Facts vs. Truth: How David Fincher’s ‘Mank’ Approaches the Competing Histories of Hollywood’s Golden Age

Of all the things audiences expected from David Fincher’s newest film, Mank, they likely didn’t anticipate an acidic portrayal of politics and corruption in 1930s Hollywood. Fincher, working from a script by his late father, Jack, had indicated that he would explore the writing of Citizen Kane through the eyes of one of its co-writers, Herman Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman), and the battle for screen credit he waged with his co-writer, producer/director/star Orson Welles (Tom Burke).

It turned out that Fincher’s ambitions were wider in scope than that, folding in the 1934 California governor’s race where newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance), in partnership with MGM producers Louis B. Mayer (Arliss Howard) and Irving Thalberg (Ferdinand Kingsley), worked to undermine socialist candidate Upton Sinclair (Bill Nye).

What does this all have to do with Mankiewicz and Citizen Kane? It’s an interesting question, and one that deserves unpacking. Fincher manipulates the historical record to place Mankiewicz at the center of Hearst’s and Mayer’s machinations, and his disillusionment with their decision to more or less invent modern “fake news” via staged campaign newsreels results in his decision to tackle the first draft of the Kane screenplay, and make its hero-turned-villain, Charles Foster Kane, a thinly fictionalized version of Hearst. Fincher has essentially made an origin story for Citizen Kane.

But while the facts are sometimes left aside, Fincher still managed to capture some essential truths about Mankiewicz and the world he traveled through. Like all historical fiction, writers and directors must reshape history to make a good story, but when is history reshaped out of existence?

MANK: ORGAN GRINDER, WINDMILL TILTER, OR BOTH?

Let’s start with Mankiewicz himself. As portrayed by Oldman, he is an alcoholic gambling addict who has a strong distaste for the sordid, assembly-line nature of the movie business. He also happens to be a devastating wit who can both charm and repel anyone in his wake. “One of his tragedies was that he chose to make his living in a field that he didn’t respect,” his grandson, filmmaker Nick Davis, told Decider. “He went to Hollywood to write screenplays just to make a quick buck, and he assumed he would be back east soon doing real work, but the money and the lifestyle were so good that like a lot of other writers followed him, he never got back to work that he respected. ”

That cynicism is all over Oldman’s performance, and in Jack Fincher’s words. In scene after scene, Mank displays his knowledge, wit, and moral backbone in countless scenarios that didn’t actually happen, but they draw on the essential truth of a man to give us a concise portrait of what he was actually like. “He was a journalist at heart,” Davis said. “One thing that he maybe should have been is a political columnist like Walter Lippmann.” (Davis is the author of Competing With Idiots, a forthcoming book about Mankiewicz and his brother, writer-director Joseph Mankiewicz.)

The approach extends to various supporting characters, including the mercurial Louis B. Mayer, the titanic Hearst, and the flighty but sharper-than-she-looks Marion Davies (Amanda Seyfried), Hearst’s mistress. Fincher takes various elements from history and streamlines them to give us hyperefficient bits of character information that repeatedly ring historically true.

While Fincher’s attention to the small details brings his characters to life, things get a little fuzzier as he expands his focus. The central element of Mank is Herman Mankiewicz’s political awakening, thanks to Mayer’s and Hearst’s fake newsreels that spread misinformation and fear about Upton Sinclair’s socialist agenda. Mank feels guilty about accidentally suggesting the idea to Thalberg in the first place, and then begs both Thalberg and Marion to scrap the project. When Sinclair gets pasted in the election, Mank is eventually inspired to burn his bridges with the powerful, and write Citizen Kane as a rebuke to their actions.

It’s a little more complicated than that. Mankiewicz’s politics were often contradictory, and often willfully so. “He had a lot of competing impulses going on inside him,” his biographer, Sydney Ladensohn Stern, told Decider. (Stern is the author of The Brothers Mankiewicz: Hope, Heartbreak, and Hollywood Classics.)

Mank most likely wouldn’t have supported Sinclair, either. “There were inconsistencies where you think sometimes, well, clearly he is a staunch Republican; he’s anti-Roosevelt,” said Davis. “Other times, you think, well, he’s so anti-Nazi … I don’t think that he was ideologically driven, so much as he was driven to question power, and to question authority.” Given Mankiewicz’s other professed sentiments against communism and labor unions in Hollywood, he might not have had much interest in sharing the spirit of a prominent socialist.

