Does the film Mank settle the long-standing debate over who wrote Citizen Kane?
In short: David Fincher’s 2020 biographical drama explores the life of screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz and his collaboration with Orson Welles. While the film revives a decades-old controversy regarding authorship, Fincher insists his goal was not to resolve a historical dispute, but to examine a man who broke his own contract.
The film centers on Herman J. Mankiewicz, who was recruited by Orson Welles in 1940 to write the screenplay for Citizen Kane. While recovering from a car accident in Victorville, California, Mankiewicz dictated the script to his secretary, Rita Alexander. The project was fraught with tension, as producer John Houseman worried about the nonlinear structure, and Mankiewicz’s brother, Joseph, feared the script would provoke the powerful media mogul William Randolph Hearst.
Mank draws heavily from a 1971 New Yorker piece by Pauline Kael, which argued that Welles contributed little to the final script. This premise has been widely contested by film scholars, including Robert L. Carringer, and figures like Peter Bogdanovich, who published a point-by-point rebuttal in 1972. Critics and academics, such as Jonathan Rosenbaum, have criticized the film for perpetuating a narrative that research has repeatedly debunked over the years.
Despite the historical debate, Fincher maintains that he was not interested in conducting a posthumous credit arbitration. Instead, he focused on the personal arc of a writer who initially agreed to forgo credit, only to change his mind later. Ultimately, Mankiewicz and Welles shared the screenwriting credit and won an Academy Award for the film two years after its release. Fincher’s production, shot in black-and-white using RED cameras, aimed to evoke the aesthetic of 1930s Hollywood rather than provide a definitive historical record.
The film received significant critical attention, earning 10 nominations at the 93rd Academy Awards and winning for Best Production Design and Best Cinematography. While some reviewers praised its technical mastery and period-authentic score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, others found the narrative distant or conventional. Regardless of its historical accuracy, the film remains a notable attempt to capture the complex, often corrupt hierarchies of the studio system during the era of Louis B. Mayer and Hearst.
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Sources
- Summary by Intellect · source: Mank
- Also: Wikidata — Mank · CC0
- Also: Wikidata — Mank · CC0
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