(Editor’s note: Film historian Joseph McBride, who penned “Rough Sledding with Pauline Kael” in 1971, graciously offered to revisit the authorship of Citizen Kane for Wellesnet after screening David Fincher’s new Netflix movie Mank — the latest in a string of unflattering film portrayals of Orson Welles.)

By JOSEPH McBRIDE

Welles hatred is hardly a new phenomenon. Even before Orson Welles came to Hollywood in 1939, he incurred the wrath of the Hearst press and the U.S. government for his work in the theater. Many envious people in Hollywood resented the wunderkind for his extreme youth, his remarkable contract with RKO, his beard, his intellectualism, and his leftism. They mocked him and gloated over his early difficulties in getting a film before the cameras. One actor tried to physically attack him at a restaurant. Even then, as Welles recalled in a 1974 interview for British television, he was seen as “this terrible maverick. . . . I was sort of forty or thirty years ahead of my time… a sort of ghost of Christmas future. There was the one beatnik, you know, there was this guy with a beard who was going to do it all by himself. I represented the terrible future of what was going to happen to that town. So I was hated and despised, theoretically, but I had all kinds of friends among the real dinosaurs, who were awfully nice to me. And I had a very good time.”

All these years later, long after the studio system has collapsed, after the “kids with beards” briefly took over the town (as Billy Wilder’s 1978 Fedora puts it), and the conglomerates took over, making it almost impossible for true independents to function in Hollywood, Welles is still hated in some quarters of the American film industry. That hatred (not evident abroad) also infects much of our mass media and some dark corners of the book publishing world. The latest Hollywoodite to jump on the anti-Welles bandwagon is director David Fincher, whose Netflix film Mank is just one in a string of films portraying Welles as a megalomaniacal bogeyman. And, borrowing from Pauline Kael’s discredited 1971 New Yorker article “Raising Kane,” it accuses him of being a credit thief. Mank even goes beyond Kael to portray Welles as an overhyped charlatan as a director. The film has his associate John Houseman (Sam Troughton) telling Citizen Kane’s co-screenwriter, Herman J. Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman), “Don’t be fooled — he’s a showman, a busker reveling in sleight-of-hand. Save yourself the trouble.” And it portrays the cultivated Houseman as lapsing into ungrammatical language and urging Mank to make the complex structure of Kane simpler and easier for the masses to digest.

It is no longer surprising that many in the media have uncritically swallowed the myriad lies and distortions this film peddles or sidestepped the Kael controversy in a cowardly way. These pernicious myths designed to tear down a great filmmaker persist despite the fact that careful research by film historian Robert L Carringer in Critical Inquiry in 1978 discredited Kael’s claim that Welles didn’t write any of the screenplay of Citizen Kane, which is credited both to him and, in first position, Mankiewicz.

I tried to analyze the roots of Welles hatred in my 2006 book What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?: A Portrait of an Independent Career, including the strange American obsession with Welles’s weight.  As Jonathan Rosenbaum has noted, harping on Welles’s weight is a coded way of attacking him for being an artist (i.e., an artist in American eyes is someone profligate, wasteful, hedonistic). I thought I had put that talk to rest for a while, but it has had a resurgence. Such hangups don’t affect Welles’s reputation in other, less puritanical countries. As I discuss at length in the book, the American antipathy to Welles on a more serious, overt level stems from the unflagging radicalism of his work, both thematically and stylistically, in the theater, radio, and film. That caused him to be regarded as a dangerous influence from his days in the New York theater in the late 1930s, when he first came under attack by the Hearst papers, before he provoked them further by critiquing William Randolph Hearst in his daringly anti-fascist 1941 Hollywood debut film. As Rosenbaum has further observed, another scandal of Welles’s career in the eyes of Hollywood is that he used his own money to make his films. That is one of the oldest taboos in the industry and marked Welles as someone to be shunned and despised.

After the collapse of his Hollywood directing career and his escape to Europe when the blacklist began in 1947, Welles made films mostly with the money he earned from his work as an actor, so he enjoyed the independence that meant so much to him as a director. As he said later, “I chose freedom.” That causes the resentment of wage-slaves in Hollywood who don’t have the courage to go that route. He paid a price by having difficulty getting his films seen in this country and being unable to finish many of his projects, leading to gloating by smug professional filmmakers and commercially minded reviewers even today.

