In 1939, Herman J. Mankiewicz was a forty-two-year-old screenwriter, acclaimed in Hollywood not only for the lines of dialogue he wrote for movies but for the ones he delivered in life. In nearly a decade and a half in the business, he’d found success at Paramount working with Josef von Sternberg and with his friends the Marx Brothers, and at M-G-M writing on “Dinner at Eight” and, briefly, “The Wizard of Oz,” where he had the idea of filming Kansas in bleak black-and-white and Oz in Technicolor. But he was best known as one of the great personalities in the film business. He’d migrated to Hollywood from New York City, where he’d been The New Yorker’s first theatre critic and a member of the famed Algonquin Round Table, and he carried that group’s spirit of cynical candor and acerbic bravado to the movie community. In commissaries and cocktail parties, he was known for his learned insights and his unpredictable politics (he wrote, at great risk, an anti-Hitler script in 1933, yet he was opposed to American involvement in the Second World War, and even called himself an “ultra-Lindbergh”) as well as for the style with which he delivered them. He was also habitually drunk and wildly impolitic, known for the scenes that he made and the insults that he flung. His work habits were notoriously dubious: a compulsive gambler, he spent ample studio time placing bets and listening to horse races; a social whirlwind, he talked the day away in person and by phone. He lampooned and defied his bosses, and got fired from every job he didn’t quit. By the summer of 1939, he was unemployed, which is how he found himself desperately available when a twenty-four-year-old newcomer to Hollywood by the name of Orson Welles offered him a job.
Welles, prolific and precocious, had become a stage star at sixteen, a major theatre director at twenty, and, in 1937, the co-founder (with John Houseman) of the Mercury Theatre company; he’d become a radio star at twenty-three, and become infamous, in 1938, for the radio broadcast “War of the Worlds,” the tale of an invasion from outer space, told in the form of faux news bulletins, which many listeners mistook as real. He’d also made two independent films on the side. The week of his twenty-third birthday, he had been featured on the cover of Time magazine. But whereas Mankiewicz was a Hollywood insider, Welles was despised by the movie industry in advance, resented and derided for his youth, his fame, his intellectualism—and his contractually guaranteed freedom. He had signed a contract with R.K.O. studio to produce, write, direct, and act in two movies, for which he, alone among Hollywood studio filmmakers, would be allowed final cut. He initially brought Mankiewicz on to ghostwrite radio programs, but their collaboration soon shifted, and Welles recruited him as a co-writer of the first film.
Their collaboration, and the film that resulted from it—“Citizen Kane”—was hailed, even before its release, as one of the greatest movies ever made. A drama about a young heir who turns himself into a newspaper mogul and national figure, building and destroying an empire of his own, it became a marker of an aesthetic and generational shift in the history of cinema, and it made Welles—and what Welles represented—the cynosure of world cinema. Welles and Mankiewicz won an Oscar for the screenplay (the only one that the movie earned, though it was nominated in nine categories), but that award itself was the culmination of a bitter dispute, only one of the many that the movie sparked: Mankiewicz’s contract with Welles had explicitly denied him writing credit, yet Mankiewicz, whose career badly needed the jolt, wanted it—and, after a struggle both in the press and behind the scenes, ultimately succeeded in securing it. Yet today, Welles remains legendary, while Mankiewicz, who died in 1953, is unknown to all but the most attentive movie buffs.
This should change with the release, on Friday, of David Fincher’s new film, “Mank,” a bio-pic of the screenwriter’s years in Hollywood, centered on his work on “Citizen Kane” and based on a script by Fincher’s late father, Jack, a journalist to whom Fincher had suggested the subject. The movie, as Fincher put it in a recent interview with Vulture, is an attempt to define the very nature of Mankiewicz’s contribution to “Citizen Kane,” and to the history of cinema—and to dramatize his battle to get credit for it.
