“Mank” and the writers written by the history of cinema

“There if not by the grace of God God goes,” Herman Mankiewicz once observed when he saw Orson Welles pass by in a restaurant. It was a suitably concise remark from the screenwriter of Citizen Kane, with a bitter tinge of resentment. Now Mankiewicz himself is the subject of a new Netflix movie, Mank, directed by David Fincher.

The film stars Gary Oldman as the witty, alcoholic writer and enters the long-standing controversy over the authorship of Kane, often considered the best film ever made. Pauline Kael, in an influential 1971 New Yorker essay entitled “Raising Kane,” argued that although Welles had gained credit as a screenwriter, Mankiewicz was actually the sole author. His claims were challenged by Welles allies such as Peter Bogdanovich and have since been largely debunked by documentary evidence.

But Kael rejected the idea of ​​the brilliant director as the sole creator of a film, which, as a writer, director, producer and star, Welles represented to many. To use a phrase coined by François Truffaut, the director was the author, the author of the film. A mere screenwriter ranked pretty low in comparison.

While in the theater the playwright is sacrosanct, in the films the writer is the drummer of the band, the butt of jokes. The culture shock of the transition from theater to cinema manifests itself in the Coen brothers’ film Barton Fink, in which a fictional playwright played by John Turturro travels to Hollywood where his experiences become a hellish nightmare. He asks a producer where he can find a fellow writer to give him advice and he is told: “Jesus, throw a stone here, you’ll hit one. And do me a favor, Fink: throw it hard. “

Alfred Hitchcock once said, “To make a great movie you need three things: the script, the script and the script.”

What makes this all the more irritating is the way the directors speak reverently about the script. Alfred Hitchcock once said, “To make a great movie you need three things: the script, the script and the script.” But, paradoxically, it is the importance of the script that ends up devaluing the writer. Why entrust something so vital to a multimillion-dollar project to just one person? Casablanca is based on a play produced no two writers and another three credited writers, with some of his most famous lines, including “I’m watching you, boy” and “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship” added by star Humphrey Bogart and Hal Wallis, the film’s producer, respectively.

Billy Wilder could have scorned the author’s theory, saying, “What does the director do, the phone book?” But writing the script was too important to be left to the writers alone. Wilder co-wrote his scripts with scribes such as Charles Brackett and IAL Diamond, often in hot-tempered relationships. His collaboration with Raymond Chandler on Double allowance it was infamously stormy, and Diamond’s wife claimed bickering couples from their films, including The apartment is Some like it hot, they were inspired by their contentious process. Wilder once wrote about the collaboration: “If there are two guys who think the same, who have the same background, who have the same political beliefs and all that, that’s terrible. It is not collaboration. It’s like pulling one end of the rope. “

Collaborations between director and writer are common, but often it is the writer who is left out of the mix. Leigh Brackett has written several films for Howard Hawks and John Michael Hayes has written four films for Alfred Hitchcock, but Hawkes and Hitchcock were the main examples Truffaut used when writing about the author and took all the limelight. Even more shocking is the case of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, who has written 22 films for director James Ivory and producer Ismail Merchant, but it is Merchant Ivory who is celebrated, not Merchant Ivory Jhabvala.

This is not to say that there are no famous screenwriters. Paddy Chayefsky, writer of Network and winner of three Academy Awards, he is revered in scriptwriting circles. Likewise, William Goldman and Robert Towne were rival gods, dominating the 1970s with such well-written films as Chinatown is All the president’s men. But even the most successful screenwriters will have a side gig as uncredited novelists or screenwriters. The only way for them to guarantee greater visibility and work is to go directing their films, the path followed by the likes of Taxi driver is wild bull scribe Paul Schrader, Silkwood is When Harry met Sally. . . writer Nora Ephron and, more recently, Charlie Kaufman and Aaron Sorkin.

But the most famous screenwriters are those who completely cut out the middleman and go directly to directing. Woody Allen, Joel and Ethan Coen and Quentin Tarantino are justly famous for their clever and witty scripts, which sell well as published screenplays. Interestingly, however, David Fincher is not one of them, happy to direct the scripts of others and has never accepted co-writing credits. As befits a film that greets the screenwriter as an unsung hero, Mank gives screenwriting credit to the real screenwriter, Fincher’s late father, Jack Fincher.

In interviews, Fincher took pains to bring his father’s work to the fore. Yet, despite the appreciation of the creative contribution of Mankiewicz, and a greater appreciation of the role of screenwriters, the director’s figure – for many significant aspects created by Orson Welles – it remains crucial. After all, Mankis the new film by David Fincher.

‘Mank’ has been on Netflix since December 4th