Another film historian, Douglas Gomery, a colleague of mine from our days at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, analyzed Welles’s filmmaking career as that of an independent filmmaker avant la lettre, rather than that of a failed Hollywood director, as most Americans have seen him since he was fired by RKO in 1942 for making perhaps the greatest film ever made in this country (no, not Kane). Gomery saw Welles instead as an independent who briefly had the resources of a major studio before being inevitably kicked out for the crime of not being a popular artist. The only medium in which Welles was truly popular was radio, but as a filmmaker, as Jean Renoir put it, Welles was an “aristocrat” working in a popular medium, a contradiction in terms, despite the ambitions he once had to become the American Charles Dickens (as I heard him say in the 1980s). I borrowed Gomery’s theme, with full acknowledgment, for What Ever . . ., reexamining Welles’s entire career path to trace how he became totally independent and what the ramifications were for his art. Doing so enabled me to take a more accepting view of Welles’s career peregrinations than most commentators and to see his independence as valiant rather than pathetic, as American observers prefer to see it because it reinforces their own compromises.

The films in which Welles is portrayed as a character tend to see him in much the way David Thomson paints him in his 1996 biography, Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles, the most vicious of all books on Welles, which is saying quite a lot, since Charles Higham wrote two before that. Welles is almost invariably portrayed as a dour, forbidding figure, an ogre who tyrannized people on the set and who exemplifies Ben Hecht’s old quip, “Orson has no friends, only stooges.” In RKO 281, a 1999 TV movie about the making of Kane, Liev Schreiber plays Welles as an ogre all the way through.

Even when Welles is shown performing the heroic feat of persuading the hardboiled New York heads of the film industry in a Radio City Music Hall screening room not to follow the urging of MGM chief Louis B. Mayer and his boss, Nicholas Schenck of Loews Inc., to burn the negative of Kane to appease Hearst — in a speech about freedom of speech vs. fascism that Robert Wise, who was there, told me was “the greatest performance of Welles’s life” — RKO 281 undercuts that great moment by having his RKO patron George Schaefer (Roy Scheider) ask Welles if he really meant it and Welles giving him a sly, ambivalent response.

That’s not the most ridiculous portrayal of Welles in a film, however. That dubious distinction goes to a 1999 short called Orson Welles Sells His Soul to the Devil, a title that literally describes how he does the foul deed during the production of his Voodoo Macbeth (1936) in order to rule the world of show business. When I asked writer-director Jay Bushman why he would want to make such a film, he couldn’t give me an answer; I gathered that he just thought that was the conventional wisdom and didn’t need an explanation.

Another absurd portrayal of Welles came that same year in Tim Robbins’s Cradle Will Rock, an often lively and fascinating portrait of the Popular Front period in the New York arts scene of the late 1930s, including Welles and Houseman’s landmark 1937 Federal Theatre Project production of Marc Blitzstein’s labor opera, The Cradle Will Rock. Despite the film’s exciting recreation of the opening night in which Welles and Houseman defied the federal government’s ban of the production by staging it in a different theater without sets, director Robbins oddly makes both men look foolish. Welles is played by Angus Macfadyen as a short, shambling bum and incoherently ranting alcoholic, much older than the actual youthful prodigy, while Houseman is depicted by Cary Elwes as a pompous twit. The most charitable interpretation of these lapses in an otherwise good film is that Robbins wanted to demystify the role of the director by portraying Welles as having little to do with one of the greatest feats of his young life. Houseman became “collateral damage” in Robbins’s misguided project.

The film comes off as a petty symptom of the “anxiety of influence,” another way of saying younger directors are simply jealous of Welles (as many are of Steven Spielberg, whose life and work have been the target of similar hatred, a phenomenon I wrote about in a 2009 article for the UK journal New Review of Film and Television Studies). Robbins is one of many lesser filmmakers so intimidated by the influence of Welles that they feel they have to tear him down, even though Jean-Luc Godard once said, “All of us, always, will owe him everything.” But Godard has a stronger ego and doesn’t suffer from being an American like Robbins or Fincher. Fincher is not worthy of carrying Welles’s viewfinder, yet he has denigrated him as having been “immature” at the time he made Kane and as someone who spoiled the rest of his career with “the disastrous impact of his own fits of delusional hubris.” It’s easy to see “delusional hubris” as projection on the part of a filmmaker so insecure about his own talent that, as we used to say, he has developed a swelled head.

