Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

The journalists who scripted the golden age of Hollywood

Mank, a new Netflix film about reporter-turned-screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, is an opportunity to examine the hacks who shaped Hollywood

Gary Oldman as Herman J. Mankiewicz, co-writer of Citizen Kane, in Mank 
issue 14 November 2020

When talkies appeared in 1927, Hollywood went searching for talkers to write them. It turned to men like Herman J. Mankiewicz: to journalists. The greatest screenwriters of the golden age were journalists first; unlike novelists, they thrived in Hollywood — at least professionally. Good films and good journalism need brevity; novels don’t. Reading about F. Scott Fitzgerald struggling at MGM, 12 years after The Great Gatsby, is brutal, like trying to watch a man learn to walk.

The film Mank, by David Fincher, tells the story of how Mankiewicz and Orson Welles created Citizen Kane — for which they shared an Oscar for the screenplay in 1942 — and how they bickered over the credit. Despite Pauline Kael’s vast 1971 essay ‘Raising Kane’, which accused Welles of credit theft, it’s a red herring, a McGuffin — a rosebud, if you will. Welles himself put Mank first in the credits; and Welles wouldn’t do that without cause.

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