MANK - Netflix biopic on Herman Mankiewicz

[Wellesnet]

Guardian review:
Mank review –
David Fincher swooningly revisits myth of Citizen Kane
5 / 5 stars 5 out of 5 stars.
Gary Oldman plays cynical screenwriter Herman J Mankiewicz in a gorgeously shot film that both revels in Hollywood’s golden age and exposes its corruption

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/n ... aG58LA5Gbk

[Steve Paradis]

A little less enchanted . . .
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/mank ... eview-2020

And an assortment of reviews.
https://editorial.rottentomatoes.com/ar ... -the-year/

[Wich2]

I don't usually even think about the Oscars until the critics awards and 10 best lists start rolling in, but if Mank gets Oscar attention, that would be nice. I'm afraid next year's Oscars might be dominated by streaming contenders as well.

Chief, why afraid?

Venue is just venue; a motion picture is a motion picture. (And I'd bet Uncle Orson, who started in Broadcasting, and was well versed in Guerrilla Filmmaking, would jump right into Interwebular production!)

Take good care and be well,
- Craig

[Le Chiffre]

I was actually referring to the pandemic, and the possibility that it wipes out movie theaters for 2021 as well. Yes, they are the same movies no matter where you watch them, and I watch plenty of movies on streaming, especially since the pandemic hit, but rarely ever do I watch a movie from start to finish on my TV. It's too easy to hit the pause button and then finish up the film the next day or the day after, or sometimes even the week after. In that sense, the experience of watching a movie at home is different from going to a theater to see it. Call me old-fashioned, but I have trouble thinking of a movie specifically made by and for a streaming service to be a theatrical movie, even if it is shown in theaters a few times. I still tend to think of it more as a TV movie.

I'm looking forward to MANK, but I'll watch it on Netflix. I don't have that much need to see it in a theater. However, I will miss the experience of seeing a NEW movie in a theater if that starts to go away, whether from the pandemic or technical obsolescence or whatever. If it does, I think the Oscars will sink further and further into irrelevance.

[Wellesnet]

Netflix's 'Mank' is an eerie look at how media can make a president — and unmask itself
Written nearly two decades ago, the story behind the movie "Citizen Kane" is a prescient skewering of the modern media climate and Fox's Rupert Murdoch.
https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/n ... cna1247699

Meanwhile, Anthony Lane of The New Yorker is not as impressed:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020 ... similar2-3

(Pauline Kael's) case was made with typical trenchancy and dash, and answered (dismantled, some would say) by Robert Carringer, in his 1985 book “The Making of ‘Citizen Kane,’ ” which traced Welles’s reshaping of the screenplay, over many drafts, after Mankiewicz was done.

A more provoking question: Who cares who wrote “Citizen Kane”? Historians of cinema will shriek at the very notion, but we need to remind ourselves that millions of movie watchers couldn’t give a damn either way, and I wonder what they will make of “Mank.”

[Wich2]

Interesting that just in the recent days, a President (Trump) begged a Media Mogul (Murdoch) to help him - and the Mogul told him to take a hike...

[RayKelly]

Wellesnet looks at how MANK perpetuate the Pauline Kael lie that Orson Welles did not co-author the CITIZEN KANE screenplay.

https://www.wellesnet.com/mank-finds-villain-orson-welles/

[Wellesnet]

David Thomson ("Rosebud") weighs in on "Mank":

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/n ... son-welles

[Steve Paradis]

Wellesnet looks at how MANK perpetuate the Pauline Kael lie that Orson Welles did not co-author the CITIZEN KANE screenplay.

https://www.wellesnet.com/mank-finds-villain-orson-welles/

The story goes that after the Bogdanovich/Welles article came out in Esquire, Kael asked Woody Allen what she could say, and he said Nothing. And she never did. She may have cashed the checks from The Citizen Kane Book--so did Welles--but her essay wasn't reprinted in any of her anthologies.
So now it will be up to Fincher to defend the undefendable. The knowing reviewers have already included the truth in their reviews, even the positive ones, so that's getting out. Sooner or later Fincher will be put on the spot, and he'll have nothing to say.

