Herman J. Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman) and his assistant (Lily Collins) enjoy a beverage in ‘Mank.’
Central to the lore of classic Hollywood are tales of disconsolate screenwriters rendered cynical and self-loathing by the indignities that producers and studio moguls heaped upon them, and by their own failures to walk away because they were being paid too much to leave. From F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon to the Coen brothers’ Barton Fink and Hail, Caesar! the story of the hard-bitten and much put-upon screenwriter has long been the subject of novels and plays, of screeds and parodies.
But stories of screenwriters at work don’t really lend themselves to the big screen, or even the small one. Typing, dictating, even wadding up paper and throwing it away isn’t the stuff of high drama. William Holden’s occupation as a screenwriter in Sunset Boulevard is a sidelight to a larger story about the evolution of movies, in which Gloria Swanson’s faded star is central. Humphrey Bogart’s screenwriter is the main character of In a Lonely Place because he may be a murderer.
That may be why films about actual screenwriters are so rare. The sole exception to this rule is Trumbo, which dealt with the struggles of screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, who was briefly imprisoned for contempt of Congress for his refusal to testify to the House Un-American Activities Committee, and then blacklisted by the studios for what they believed was his onetime membership in the Communist Party and his decision not to rat on his fellow lefties. During his decade on the blacklist, Trumbo authored screenplays under various pseudonyms, which won Oscars for other writers who’d been given the credit. He then broke the blacklist when Kirk Douglas and Otto Preminger each decided they’d credit him for writing their respective films (Spartacus and Exodus). In other words, Trumbo told the story of a political period that shook the nation and the film industry, viewed through the prism of the Trumbo family’s ordeal.
There’s plenty of human drama in the life of Herman J. Mankiewicz, the subject of Mank, the new film by director David Fincher with a decades-old script by Jack Fincher, his late father. Mankiewicz was abundantly cynical and deeply self-loathing even before he got to Hollywood. But once he arrived, despite the contempt in which he held both the industry and its product, he thrived.
For a time. Mankiewicz recruited a generation of playwrights and journalists to come west to craft the words for talking pictures; produced some brilliant, anarchic comedies (including two Marx Brothers classics) himself; and turned out other scripts that pleased the studios, even when he knew they were dreck. On his own volition, he penned an anti-Hitler drama in the month following the Nazis coming to power in 1933, which predicted the murderous violence of the then-fledgling Third Reich. Mankiewicz tried to find a studio with the guts to produce it, but the studios, fearing the loss of their German market, turned him down.
By the mid-1930s, though, the subversion of propriety and logic that had once suffused his comedies had given way to a deeper subversion of his own talents. By the time we meet him in Mank, it’s 1940, and he hasn’t written or produced or even completed anything worthwhile in years. He’s still known as a devastating wit, and also for drinking himself into recurrent stupors and gambling away both his own money and whatever he’s sponged from studios and friends. But his fabled wit was confined to the spoken, not the written, word. (The alcoholism and gambling dated back at least to Mankiewicz’s college years at Columbia. His classmate, the great comedy writer Morrie Ryskind, told me when I interviewed him in the 1970s of the couplet he had composed that was affixed beneath Mank’s photo in the Columbia yearbook: We’ll say this much for HJ Mank / When anybody blew, he drank.)
But we also meet Mankiewicz at a moment of potential resurrection. His wit, and the brilliance behind it, attracted one more migrant from Broadway to Hollywood: Orson Welles, the 24-year-old theatrical phenom and radio genius. Welles spent hours with Mankiewicz, cooking up possible projects for his debut film. They settled on dramatizing the life of a media baron modeled on William Randolph Hearst, whom Mankiewicz knew well, having been for a time a regular guest at San Simeon, home to Hearst’s palatial, bizarre estate. The result was the original script for Citizen Kane, which critics and historians have ranked over the subsequent eight decades as one of the greatest movies ever made.
Both Mankiewicz and Welles knew they were playing with dynamite by creating a character so unmistakably modeled on Hearst, whose papers not only helped ensure the success of Hollywood’s films and stars for decades, but also had no hesitation going after anyone whom Hearst wanted to target. (The one remaining American newspaper still functioning in the old Hearst spirit is Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post.) Moreover, Hearst’s longtime friendship with the most powerful studio mogul, MGM’s Louis B. Mayer, made the project even riskier. After Kane was finished but before it was released, Mayer actually offered RKO, the studio that had produced it, a cool million dollars in return for RKO destroying it. Fortunately, RKO refused the offer.
Both Mankiewicz and Welles knew they were playing with dynamite by creating a character so unmistakably modeled on Hearst.
For Mankiewicz, Kane ran the risk that Hearst would view the film as a betrayal and sic his newspapers on him (which he eventually did three years later, when Mankiewicz’s drunk-driving arrest provided the pretext for front-page “exposés” in Hearst papers across the country for nearly a month). The Finchers endeavor to explain why Mankiewicz not only went through with the project, when he had dropped so many others, but also fought, successfully, to get credit for the screenplay, though his initial contract with Welles required him to ascribe credit for their work solely to the director. Pride of authorship, pride of having his name attached to what he knew would be a great film, pride in work that followed the great fall of his career—all these are the answers that Mank quite accurately provides.
