Orson Welles and Herman Mankiewicz
By RAY KELLY
Frank Mankiewicz’s posthumous memoir So as I Was Saying… repeats the tired, thoroughly disproved allegation that Orson Welles robbed his father, Herman Mankiewicz, of the sole author credit for Welles’ landmark movie Citizen Kane.
The book, published this month by Macmillan, rails against what it calls “the absurd fiction that Welles had written any of Citizen Kane.” The book conveniently ignores pages of documents from the RKO Pictures archives, and incredibly maintains Welles wrote “not one word’’ of the Oscar-winning screenplay – even going as far as falsely stating there are “no script, no notes, no scribbling on envelopes” by Welles. So as I Was Saying… echoes the long-discredited theory espoused by film critic Pauline Kael.
In her controversial 1971 essay for The New Yorker, Kael argued that Mankiewicz was the true author of the screenplay, citing comments from Welles’ nemesis John Houseman. (Ironically, it was revealed years later that Kael failed to properly credit the research done by Howard Suber in her essay Raising Kane).
Director Peter Bogdanovich wrote a stinging rebuttal for Esquire, citing flaws in Kael’s essay and quoting Welles as saying “the initial ideas for this film and its basic structure were the result of direct collaboration between us; after this we separated and there were two screenplays: one written by Mr. Mankiewicz, in Victorville, and the other, in Beverly Hills.” Welles found defenders in Andrew Sarris, Jonathan Rosenbaum and Joseph McBride.
Film scholar Robert Carringer effectively settled the debate 38 years ago.
Carringer’s exhaustive research, first published in 1978, cited nearly day-to-day script records found in the RKO Pictures archives. Those records included Welles’ handwritten contributions on the drafts and subsequent changes that fleshed out the title character.
In his book, The Making of Citizen Kane, Carringer wrote:
“Mankiewicz (with assistance from Houseman and with input from Welles) wrote the first two drafts. His 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 Hearst into a figure of mystery and epic magnificence. Citizen Kane is the only major Welles film on which the writing credit is shared. Not coincidentally, it is also the Welles film that has the strongest story, the most fully realized characters, and the most carefully sculpted dialogue. Mankiewicz made the difference.”
The Mankiewicz family has apparently never read Carringer’s book and will not accept Welles as co-author, despite the overwhelming evidence.
In a Father’s Day showing of Citizen Kane on Turner Classic Movies in 2013, TCM host Ben Mankiewicz talked with his father, Frank Mankiewicz, about the Kane authorship. Frank Mankiewicz, a journalist and former president of National Public Radio who died in 2014, maintained the film “was not written at all by Orson Welles.” He asserted that Welles “begged” his father for co-authorship because Welles’ receiving his full salary for the movie from RKO depended on getting the writing credit in addition to directing, acting in and producing Citizen Kane.
In fact, Herman Mankiewicz lodged and subsequently withdrew a protest with the Screen Writers Guild. (Welles biographer Barbara Leaming has theorized that Mankiewicz feared Guild the might give him no credit at all).
RKO awarded Mankiewicz secondary credit, though Welles opted for the official credit to read “Screenplay by Herman J. Mankiewicz and Orson Welles.”
________
Post your comments on the Wellesnet Message Board.