[tonyw]

An ironic take on Ford's "Print the Legend" from THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE (1962). But the fact is the Kael legend has long been debunked.

[JMcBride]

In fact, "Raising Kane" was shamelessly reprinted without corrections
in Kael's last collection, FOR KEEPS: 30 YEARS AT THE MOVIES.

[Steve Paradis]

In fact, "Raising Kane" was shamelessly reprinted without corrections
in Kael's last collection, FOR KEEPS: 30 YEARS AT THE MOVIES.

Thanks. I knew it was omitted from her Library of America volume--due to space was the cited reason--so it seems the friend who edited it had a stronger sense of shame than she did.

[tonyw]

Good to know this, Steve. At least there are some people with integrity around. When invited to meet her by our university (Dis) Honors Program several years ago, I refused. Those who did blithely swallowed her "guff" since she was a "celebrity."

[RKadin]

Hmmm, let's see:

Welles's career includes more innovations in radio, on stage, on the screen and on television than can be easily counted. Even posthumously.

Mankiewicz's career includes a prolific output of word-dependent screenplays, few of which age at all as well as Kane.

Yeah, Mank was the genius and Welles was the hitchhiker-opportunist. My tuchis.

[Le Chiffre]

From Ray's review of MANK:

. 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.

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.

RAISING KANE by Pauline Kael:

Welles was so deeply entangled in the radio shows and other activities and a romance with Dolores Del Rio at the time the script was being prepared that even when he came to dinner at Victorville, it was mainly a social visit; the secretary didn’t meet him until after Mankiewicz had finished dictating the long first draft. Welles probably made suggestions in his early conversations with Mankiewicz, and since he received copies of the work weekly while it was in progress at Victorville, he may have given advice by phone or letter. Later, he almost certainly made suggestions for cuts that helped Mankiewicz hammer the script into tighter form, and he is known to have made a few changes on the set. But Mrs. Alexander, who took the dictation from Mankiewicz, from the first paragraph to the last, and then, when the first draft was completed and they all went back to Los Angeles, did the secretarial work at Mankiewicz’s house on the rewriting and the cuts, and who then handled the script at the studio until after the film was shot, says that Welles didn’t write (or dictate) one line of the shooting script of “Citizen Kane.”

From an abstract of THE SCRIPTS OF CITIZEN KANE by Robert Carringer:

There was constant interchange between Victorville and Hollywood, with Houseman going in to confer on the script and Welles sending up emissaries and regularly receiving copies of the work in progress. Welles in turn was working over the draft pages with the assistance of his own secretary, Katherine Trosper, and handing the revised screenplay copy in its rough state over to Amalia Kent, a script supervisor at RKO noted for her skills at breaking this kind of material down into script continuity form, who was readying it for the stenographic and various production departments...Amalia Kent had impressed Welles with her work on the problematic first-person script for his unproduced Heart of Darkness film, and...she also continued as the script supervisor throughout the shooting of Citizen Kane and prepared the cutting reports for the film's editor, Robert Wise. Kael gives the impression that Rita Alexander, Herman Mankiewicz's private secretary, was performing all these specialized studio functions herself.

From the Wikipedia article on RAISING KANE:

Kael also related a damaging anecdote from Nunnally Johnson, who said that during the filming of Citizen Kane Mankiewicz told him that Welles offered him, through a third party, a $10,000 bribe to relinquish screen credit... "I like to believe he did," Johnson replied when Kael asked if he believed the story. Kael left it at that: "It's not unlikely", she wrote. The unresearched rumor became part of the record, repeated as fact in a book by film historian Otto Friedrich and a documentary by Barry Norman.

Attorney Arnold Weissberger advised Welles not to file suit for libel. Proving malice would be difficult; Welles was a public figure, and Kael's ideas were theories and matters of opinion. A complicating factor was that Welles was receiving a portion of the royalties of The Citizen Kane Book, which contained the script as well as Kael's essay.

Gotta love the irony of Welles making money (probably good money) off of a book that tries to trash his reputation.

Sounds like this is where MANK goes off the rails, though: presenting hearsay as fact.