Fincher said that the original draft of his father’s script closely followed the argument made in one of the most famous—and likely one of the most controversial—essays ever to appear in The New Yorker: “Raising Kane,” from 1971, by one of the magazine’s film critics at the time, Pauline Kael. The piece, which was published in two parts and ran fifty thousand words long, attempted to make the case that Mankiewicz deserved not joint but sole credit for the “Citizen Kane” script. “Mank” focusses tightly on Mankiewicz’s behind-the-scenes social and studio life in the nineteen-thirties and its connection to his work on “Citizen Kane.” For a more complete understanding of Mankiewicz’s legacy, it’s worth also revisiting his path to writing movies, which he never much respected as an art form, and the battle that Kael ignited with “Raising Kane,” in which, far from merely outlining Mankiewicz’s crucial role in “Citizen Kane” and his fascinating and tragic character, she attempted, misguidedly, to elevate Mankiewicz, the company man malgré lui, over the independent artist Welles.
Mankiewicz was already a member of the Algonquin Round Table set, when, in late 1924, Harold Ross, on the cusp of launching a new magazine called The New Yorker, asked him to be its first drama critic. Mankiewicz was twenty-seven years old at the time—young in years but long in experience. Born in New York, in 1897, and raised in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, he was the son of German-Jewish immigrants; his father was a poor but fiercely striving (and, eventually, publicly recognized) scholar, a cold and harsh figure who imparted high intellectual standards on Herman, who met them brilliantly but unhappily. Herman had graduated from high school at fourteen and entered Columbia at fifteen, after spending a gap year working in a coal mine; he had served in the Marines in the First World War, worked as a reporter in New York, and then, with his new bride, Sara, gone to Germany, in 1920, where he’d quickly made his name, and his legend, as a reckless and wild wit, able to talk himself into jobs and situations that he usually left in ruins. After returning to New York, in 1922, he’d become a drama critic at the Times while aspiring, with little success, to a career as a playwright. When he joined The New Yorker, Ross hoped he could wrangle his Algonquin cohorts as well; when the others demurred, Mankiewicz offered Ross a notable word of consolation: “The half-time help of wits is no better than the full-time help of half-wits.”
Less than a year into his job at The New Yorker, which published its first issue in February of 1925, Mankiewicz received a lucrative invitation to write in Hollywood. He needed the quick payday, not only to help support his family (he and Sara had two young sons) but also to repay his gambling debts. But he had little interest in movies and even less regard for them. According to Sydney Ladensohn Stern, in her 2019 book “The Brothers Mankiewicz,” he told his son Don, “You can’t have a literature of screenwriting because it would be like a literature of comic books.” Yet he was good at it; for silent films, he deployed his epigrammatic wit to create intertitles, dialogue as well as descriptive passages that needed to be brief enough to fit on the screen and be read quickly, and with his journalistic sensibility, he could both recognize a good story and fit it into a rigid format. He sent a telegram to his friend the reporter Ben Hecht in late 1926, perhaps the most famous and likely the most consequential one ever sent from Hollywood, offering him a job and concluding with the fateful lines: “Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots. Don’t let this get around.”
Mankiewicz hadn’t hoped to remain in Hollywood very long. Before heading West, he had arranged with Ross to keep his job waiting for him upon his return—or so he thought. In February of 1926, Ross, long dismayed by Mankiewicz’s work habits and, for that matter, with his work, fired him—by telegram—and Mankiewicz, without an immediate alternative, decided to keep working in Hollywood. Mankiewicz, though, not only disdained movies as such but found the very nature of their collaborative and corporate work inimical to his idea of writing; “The producer says to you, ‘Now in reel three the fellow shouldn’t kiss the girl, he should kiss the cow.’ And then the whole picture unravels, and you can’t stand it.” At M-G-M, the industrialized process was less like a writers’ room than a game of exquisite corpse; as Irene Selznick (the studio head Louis B. Mayer’s daughter and the first wife of the producer David O. Selznick), explained, “Sometimes one writer did the outline, someone else did the synopsis, someone did the dialogue, someone did the revision, someone did a complete rewrite.”