Sympathetic portraits of Welles onscreen are less common. Tim Burton’s 1994 Ed Wood provides a brief scene in which Welles is warmly portrayed by Vincent D’Onofrio (though voiced by Maurice LaMarche), in a fictionalized meeting with Z-movie director Ed Wood (Johnny Depp). Wood spots Welles dining alone at the venerable Hollywood restaurant Musso & Frank’s and goes over to commiserate with the maestro about the difficulties of the business. The bond they share is the one most valued by Welles: independence. But Welles is then in the process of working for Universal-International on the film that became Touch of Evil, and Ed Wood has him inaccurately complain that the studio forced him to cast Charlton Heston as a Mexican. In fact, changing a character in the Whit Masterson novel Badge of Evil from an Anglo California detective to a Mexican federal narcotics official to give Heston a more complex and significant role to play, and to strengthen the film’s ethnic tensions, was Welles’s idea, even though it may seem eyebrow-raising to the censorious PC crowd today and provokes a cheap laugh in the film. But Ed Wood’s portrayal of Welles as an isolated figure in the Hollywood system, understood only by a fellow ostracized filmmaker, is a poignant tribute on Burton’s part.

Other than that, the portrayal of Welles onscreen I have found most accurate is by English actor Christian McKay in the 2008 film Me and Orson Welles, directed by Richard Linklater from the novel by Robert Kaplow. McKay captures the charisma of Welles, his humor and charm, in ways none of the other portrayals has so well or fully. McKay’s characterization shows Welles, while directing his Mercury Caesar onstage in 1937, coming up with brilliant blocking and ways of molding performances on the spur of the moment even while his mercurial nature frequently exasperated his colleagues. Those were qualities I witnessed at first hand while spending more than five years acting for Welles in The Other Side of the Wind. What the other film portrayals miss was how much fun Welles was to work with, constantly entertaining the cast while he came up with fresh creative solutions and made everyone feel like a valued contributor. But even Me and Orson Welles has to transform him into an ogre toward the end by having him fire the worshipful young lead character (Zac Efron), which didn’t happen in actuality (the even younger fellow he’s based on, teenager Arthur Anderson, lasted with the company for three years and was never fired) but is a trope that seems de rigeur for screen depictions of Welles.

Since I had read the 1994 script of Mank by the late Jack Fincher (the journalist father of the director), which portrays Welles in the usual clichéd fashion, I was wary of the film but hoped that David Fincher and producer Eric Roth, in their uncredited rewrites, might have transformed it into something more accurate. David Fincher has been quoted as finding his father’s script too one-dimensional in painting Welles as a villainous exploiter of Mankiewicz. But when I finally saw the film, I was sickened, although not particularly surprised, to see Welles once again portrayed as a bullying maniac and credit thief, a figure out of Kael’s malicious fantasies.

The Finchers evidently wanted to believe her article that was critiqued by Peter Bogdanovich, Andrew Sarris, me, and others at the time before Carringer managed to study all the available drafts of the Kane script before Ted Turner closed his files (I also wrote about the script controversy for the entry on screenwriting in the 2009 Harvard University Press collection A New Literary History of America). Carringer demonstrated that the film’s screenwriting credits are fair and accurate. Rosenbaum discovered that Bogdanovich’s rebuttal, “The Kane Mutiny,” in the October 1972 Esquire, was actually written by Welles himself, with his young amanuensis doing some of the legwork. Evidently they thought of this ruse as something of a joke or an ironic way of confronting Kael, as well as a way around what Welles once disparaged as “that odious thing, ‘a reply to the critic.’” Kael’s grossly inaccurate piece was shamelessly reprinted, without corrections, in her last collection, For Keeps: 30 Years at the Movies (1994).

