The ‘Mank’ Opening Credits Deserve An Oscar

Mank may not deserve Best Picture at the 2021 Oscars, but the Mank title credits absolutely do deserve an Academy Award. Honestly, director David Fincher played himself, because nothing in the remaining 129 minutes of his Herman Mankiewicz biopic—which released on Netflix on Friday—could possibly live up to the brilliance of that opening sequence. It’s all downhill from there.

Right at the top, you’re hit with the first note of the haunting score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, who are these days more famous for their Oscar-winning collaborations with Fincher than they are for their music with Nine Inch Nails. (Already, the duo has joined the Best Original Song race for the track “If Only You Could Save Me” from Mank.)

Then you get an Orson Welles-style fade-in to “Netflix International Pictures Presents,” which, as fall as I can tell, is the only time in the history of Netflix that anyone has called the streaming service “Netflix International Pictures.” Then, after Gary Oldman’s credit, comes the best part: The fade-in on “Mank,” scrawled with what looks like a paintbrush, offset from the idyllic California sky with a drop shadow.

This is followed by a scroll of names—13 more members of the cast, ending on Charles Dance who gets the “and”—before the camera pans down to a car on the open road. It’s beautiful, it’s evocative, it’s melancholic, and it’s perfect.

The whole thing feels so very ’40s movie that you might think it’s an homage to the Citizen Kane opening credits. But in fact, the Mank credits bear little resemblance to those of Citizen Kane. Go back and give Citizen Kane a stream—it’s free on HBO Max—and you’ll see what I mean. There is no list of actors and producers at the beginning of Citizen Kane. There are no credits for cinematography, production design, or “gowns by,” as we see on Mank. There is certainly not a shout-out for screenplay.

Instead, the only credit at the film’s start, besides the RKO Pictures logo, is this:

Kane was, of course, screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz’s greatest work—to this day regarded as one of the greatest films ever made—but one for which he is rarely remembered for among mainstream audiences, living in the shadow of director Orson Welles, who was listed as the film’s co-writer. For film scholars, the question of who really wrote Citizen Kane has long been a controversy, and though Mank does its best to be more than a film about getting credit, in the end, it posits that Mankiewicz alone wrote the script. (In a final scene, Oldman as Mankiewicz tells reporters: “I am very happy to accept this award in the manner in which the screenplay was written, which is to say, in the absence of Orson Welles.”)

Fincher deliberately distances himself from the Welles’s egomania with the Mank credits. The attribution for the screenplay is given to his late father, Jack Fincher, in clear, prominent letters. The elder Fincher wrote the script before died in 2003, so it seems likely that his son truly did co-write the script this time around—but to leave his name off is a fitting and moving gesture.

Though it lasts no more than a minute, the Mank opening credit sequence is the best scene in the movie. Not only is it gorgeous in its craftsmanship, but it manages to sum up one of the movie’s major themes without a word of dialogue. Not to step on the toes of the dozens of deserving short films this year, but is there any way for a title sequence to be considered for the Oscar for Best Short Film? Mank deserves it.

Watch Mank on Netflix