The job working for Welles was something different—it provided Mankiewicz with his first chance to write a movie without a studio hovering over his shoulder. His role on “Citizen Kane” was the result of some curious twists of fortune: Welles originally hired him to ghostwrite radio shows, while planning to make his first film for R.K.O., an adaptation of “Heart of Darkness.” Welles was going to play both Marlow and Kurtz, as he had done in a radio version of the novel, and his artistic idea was as extreme as anything in “Kane”: Marlow would never be seen, because the camera would follow the explorer’s subjective point of view throughout. The plan fell through because of its budget, and his next project—a mystery about a fascist plot in America, which he asked Mankiewicz to help out on—did, too. Then, in conversation with Mankiewicz, the idea for a project about the life of a powerful person, seen from multiple perspectives, came up. Welles and Mankiewicz ran through several possible subjects (including the gangster John Dillinger) before Mankiewicz suggested the newspaper magnate and politician William Randolph Hearst. Mankiewicz knew Hearst well—before he wore out his welcome, as he did with just about everyone, he and his wife had been frequent guests at Hearst’s colossal San Simeon compound.
Mankiewicz and Welles’s collaboration on the script—which Mankiewicz originally called “American” (the ultimate title was chosen by the head of R.K.O., George Schaefer)—was a peculiar one. Mankiewicz was in a half-body cast at the time, having broken his leg badly in a car accident (he was a passenger). Welles parked him in a house in the remote town of Victorville, eighty miles from Hollywood, where a nurse took care of him. Welles’s associate John Houseman, at Mankiewicz’s insistence, was present to talk out the story. The secretary Rita Alexander took Mankiewicz’s dictation and typed it up, and Welles periodically visited and often called to consult.
The battle over credit began while the movie was still in production, in the summer of 1940, and sorting out the details is like diving into the Warren Commission report. Mankiewicz, realizing that the script was turning out well, regretted that his deal with Welles specified he’d get no credit for it. Hecht and others in his circle urged him to take the matter public—and to fight for sole credit. For Welles, that would have been a big problem, not least because losing his writing credit might have put him in breach of his R.K.O. contract, which specified that he’d act, write, produce, and direct. Mankiewicz appealed to the Screen Writers Guild, then withdrew his appeal, out of fear of retribution from Hearst. It was R.K.O. that ultimately decided to award him joint credit with Welles. Famously, when the Oscar was announced at the awards ceremony, the cheering at the mention of Mankiewicz’s name obliterated the mention of the second-credited writer, Welles. Neither man was present at the ceremony, but Richard Meryman, in his groundbreaking 1978 biography “Mank,” cites the speech that Mankiewicz said he would have given: “I am very happy to accept this award in Mr. Welles’s absence, because the script was written in Mr. Welles’s absence.”
The story of Welles and Mankiewicz’s fraught collaboration was a perfect vessel for Pauline Kael’s preoccupations as a critic. She had made her name with a 1963 piece, “Circles and Squares,” savaging the film critic Andrew Sarris and other proponents of the “auteur theory,” which emphasized the primacy of directors as the creative force in movies. A lover of classic Hollywood movies and their commercial, popular appeal, she believed that the emphasis on directing led critics to overlook the inherently collaborative nature of Hollywood filmmaking, and she portrayed other critics’ principled attention to directors (including many whose work went unduly unacclaimed) as an orthodoxy in need of demolishing. In “Raising Kane,” she argued that much of what’s great about “Citizen Kane” in fact arose not from Welles but from the contributions of Mankiewicz and the rest of the cast and crew, and not from the film’s originality but from its place in, and reflection of, cinematic traditions that passed into it by way of the studio system and its veterans. After “Citizen Kane,” Kael concluded, Welles “was alone, trying to be ‘Orson Welles,’ though ‘Orson Welles’ had stood for the activities of a group.”
