By RAY KELLY
David Fincher’s Mank is a handsome nod to the Golden Age of Hollywood; the fulfillment of his longtime dream to bring his late father’s script to the screen; and clearly a contender in the Academy Awards race.
But since you are reading Wellesnet, what you really want to know is whether Mank does Orson Welles dirty?
Does it perpetuate the Pauline Kael lie that Welles — the 25-year-old star, director and producer of Citizen Kane — did not also co-author its screenplay?
Yes, mainly by choosing to ignore evidence of Welles’ contributions to the script and including a dose of putdowns and misbehavior.
Scripter Jack Fincher blindly followed Kael’s 47,000-word “Raising Kane,” a widely debunked, shallow analysis of the authorship of Citizen Kane published in 1971.
Like “Raising Kane,” Mank ignores Welles and Mankiewicz working out the story details in the weeks before Mankiewicz, accompanied by John Houseman, went to Victorville to write his draft. Welles and secretary Katherine Trosper have told film scholars he penned his own draft in Los Angeles concurrently, yet there is no hint of that happening. The audience never sees Welles rewriting and revising pages sent to him by Mankiewicz, which was documented in Robert L. Carringer’s exhaustive review of the seven drafts and numerous revisions.
In his 1978 essay “The Scripts of Citizen Kane,” Carringer concluded, “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.”
The closest Mank comes to acknowledging Welles input occurs when Mankiewicz, played by Gary Oldman, explains Houseman’s brief absence. “He and the wunderkind are cutting the first draft — a form of creative vivisection — the vital organs are exposed, nothing is learned, and the patient dies on the table.”
Mank seeks to elevate Mankiewicz’s place in Hollywood history, a noble goal, but it does so at the expense of Welles’ reputation.
Near its close, Mank includes an invented scene where Welles, played by Tom Burke, hurls a liquor cabinet against the wall after Mankiewicz demands screen credit for Citizen Kane despite earlier signing a deal that waived credit. The fictitious moment was likely inspired by an explosive fight at Chasen’s, where, according William Alland, Welles threw a flaming Sterno pot at Houseman.
It also has Welles offering Mankiewicz $10,000 to relinquish his screen credit. It’s an unsubstantiated claim voiced by a Mankiewicz crony to Kael, but denied by Welles.
Welles once noted of his self-destructive screenwriting partner: “Mank always needed a villain.”
The same can be said of the movie that bears his nickname.
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