Sarris pointed out in one of his critiques of Kael back then that I was the first writer who had given Mankiewicz his first sustained critical attention he ever received for his work on the film, in a 1968 appendix on the script I wrote in the section on Welles for my book Persistence of Vision: A Collection of Film Criticism. That script, which I found in the Wisconsin Historical Society and spent a month copying with my portable typewriter, was my bible as an aspiring screenwriter. It remains my favorite screenplay, and I have always loved Mankiewicz for his intelligence, sage and cutting wit about Hollywood, savvy journalistic background, and mastery as a screenwriter. But Mankiewicz did not deserve all the credit for the script of Kane, as Kael and Mank and the mendacious TCM host Ben Mankiewicz (Herman’s grandson) would have us believe.

To pay tribute to this still relatively unknown Hollywood screenwriter (who famously wired Hecht and others to come there because “MILLIONS ARE TO BE GRABBED OUT HERE AND YOUR ONLY COMPETITION IS IDIOTS. DON’T LET THIS GET AROUND”) does not require denigrating his collaborator on the best film he ever wrote. Credit is not a zero-sum game, even if Kael, The New Yorker (whose vaunted fact-checking system failed spectacularly in that instance), and Hollywood tend to think so. Welles wrote Bogdanovich after Kael’s attack was published, “I hate to think what my grandchildren, if I ever get any . . ., are going to think of their ancestor: something rather special in the line of megalomaniac lice. Of course, I’d be grateful for a chance to send some sort of signal to those mythical descendants — But how? Fight for my honor? And it really is, of course, an old-fashioned question of personal honor. But . . . even if the code of the duello weren’t defunct — how the hell do you ‘call out’ a lady movie critic at dawn?”

I was surprised when I saw Mank to find that not much of it is actually about the Kane script controversy. Much more is about, of all things, the 1934 California gubernatorial election. That highly charged political battle, in which MGM’s Mayer and Irving Thalberg (whom Welles considered the greatest villain in Hollywood history) made fake newsreels to help defeat Socialist writer Upton Sinclair, was well-covered in Greg Mitchell’s 1992 book The Campaign of the Century: Upton Sinclair’s Race for Governor of California and the Birth of Media Politics. That book is liberally borrowed from in Mank, as is Richard Meryman’s thoroughly researched 1978 biography, Mank: The Wit, World, and Life of Herman Mankiewicz, but neither is credited. Nor does Kael get credit, or Mank himself for that matter, even though many of the best lines in the script are his. And the film evidently fabricates a central role for Mankiewicz in that 1934 campaign, while simultaneously blurring his complex, often contradictory and controversial political stances to make him more palatable to a 2020 audience. The best moment in the film (though fictitious) is Mank’s begging Thalberg with sudden sobriety, “Don’t do this, Irving.”

It seems that David Fincher somehow recognized he was on shaky ground with simply repeating Kael’s lies and so preferred to retreat into his subplot. Although there is no evidence that Herman Mankiewicz, unlike his brother Joseph, played a significant role in the Sinclair controversy, that does not inhibit Fincher from inventing one, inadvertently suggesting that Thalberg fabricate his infamous anti-Sinclair “newsreels” that helped turn the election. Mank suggests Herman’s guilt over that caused him to write a film attacking Hearst, the rightwing patron of Mayer and Thalberg, and thereby getting back at Hollywood and the news media. Mankiewicz’s unfilmed script about Adolf Hitler, which Hollywood had anxiously rejected, is briefly mentioned, but not his unfinished, kaleidoscopic, Kane-like play about John Dillinger, or a similar play Welles claimed to have written about a Western character. It’s ironic that Fincher’s film supposedly exalting the genius of Mankiewicz somewhat diminishes his talents. Although a far amount of claustrophobic screen time is spent showing Oldman (in a subtly intricate performance) as the perpetually sozzled, temporarily disabled Mank on his back in a Victorville hotel mumbling as he dictates Kane to a secretary, the actual creative process that went into the work is barely elucidated. More time is spent on his cleverness in smuggling booze into the hotel and charming his female helpers as well as conning Houseman, whom Fincher peculiarly moved to a different hotel, as if to minimize Houseman’s considerable contribution to the script (which Welles acknowledged, as he did that of Mankiewicz). This film plays loose with all kinds of facts, big and small, including even the date of President Roosevelt’s 1933 Bank Holiday, exceeding the usual license allowed to docudrama or the kind of allegory this film attempts to be.