When “Raising Kane” was published, the piece outraged Welles himself—who was busily working on movies, including “The Other Side of the Wind”—and caused an outcry among critics who appreciated Welles’s entire œuvre and among historians who knew the fuller story. In October of 1972, in Esquire, the filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich rebutted Kael’s findings with his own ten-thousand-word piece, titled “The Kane Mutiny.” In it, Bogdanovich demonstrated that, in reporting her piece, Kael had failed to speak with Welles or anyone who’d worked with him on the script, or, for that matter, with anyone who might have provided a different point of view. Bogdanovich interviewed the screenwriter Charles Lederer, a close friend of Mankiewicz’s, who said that Mankiewicz complained to him about Welles’s many changes to the script. Welles’s secretary from the time, Katherine Trosper, hearing of the charge that Welles wrote nothing of “Citizen Kane,” told Bogdanovich, “Then I’d like to know what was all that stuff I was always typing for Mr. Welles!” Among the other sources Bogdanovich spoke with was a U.C.L.A. professor, Howard Suber, who claimed that Kael had cajoled him—with a promise of a book contract that never materialized—into sharing his copious research on “Citizen Kane” with her, only to use it in her piece, uncredited, while distorting its findings—“After months of investigation I regard the authorship of Kane as a very open question,” he said. Bogdanovich wrote, in 1998, that although he had done “all the legwork, research, and interviews” for the piece, Welles himself—a close friend and associate—“had taken a strong hand in revising and rewriting” it. (In a recent e-mail, Bogdanovich said that there were “bits and pieces that Orson added or subtracted—added, mainly.”)
Subsequently, more impartial, and more crucial, sources for Mankiewicz’s life emerged. Notably, in 1985, the scholar Robert Carringer published a scholarly book about “Citizen Kane” that drew upon newly available studio archives. Carringer concluded that the script bore the work of both writers—Mankiewicz’s work was fundamental, and Welles’s revisions were transformative. Fincher, in making “Mank,” revised his father’s script to soften its anti-Welles bent. The film he made is less interested in litigating the battle between Mankiewicz and Welles than in exploring the relationship between Mankiewicz and Hearst, and how it informed Mankiewicz’s writing of “Citizen Kane.”
There’s little doubt, by now, that Mankiewicz’s Hearst connection provided the essential substance for the film; it also nearly destroyed the film before it could be released. Mankiewicz took it upon himself to provide a copy of the script to Charles Lederer, a friend and screenwriter who also happened to be the nephew of Hearst’s mistress, the actress Marion Davies. It came back to Mankiewicz with markings on passages relating to Hearst. Welles had denied that the movie was based on Hearst’s life; the set had been kept strictly sealed, and the footage wasn’t shown to anyone outside the studio. But then the gossip columnist Hedda Hopper pushed her way into a screening and reported what (rather, who) she thought the movie was about, and Hearst sprang indignantly into action, orchestrating a scurrilous publicity campaign against the movie, and exercising his considerable influence in Hollywood—especially with Louis B. Mayer, the head of M-G-M (who’d fired Mankiewicz, in 1939)—to prevent it from ever being seen.
The pressure that Hearst exerted was fearsome and monstrous. He threatened to divulge salacious information about stars and studio executives, to drum up a nativist campaign against European (mostly Jewish) movie-industry people who’d fled Hitler and found work in Hollywood, and to launch an anti-Semitic campaign against the (mostly Jewish) studio heads. In response, Mayer (who was Jewish) organized a consortium of studio heads to buy the negative of “Citizen Kane” from R.K.O. and destroy it, but Schaefer, R.K.O.’s head, rejected their demand. Hearst also had his newspapers pursue Welles; he charged that Welles was a Communist (he wasn’t); he used his influence with J. Edgar Hoover to have Welles investigated by the F.B.I. Hearst’s movie-gossip columnist Louella Parsons, Meryman writes, contacted the local draft board to try to get Welles drafted. (Later, he inflicted scathing journalistic revenge against Mankiewicz, too, inflating a minor accident caused by Mankiewicz’s drunk driving into a national scandal.) The campaign worked: though “Citizen Kane” wasn’t burned, Mayer got the studios—which also owned most of the first-run movie houses in major cities—to refuse to screen it.