Fincher has to work a little harder in order to get Mank in line with Sinclair. At one point, Fincher has Mank say that “in socialism, everyone shares the wealth; in communism, everyone shares the poverty.” There’s not much evidence to suggest that Mankiewicz made such a distinction in real life.

Herman was less angry about political hypocrisy and more frustrated that he didn’t have a job anymore. Fincher manages to capture Mankiewicz’s notoriously self-destructive habits, but he transforms the underlying cause of all of his trouble. “I think that he was always a bit of a victim of what’s going to make a better story,” Davis said. Mankiewicz’s life was not “a life actually well lived, but a life lived well for the biographer.” Fincher takes up this baton, recasting Mankiewicz as a Don Quixote figure, gallantly tilting at windmills.

Mankiewicz’s feelings about Hearst were not so clean-cut as the film’s climax would have us believe. In the film, after his drunken rant in front of Hearst, Mayer, Marion, and the rest of the guests, Hearst shares the parable of the organ grinder’s monkey, a creature who thinks the entire world moves on his performances, all the while ignorant of who actually controls him. Hearst is quite clear who the monkey is, and this drives Mank to eventually take Hearst down with Kane. After the first draft is finished, Mank’s editor, John Houseman (Sam Troughton), asks, “why Hearst?” Mank makes it quite clear that the monkey is seeking revenge on his former master.

Mankiewicz in many ways revered Hearst. Long after he had co-written Citizen Kane, he said of Hearst, “I couldn’t imagine anyone who didn’t have affection for him … he was, and is, one of the most charming men I have ever known.” Furthermore, Hearst was just one of many “American sultans” that Mankiewicz and Welles poured into Charles Foster Kane, and Hearst was used more as a convenient model rather than as Mankiewicz’s bete noire.

That’s not especially dramatic on its face, and toying with facts to make them more dramatically compelling isn’t a problem on its own. But if Mankiewicz wasn’t really a quixotic, David-vs-Goliath crusader, does it not then undercut the ideas you hope to impart by making him one? Compared to, say, Barton Fink—a vicious satire of Hollywood and politics in the 1930s—Fincher has ostensibly hewn close to the real people, rather than fictionalized versions of real people, and that can messy pretty quickly.

NAVIGATING KAEL FORCE WINDS

Then we come to the elephant in the room, and where the project originated for Fincher and his father: the battle between Mankiewicz and Welles over the screenplay credit of Citizen Kane. In a couple brief scenes, Welles suggests that the two of them “noodle” through the rewrites of the script, and then Welles will “run everything through my typewriter,” implying that he will help dig into the rewrite. Mank’s contract says that he must relinquish credit, but once Mank realizes the script was the best thing he’s ever written, he insists that his name be included.

Before Mank confronts him, Welles states that Hearst is attempting to shut the film down before they even begin filming, and Mayer was ready to buy out the investment. He fails, but Welles is concerned about Mank’s health, so he offers a $10,000 buyout to get him off the rewrite. Mank refuses. Welles explodes, reminding him that it was he who rescued Mank from the gutter, and that he’s going back on his word. He threatens that Mank would lose in credit arbitration, before conceding that he probably won’t. He reminds Mank that it is Welles who is producing, directing, and starring in the movie, and then angrily smashes a chest of liquor against the hearth. This sparks Mank to write the climactic scene of Citizen Kane, one of “purging violence.” Welles grudgingly agrees, then storms out of the bungalow.

The scene plays very awkwardly. Welles isn’t much of a character in the film. We don’t really understand his motivations. Why is he so concerned about Mank’s health when he offers to buy him out? Why does he become so angry that Mank is trying to change the terms of his contract? Since we don’t really know anything about Welles as he is depicted in the film, we can’t speculate, and the movie doesn’t help us. It’s mostly because Fincher is stuck trying to resolve two seemingly incompatible ideas.

The scene is partially inspired by critic Pauline Kael’s infamous 1971 New Yorker essay, “Raising Kane.” In it, Kael declares that the value of Citizen Kane doesn’t come from its visual style, but rather its screenplay. She then embarks on a piece of historical revisionism to show that Mankiewicz wrote the whole script himself, and that Welles not only attempted to deny him credit, but also tried to bribe him with $10,000 to make him go away.

None of it was true. Kael never did any actual research, made up stories whole cloth, relied on a single source—John Houseman, who bore a grudge against Welles—and in a nice bit of irony, also plagiarized research from UCLA professor Howard Suber while writing the piece. “It was a painful thing in my life that marked me in various ways,” said Suber. Nothing about Kael’s historical claims held up to scrutiny.