But there’s no larger narrative framing Herman Mankiewicz’s life and career and decision to take on Hearst, something that could drive the story beyond the clicking of typewriters and the fight over screen credit. So the Finchers, in the best Hollywood tradition, invented one.
IN MANK, THE HEART OF THE DRAMA is the belated revenge that Mankiewicz takes on Hearst and the studios for their attacks on the 1934 California gubernatorial campaign of author Upton Sinclair, a socialist who won the Democratic nomination that year. Sinclair, the muckraking writer who’d won national acclaim for exposing the abuse of slaughterhouse workers, the animals they dismembered, and everyone who ate meat, in his 1906 novel The Jungle, had run for governor of California twice before on the Socialist Party line, never winning more than 2 percent of the vote. The first year of Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency and the nation’s Depression-era leftward movement, however, led him to believe he could more effectively advance a socialist agenda by running as a Democrat.
Having won the Democratic primary, to general astonishment, on a platform to “End Poverty in California” (known as the EPIC movement), Sinclair appeared to be leading his Republican opponent, a reactionary named Frank Merriam, as November’s election drew near. Then, the state’s Republican establishment—in particular, Harry Chandler’s Los Angeles Times, Hearst’s several California-based papers, and the Hollywood studios—decided to do whatever it took to defeat Sinclair.
Hearst was no stranger to fake and manipulated news. His papers’ depiction of the explosion that had sunk the battleship USS Maine in Havana’s harbor in 1898 falsely attributed the Maine’s demise to the machinations of the Spanish government (Cuba was then a Spanish colony). His paper’s hysterical agitation for retaliatory military action played a key role in pushing the McKinley administration to embark on our first extra-continental imperialist war, in which we wrested control of both Cuba and the Philippines.
It was no great stretch, then, when Hearst’s California newspapers began running stories in 1934 that “reported” on Sinclair’s plans to expropriate small shops and homes (which didn’t actually exist). It was actually the L.A. Times, owned not by Hearst but by Harry Chandler, that took the lead on this, but since Hearst is a key figure in Mank and Chandler isn’t in the picture at all, the Times escapes unscathed in the Finchers’ film. (It didn’t escape Mankiewicz’s sardonic wit. Reviling not just the paper’s reactionary politics but the jejune boosterism that had it put a Los Angeles angle on every story it could, he once said that the quintessential Times headline would be “L.A. Dog Chases L.A. Cat Over L.A. Fence.”)
Of course, Americans had long been accustomed to political fabrications in newspapers, particularly those, like Hearst’s and Chandler’s, whose political slant was well established. The core method of destroying Sinclair’s political hopes highlighted in Mank, and the more innovative one, involved the production and distribution of fake newsreels that were screened before feature films—essentially, the first filmed attack ads in history.
Fiction films had long depicted completely false versions of history, of course (The Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind being two prime examples). But the moviegoing public was unaccustomed to seeing fictional agitprop presented as documentary news. They hit home harder than newspapers’ fabrications, adding the greater authority of a filmed event: In newsreels, that was really FDR speaking, Hitler gesticulating, the Queen Mary docking in New York Harbor.
William Randolph Hearst, played by Charles Dance in ‘Mank’
The studio moguls of 1934 had an ax to grind. They not only loathed Sinclair’s socialism, but also feared his promises to raise their taxes. (In the early 1930s, Mayer was the highest-salaried executive in the nation, and the finance chair of the national Republican Party.) And so, Mayer’s MGM, at the instigation of production chief Irving Thalberg, began assigning directors and cinematographers to film “interviews with prospective voters”—actually, studio extras—that were scripted to depict Merriam supporters as good, solid Americans and Sinclair supporters as foreign-accented Bolsheviks. They even appropriated footage from the Warner Brothers’ picture Wild Boys of the Road, and shot footage of their own of their extras jumping from freight cars, which the newsreel narrators said were shots of dangerous hobos arriving in California in anticipation of a Sinclair regime that would pay them to loll around and make trouble. All this material was bundled together and presented as regular newsreels to the millions of Californians who went to the movies every week. Thus bolstered, Merriam staged a remarkable come-from-behind victory in November’s general election.
In order to posit Mankiewicz’s hatred of Hearst and Mayer as central to his determination to épater le bourgeoisie—at least the Hearst and Mayer wing of the bourgeoisie—in his screenplay for Kane, the Finchers place Mank squarely in the middle of the studios’ machinations. In an exchange with Thalberg, Mankiewicz refuses the studio’s demand that he, like all studio employees, contribute $20 to Merriam’s campaign. (In reality, only a handful of stars who were both so left and so popular that they could reject that demand—chiefly, Warner Bros.’ James Cagney—refused to pay and endorsed Sinclair.) As he leaves his meeting with Thalberg, Mank notes in passing that for an industry that had created fearful horrors like King Kong, it shouldn’t be all that hard to create a Sinclair as monstrous as Kong.
