arrogance. During his stay in Victorville, Mankiewicz poured it all into a 325-page play called The American. This exaggerated title seems to be enough to prove that such a film contains too much material. In "Mank," his brother Joseph tells him, "This is the best thing you've ever written." For Herman, that recognition was superfluous.
The Mank noted that Herman signed a contract at the time and accepted a bonus on the condition that Wells would receive the sole attribution, but when the creation was complete, Herman reneged on his promise. The film notes that Wells' contribution to the script was not prominent: "I just had to type on a typewriter," he told Herman.
People who admire Citizen Kane can choose whether or not they accept this situation. Those who have read Robert Callinger and Harlan Lebow (who studied RKO's existing scripts and records), or Joseph McBride and Jonathan Rosenbaum The subject of the article will almost certainly not accept this.
In his 1978 biography, Mank, Richard Merriman estimated that Herman contributed 60 percent of the final screenplay to Citizen Kane, including his later revisions. But critic Pauline Kael claimed in his essay "Holding Kane High" that it was almost 100%, and even John Hausman agreed. What's more, Hausman adds, if Citizen Kane "is a Welles movie, then "Flying Mountain" is a John Ford movie -- even though it's Dudley Nicole Written by Els".
If we look back at that telegram again, we find that Mank is telling the myth of a town full of idiots. But at least it's a myth. Historically at least, Herman's main rival at the signature level is still Orson Welles, which is the furthest thing an idiot can imagine.
In a 1978 interview, Merriman said of Herman: "What I want to know is how he fought back and wrote Citizen Kane as he neared the end of his writing career. ?" The answer to "Mank" is that, as Dorothy did when she returned from Oz, Herman Mankiewicz was always capable of writing so well, only Hollywood stopped him. Maybe, but it was Hollywood that immortalized him.
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