This inspired Welles’s close friend, filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich, to write a response to Kael in Esquire a year-and-a-half later, with some ghostwriting assistance from Welles himself. “He didn’t like the idea that his [grand]children would think of him as a bald-faced liar,” Bogdanovich told Decider.

“Orson also told me, ‘Herman made a tremendous contribution. That’s why I gave him first billing!’ He reminded me of the scene in Kane where Bernstein remembers the woman in white on the ferry. Orson got very emotional. ‘That was Mankiewicz! That’s my favorite thing in the picture!'”

Bogdanovich’s article was a necessary rebuttal of Kael’s work, but her sloppy research and plagiarized ideas were properly discredited by historian Robert Carringer in 1978, when he wrote “The Scripts of Citizen Kane.” Carringer analyzed all seven official script drafts, plus supplemental documents, that conclusively demonstrated that Welles had co-written the script with Mankiewicz. The only problem was that Carringer was a scholar publishing in an obscure academic journal, while Kael was the most popular film critic in America, swallowing up two whole issues of one of the biggest magazines in the country.

“She wrote in that cynical voice that attracted everybody,” Carringer told Decider. “That’s what made her so popular. She’s fun to read. She would say things that other journalists wouldn’t say.”

“Everybody likes to say they found out something that nobody else knows,” Bogdanovich says. There’s an allure of discovery, of disproving people’s assumptions, that fuels a lot of research. Kael attempted to do that, and she did it with her trademark flourishes. The pretty and exciting package has lasted much longer in the mind than the package’s plain but highly functional contents.

Fincher recognized a lot of the problems in the Kael essay. In a recent Vulture interview with Mark Harris, Fincher stated, “Pauline Kael knew a lot about watching movies. What Pauline Kael didn’t know about making movies could fill volumes.” Although the script began with taking Kael’s words as gospel (some of the more unseemly lies from the piece, including Welles’s intention to bribe Mankiewicz, live on in albeit softer form), Fincher did try to move away from them.

Fincher also seems to loop back to Kael’s argument in the final scene in the film. Mank takes questions from the press after he wins the Oscar. “You ask me what my acceptance speech might have been. 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.” A reporter asks, “How come he shares credit?” Mankiewicz responds: “Well, that, my friend, is the magic of the movies.”  These are Mank’s literal last words in the film, and after everything we’ve witnessed, it’s hard not to believe him. We have no reason not to be on Mank’s side when he makes this statement. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s score is lush and mournful, evocative of sympathy, rather than irony.

“THE MAGIC OF MOVIES,” INDEED

One is left scratching one’s head at the whole enterprise. Herman Mankiewicz didn’t sympathize with socialists, nor did he unequivocally hate William Randolph Hearst. Nor was he embittered at being revealed as an organ grinder’s monkey for more powerful people. Nor did he write Citizen Kane in Orson Welles’s absence. So why did David Fincher use him as the vehicle for an exploration of Hollywood’s hypocrisy and philistinism?

This question doesn’t bother Davis or Stern much, two people who know Herman’s legacy better than anybody.

“How great is it that one of our best directors and one of the world’s finest actors is taking on my grandfather, and doing this loving portrait of a really talented, complicated mensch?” says Davis. “It’s an interpretation of a role that is now part of our national cast of characters. It’s just thrilling to think that Herman is now part of that.”

Stern feels similarly. “I loved the structure of the movie,” she told me. “I am so excited that people will see this. It is how Herman will be remembered.” In a riposte to the position I’ve laid out here, she recently wrote, “if Oldman’s noble but flawed Herman is more of a tragic hero than I imagine the real Herman to have been, I don’t begrudge my subject his larger-than-life moment. After all, what are movies for?” It’s hard to argue the point—if Mank were strictly a character study.

History is mutable, and an artist’s desire to use history in order to advance a particular worldview is admirable. Many of the greatest directors have done it, from Josef von Sternberg to John Ford to Fincher himself. They all had specific, and often idiosyncratic, ideas to offer through their historical lens. With Mank, those ideas are contradictory to the lived experiences of many of its characters. Furthermore, are those ideas —Hollywood is hypocritical, right-wing elites will lie to you in order to maintain power, and artists face an uphill battle to be recognized for their work—all that profound? These don’t strike me as especially revelatory, and when funneled through a man who only partially lived through them, it makes one wonder how a movie that condemns fake news ends up, in some ways, participating in it.

Evan Davis is a writer living in New York City. Follow him on Twitter @EvanDavisSports

Watch MANK on Netflix