A bottle, not a snow globe falls, from the hand of a drunken Herman J. Mankiewicz in the trailer for David Fincher’s Mank.
The clever minute-long Mank trailer harkens back to the Golden Age of Hollywood to promote a movie that looks at the writing Orson Welles’ landmark Citizen Kane.
The Netflix film, due out in December, will revisit the debate over which credited co-writer was actually responsible for Citizen Kane — Mankiewicz or Welles.
New Yorker critic Pauline Kael argued in her now-discredited “Raising Kane” in 1971 that Mankiewicz was the true author of Citizen Kane and Welles was undeserving of co-writing credit on the Academy Award-winning script.
Kael’s shoddy research was quickly questioned by Peter Bogdanovich, Joseph McBride, Andrew Sarris and others. Seven years later, scholar Robert L. Carringer debunked Kael’s claims by citing script revisions and decades-old notes. Carringer concluded Mankiewicz’s “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 (William Randolph) Hearst into a figure of mystery and epic magnificence.”
Based on a script draft leaked to Wellesnet, screenwriter Jack Fincher, the director’s late father, places his thumb heavily on the scale in favor of Mankiewicz. It is uncertain how faithful the Netflix film will be to that draft revision, which is dated September 5, 1994. (Jack Fincher died in April 2003.)
Shot in black and white, Mank stars Oscar winner Gary Oldman as Mankiewicz. Tom Burke stars as Welles and thecast also includes Amanda Seyfried as Marion Davies, Charles Dance as William Randolph Hearst, Tom Pelphrey as Joseph L. Mankiewicz, and Lily Collins as Mank’s secretary Rita Alexander.
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