This sparks Thalberg’s idea for the phony newsreels. Mankiewicz then fights in vain to keep the studios from running them in every movie theater in California. The Finchers also create a budding director friend of Mankiewicz’s whom MGM hires to shoot those “newsreels”—who is so remorseful at the role they played in Sinclair’s defeat that he subsequently kills himself. Motivation aplenty for Mank’s scripted revenge!
One problem, however: None of this actually happened. There’s no record of Mankiewicz inspiring Thalberg, imploring MGM not to distribute the newsreels, or even favoring Sinclair. His younger brother Joe (better known today as the writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz), then a lowly contract writer for MGM, actually penned some of the studios’ radio ads for Merriam, while the real director of the fake newsreels never showed any remorse for the deception. The entire motivating force of the Finchers’ film was conjured up out of whole cloth. But despite that, the story of Mank—if not Mank—resonates 80 years later.
IT’S ONLY BECAUSE OF THESE Fincher-created motivations for their protagonist, and the quarter-century delay in finding a studio (Netflix) willing to produce the script, that the issues of socialists breaking out of the third-party ghetto by running as Democrats, and the efficacy of fake news to defeat any liberal candidate, have come to the screen at the very moment when they’ve never been more timely. Mank opened on Netflix one month and a day after the 2020 election, the very moment when the really fake news that only rampant fraud and Venezuelan voting-machine software had kept Donald Trump from a second term was inspiring perhaps the greatest threat ever posed to American democracy.
Fake news has been central to the American right’s political appeal for a long time. The 1934 Republican campaign against Sinclair featured not only the studios’ and the newspapers’ descent into fraudulence, but also the creation of the first professional campaign consultancy. As Greg Mitchell documents in his history of the ’34 election, The Campaign of the Century, Clem Whitaker and Leone Baxter came together to craft ads and mailings against Sinclair just as preposterous as the newsreels, then went on to pioneer campaign advertising and mailings over decades of work for right-wing candidates.
The attacks they waged against Sinclair set the template for attacks on later generations of progressive candidates. One young progressive who first became politically active on Sinclair’s campaign was Jerry Voorhis, the headmaster of a school for impoverished children who himself was elected to Congress from an exurban Los Angeles district two years later. There, he served for a decade until defeated in 1946 by an ambitious young Republican named Richard Nixon.
The distinguishing feature of Nixon’s campaign was to attack Voorhis—a brilliant and creative liberal with social democratic beliefs—as a Communist sympathizer, though in fact Voorhis was a staunch and very outspoken anti-Communist. Nixon actually understood Voorhis’s real politics very well. Years later, when onetime Voorhis aide Stanley Long chided Nixon about his campaign, Nixon told Long, “Of course I knew that Jerry Voorhis wasn’t a Communist. But it’s a good political campaign fire to use. I had to win.”
Does the continued efficacy of campaigns like Nixon’s validate the complaints of today’s centrist Democrats that the presence of avowed and voluble socialists in their party dims prospects in the swing districts Democrats need to win? One such Democrat, Harley Rouda, who was elected to the House in a historically Republican Orange County district in 2018, only to lose that seat to a Republican in 2020, has argued that the Democrats need to counter “the narrative that Democrats are more and more leaning toward socialism.”
But just as Sinclair inspired young leftists like Voorhis and Augustus Hawkins (who in 1934 became the first Black person elected to the California legislature, having campaigned with EPIC’s backing) to run as Democrats, so Bernie Sanders inspired Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other young social democrats to run for and win congressional seats on the Democratic line. More fundamentally, after decades in which American capitalism has funneled all wealth and most income to the top, the most recent (2019) Gallup and Pew polls on the topic both found that 65 percent of Democrats have a favorable view of socialism. Rouda to the contrary, more and more Democrats are leaning toward socialism. That’s not fake news, though it certainly is fraudulent to depict most Democratic elected officials as socialists, or as willing enablers of their socialist colleagues. Then again, from Sinclair to Voorhis to Obama to Biden, Republicans have depicted Democrats as socialists or Trojan horses for socialism (and worse: communism!) for nearly a century, whether they are or not.
There may be a historic statute of limitations on this attack, as the specter of communism recedes into the fuzziest of memories among Americans who came of age after 1989. But whether the right has socialism to rail against or not, the events of the past few months make clear that its ability to craft fake news that rouses the fury of its base against Democrats and modernity doesn’t depend on troublesome socialists.
Ironically, Mankiewicz was one of the very first film industry figures to sound the alarm about fake news—only it wasn’t the fake news that the studios had produced. It was the fake news that Josef Goebbels had produced, the anti-Semitic falsehoods that had played a central role in the Nazis’ rise to power. That’s a story the Finchers don’t tell, and it wouldn’t have provided the kind of direct motivation to Mankiewicz’s work on Kane that his Fincher-augmented anti-studio animus delivers. Then again, both Mankiewicz and Welles were “premature anti-fascists,” and who’s to say that those gut convictions didn’t contribute to the emotions and creativity that gave us Citizen Kane?