What saved “Citizen Kane” was the fervent critical acclaim it garnered at private screenings held while its release was in doubt. John O’Hara wrote, in Newsweek, that he’d “just seen a picture which he thinks must be the best picture he ever saw”—and warned readers that they might never get to see it. On May 1, 1941, “Citizen Kane” was released in New York, in a single theatre, and was eventually shown nationwide; it did reasonably well in big cities but was a flop—indeed, was often not screened at all—in small-town theatres that booked it. Despite the instant renown that the film earned Welles, its influence on his career was disastrous. Welles was never able to work again in Hollywood with the same freedom. To help Schaefer keep his job (which was threatened by the controversy over “Citizen Kane” and, even more, by its financial losses), Welles renegotiated his contract for his second film, “The Magnificent Ambersons,” renouncing final cut, and he paid the price—the film was mutilated by the studio, which cut forty-three minutes out of it and had another director reshoot rewritten portions. Welles, in 1946, told Roy Fowler, “I came to Hollywood saying, ‘If they let me do a second picture, I’m lucky.’ They didn’t, and since that time I’ve been trying to get back to the position I was in when I first arrived with a contract to make the picture in my own way without interference.” The only freedom he had, from that point on, came when he financed his own movies with money he earned as an actor.
Before he went to Hollywood, Welles described his work in the theatres as “actor-director,” and he conceived of his filmmaking the same way. In the theatre, he had always been an adaptor of Shakespeare, or Christopher Marlowe, or George Bernard Shaw, and when he made movies he took a similar approach. He adapted Joseph Conrad, Shakespeare, Kafka, Booth Tarkington, several pulp-fiction stories, and even a radio script involving the character Harry Lime (which he’d played in Carol Reed’s film “The Third Man”). Why would he not adapt Herman Mankiewicz, too? There was a difference, though, from a practical perspective, in making use of the raw material of a contemporary who was also a competitor for the honors of the business (whereas the pecking order of Shakespeare and Welles was unambiguous in one direction). During the writing of “Citizen Kane,” Mankiewicz took to calling Welles “Monstro” and lampooned him for his ego; Mankiewicz once quipped, upon seeing Welles pass by at the studio, “There but for the grace of God goes God.”
Yet Welles’s earnest self-regard as an artist was ultimately one of the qualities that distinguished him from the cynical, unfulfilled Mankiewicz. Mankiewicz’s own assessment of the art of screenwriting was overly harsh (there is indeed an art to comic books), but he was right to consider it a lesser activity than writing plays—not because movies are less significant than plays but because screenwriters’ work is a matter of industrial necessity rather than artistic impulse. Kael’s most grievous error, in her polemic, was in failing to recognize that Welles would have been Welles without Mankiewicz; if he had gotten to make “Heart of Darkness,” it would in all likelihood have been as original as “Kane,” and, free from the vengeful wrath of Hearst, he’d likely have been able to make a second film without losing his creative freedom. For that matter, Mankiewicz, without the strictures of Hollywood, would likely have been at his creative heights sooner and longer. The story of Mankiewicz’s movie career, no less than Welles’s, involves the horror built into the glory of Hollywood—the relentless power of commercial institutions to impose its practices and formulas on the art of movies.
In the short term, Mankiewicz fared better after “Citizen Kane.” After the film came out—and after Mankiewicz won his Oscar for it—his career picked up. The most prominent movie he worked on was “The Pride of the Yankees,” the Lou Gehrig bio-pic from 1942; the one great one he wrote was “Christmas Holiday,” from 1944, a film noir starring Deanna Durbin and Gene Kelly, which features an intricate flashback structure akin to that of “Citizen Kane,” and which was directed—brilliantly—by Robert Siodmak, one of the great film-noir specialists (and one of the European Jewish filmmakers who’d fled the Nazi regime). Yet Mankiewicz’s bad habits caught up to him again; he was only intermittently reliable, and his health began to fail. As Meryman reports, wartime and postwar Hollywood also became home to a new generation of executives and producers, for whom Mankiewicz’s Round Table roots and journalistic tumult were more a matter of quaint nostalgia than of unquestioned admiration. Mankiewicz, Meryman writes, was lucid about his own calamity at having done movie work only because it paid well: “I came for a few months. I don’t know how it is that you start working at something you don’t like, and before you know it, you’re an old man.” Though Mankiewicz made an indelible mark on the history of cinema, he was held back from the start by his contempt for the movies, and for the studio machinery that dictated how they were made—ironically, the very thing that Kael, in her defense of Mankiewicz, would celebrate. In the end, Mankiewicz was cursed by the fact that he didn’t see the movies as an art at all, while Welles made his far greater mark because he never saw them as anything but.