The Finchers’ evident thematic intent is to show Mank heroically rallying, for once in his life, to write something of great value but almost being bullied out of credit by a craven, arrogant thief. To pull off that magic trick of storytelling, Fincher and his late father must (1) refer to what Mank is writing as “the first draft”; (2) ignore the previous weeks Mankiewicz and Welles spent together in Hollywood working out the structure and characters of what became Citizen Kane; (3) ignore the parallel draft of the script Welles was working on in Beverly Hills at the same time Mank was writing his long draft in Victorville, some of which was being sent down to Welles to revise; (4) fail to depict the visit or visits Welles paid to Victorville while Mank was writing (a photo of him there with Mank and Houseman can be consulted in Meryman’s biography), even though Marion Davies (Amanda Seyfried) is shown visiting, which did not happen; (5) downplay as mere “editing” or “noodling” the numerous drafts Welles did in reworking their early work in at least seven drafts; and (6) ignore Welles’s constant revisions even through shooting. As Carringer puts it in his judicious study of the scripts:

“Herman Mankiewicz’s principal contribution to the Citizen Kane script was made in the early stages at Victorville. The Victorville scripts elaborated the plot logic and laid down the overall story contours, established the main characters, and provided numerous scenes and lines that would eventually appear in one form or another in the film. . . . Work [had] scarcely begun on the most glaring problem in the material, making Kane into an authentic dramatic portrait. . . . In the eight weeks between the time the Victorville material passed into Welles’s 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.”

It’s significant that Welles hardly appears in Mank. He is portrayed mostly as a voice over the telephone from Hollywood — not an entirely bad device, given that he was a radio star and portrays himself as a disembodied voice in The Magnificent Ambersons — and we don’t see him much until he erupts into the desert hotel toward the end and stages a ridiculous tantrum. Mankiewicz has committed the capital crime of quietly but firmly demanding co-credit, causing Welles to hurl Mank’s liquor cabinet all over the room, which naturally leads Mank to come up with the room-smashing scene in Kane he hurriedly starts writing. A cornier way of depicting their conflicts and creative inspirations could hardly be imagined, and yet this script has been highly praised by some gullible reviewers.

Although much of the film’s highly atmospheric, alluring yet jaundiced portrait of the old studio system is accompanied with jaunty music, Welles is accompanied by the kind of sinister chords familiar from radio melodrama such as The Shadow. And for some reason the 24-year-old wunderkind is played by a glowering 39-year-old British actor, Tom Burke, who has the voice down pat but looks less like the cock-of-the-walk Orson who made Kane than the more somber and cautious Welles who fled Hollywood for Europe later in the decade. It is not surprising to report that this latest incarnation of Welles onscreen makes him out to be yet another monster, the trite view much of the public had of him after his 1938 radio show The War of the Worlds and the nightmarish image the teenage murderesses in 1954 New Zealand have of Welles as Harry Lime pursuing them down the street outside a movie theater in Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures after they watch The Third Man.

The critical acclaim Mank has been receiving (though hardly unanimous, since some reviewers and feature writers are aware of its dramatic fabrications) shows that our culture has not progressed much beyond Hollywood’s benighted 1939 view of the still-troubling wunderkind. Perhaps most Americans prefer to cling to their anti-intellectual view of artists as sinister people who should be ostracized. We still view maverick artists not as valiant figures but as egomaniacal monsters who mistreat hapless underlings and demand credit they don’t deserve. When Mank is shown at the end giving his Oscar speech for the Kane screenplay to a newsreel camera, he says it was written “in the absence of Orson Welles,” and an unseen man’s voice is heard asking, “How come he shares credit?” Mank says in the film’s last line, “Well, that, my friend, is the magic of the movies.” If David Fincher wants us to believe that kind of nonsense, he would need a better script. Mankiewicz himself would probably scoff at Mank. He was too smart and self-aware and generous at heart to do otherwise. But the mythology of Kael and Mank will likely endure, for it is a tale our belittling culture needs to cling to, and as Welles prophetically told Bogdanovich, “Cleaning up after Miss Kael is going to take a lot of scrubbing.”

* * *

(Joseph McBride has written three books on Orson Welles and plays a film historian in Welles’s film The Other Side of the Wind. He is a professor in the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University and is currently working on a critical study of Billy Wilder.)

________

Post your comments on the Wellesnet Message Board.

• RETURN TO THE HOME PAGE