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"My father died in 2003," David Fincher once told Playboy.
After “Fight Club” and “Panic Room”, the director was at the first peak of his career.
“I had made practically every decision up to that point in the hope of pleasing him - or in response to opinions of him that I thought were myopic.
And then suddenly there was no longer this compass. ”But there was one last service of love that he wanted to render to his father.
It was Jack Fincher, head of the “Life Magazine” office in San Francisco, who went to the movies with the son a lot and sparked his love for film.
Jack's god was Orson Welles, and above all the other films was written in stone his “Citizen Kane” from 1940. When Jack Fincher retired and toyed with the idea of writing scripts, the son encouraged him: Write one over the creation of "Citizen Kane"!
Whatever the father did.
Gary Oldman as film Mankiewicz - on a film set just before Jeanne D'Arc is burned
Source: NETFLIX
“Citizen Kane” is to cinema what “Le sacre du printemps” was to music: revolutionary, style-forming.
“Probably no other film has inspired so many young people to want to become a director,” François Truffaut once stated.
For half a century there has not been a film leaderboard without “Citizen Kane” at the top.
And Welles was suspected of being a genius for life.
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His father's script was the nucleus for David Fincher's new film, which is also the fulfillment of a son's duty;
For two decades, Fincher Jr.
tried hard to get the project off the ground, Kevin Spacey was also in discussion for the title role, but it's good that it has now become Gary Oldman.
The hero of "Mank" is no longer Welles.
His name is Herman J. Mankiewicz and lies in bed with a leg in plaster cast for much of “Mank” in a guest house in the Mojave Desert, looked after by a nurse who keeps alcohol away from him, and a typist to whom he dictates a script should.
Model citizen of the film colony: The real Herman Mankiewicz 1933 with his sons Don and Frank.
Don also became a screenwriter
Source: ddp / interTOPICS / mptv
Mankiewicz, called "Mank" by all of Hollywood, is an alcoholic, but also probably the most brilliant author in the film city.
The right scriptwriter for Orson Welles, the 24-year-old child prodigy who, with the radio play “The War of the Worlds”, panicked the whole country of the supposedly landing Martians.
The sensational success has brought him a film contract with the RKO studio that no one in Hollywood has ever received: subject, cast, final cut, nobody is allowed to talk to him.
Since the 1970s, initiated by the critic Pauline Kael, there has been a debate about who actually wrote the “Citizen Kane” script, Welles or Mankiewicz.
Both are in the opening credits.
Fincher joins the Kael faction, Welles only shows up on the phone a couple of times (and for the showdown).
Now a damaged middle-aged author, two young women who are uninterested in him and a question of authorship do not result in a gripping film - and that's why Fincher turns it into a who-with-whom, an ideal prequel to his "The Social Network": We see, as once was networked in the film factory.
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Classic Hollywood of the thirties was an exclusive young white gentlemen's club with a clear pecking order.
The writers who despised the Hollywood system but took its good money were fairly low on the hierarchy ladder;
for this they were exchanged at will.
Anyone who claims that the “Writers Room” for series is a great new invention should take a look at the 1940's in practice.
This is how my studio works: Louis B. Mayer (center, Arliss Howard) explains the rules of the game to the Mankiewicz brothers (Gary Oldman, left, and Tom Pelphrey)
Source: NETFLIX
It goes further up the rungs of the hierarchy to the directors, above them the producers and above them the studio bosses.
"Mank" is also a film about the famous MGM boss Louis B. Mayer (who prescribed his employees a 50 percent wage waiver during the Depression), but that still hasn't reached the top.
Above Mayer stood his financiers in New York, and above Mayer stood the man in whose splendor he liked to bask: the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst.
Hearst, who was apparently the model for the mogul Charles Foster Kane in "Citizen Kane" and threw a lot of obstacles in the way of the film.
In “Mank” there are more Hollywood celebrities than in any other film, ten-second anecdotes for those who know: Greta Garbo, Irving Thalberg, Joan Crawford, Charlie Chaplin, Bette Davis, Clark Gable, Carole Lombard.
Once a group of gentlemen met with producer David Selznick, director Josef von Sternberg and half a dozen screenwriters, who were introduced by name: George Kaufman, Herman Mankiewicz, Joseph Mankiewicz, Sidney Perelman, Charles MacArthur, Ben Hecht - all celebrities in their time.
It's like Tarantino's "Once Upon a Time", only for much more advanced players.
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Because the genesis of a classic is of no interest to anyone except hardcore cineastes, "Mank" offers further docking points.
One of them is, surprisingly, fake news.
In flashbacks, the story of the California gubernatorial elections of 1934 is told, in which probably for the last time in American history a socialist had the chance of a high office: the writer Upton Sinclair, who called for state job creation programs - and a taxation of the film companies.
Louis B. Mayer thereupon commissioned newsreels with outraged "little people" mimed by actors who demonized Sinclair, and was successful: the diabolical Soci received only (but at least) 40 percent of the vote.
Another who does not acknowledge his defeat: editors in the candidate's newspaper after the election in "Citizen Kane"
Source: picture-alliance / Mary Evans Picture Library
It's not the only current parallels that catch the eye.
In “Citizen Kane” the newspaper tsar loses the gubernatorial election, but does not acknowledge the defeat and lets his newspapers headline: “Fraud at Polls!” (Fraud at the polls!).
One figure in “Mank” says about the film business that “the buyer takes nothing but memories.
The goods still belong to the seller. ”We could very well take the film with us on VHS and DVD, as a streaming customer only memories remain.
And after the Depression, studios had to fight to get audiences back to theaters.
Isn't that like now with Corona?
RKO gave Welles a completely free hand, “Citizen Kane” would not have been created in any other studio.
Now Netflix gave Fincher a free hand, “Mank” would never have been created anywhere else, and the reason is the same then as it is now: the pursuit of prestige.
Netflix doesn't care about film history, except for “Citizen Kane”, there is not a single Welles film on offer, why should that?
Orson Welles (left) and George Colouris in "Citizen Kane"
Credit: picture alliance / Everett Collection
"Mank" is not a "real" fincher, no exploring dark souls as usual, no artful structure.
The present (Mankiewicz writes) and the past (Mankiewicz remembers) are blended in a formula.
The pleasure lies in the homage to the role model - which one has to know, however: the gloomy black and white, the rear projections when driving, the key scene from “Citizen Kane”, in which a glass snow globe falls from the dying Mogul's hand.
A gin bottle falls to the floor when Mankiewicz is sleeping.
When you see “Kane” and “Mank” one after the other, Fincher explained, one should mistake them for twins, created in the same era, and visually it comes very close.
“Mank” is a declaration of love for the cinema - and in America the film will also be shown there, with us only on Netflix, from December 4th.
“Mank” is, in contrast to “The Artist” or “Hugo”, not a film that speaks of nostalgia, a longing for the good old days.
Fincher knows she wasn't good.
But fascinating.