Cinema

Gary Oldman Had No Footage of Mank, So He Borrowed His Brother

Herman Mankiewicz left no footage, no recordings of his voice and hardly a photograph. Gary Oldman tells Husam Sam Asi how he built Citizen Kane's writer from his brother Joseph, and why Hollywood seduced Mank but never him.

Husam Sam Asi 26 January 2021

Husam Sam Asi with Gary Oldman at an interview for Red Riding Hood in March 2011. — Husam Sam Asi with Gary Oldman during an earlier interview, for Red Riding Hood, March 2011.

After winning the Oscar for playing Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour, Gary Oldman is back in the awards race, this time as Herman J. Mankiewicz, the screenwriter of Citizen Kane, in David Fincher‘s Mank.

Citizen Kane has topped lists of the greatest films ever made since 1941. It invented much of the grammar of modern cinema, not least a script that abandons chronology and tells the life of its hero through the memories of four people who knew him.

Behind the camera, its two authors went to war over who wrote it. Orson Welles and Mankiewicz each claimed the script as his own, and neither turned up at the Oscars, where the film had nine nominations and won only one: best original screenplay, shared by both men. The feud occupied critics and historians for decades, until Pauline Kael argued in 1971 that Mank was the real author. Fincher’s film takes her side.

Seduced by the sunshine

Mankiewicz came to Hollywood from New York in 1926. He had been a drama critic for The New York Times and The New Yorker, and he regarded screenwriting as beneath literature. He hated writing for films, Oldman told me when we met over Zoom. Yet as soon as he arrived, he wrote to his wife that she would love it there: the pretty little Spanish bungalows, the green lawns, the sunshine, the palm trees and the swimming pools. Like so many others, Oldman said, he was seduced.

Like Kane, Mank tells its story in flashbacks: Mankiewicz running the writers’ room at Paramount, befriending the actress Marion Davies, mistress of the newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst, and charming his way into the homes, studios and wild parties of Hollywood’s most powerful men with his wit.

Oldman found Mank’s one-liners in books while preparing, and they helped him get to know the man. Fincher did not want the film stuffed with them. He told Oldman to write a list and bring it, and if they could weave one or two into a scene where they fitted, they would. That, Oldman said, is roughly what they did. Mank was enormously charming and very funny, and unless you were on the receiving end of his bitterness, there was no better company.

A man at war with himself

The charm curdles when Mank turns his tongue on the moguls. In the film he accuses them of moral and political corruption, and rails against the way they exploit their workers, their readiness to bow to Nazi demands to remove Jewish names from their films, and the fake newsreels they made against Upton Sinclair, the Democratic candidate for governor of California in 1934. Hollywood shuts him out, and he sinks into drink, almost killing himself when he crashes his car drunk.

Mank was plainly on a path of self-destruction, Oldman said. He does not resemble him physically, but his research told him that Mank smoked heavily and drank far too much: a man in trouble with himself.

Oldman knows that road. He too turned to drink after moving from London to Los Angeles in 1990, and he was arrested for drink-driving a year later. His Hollywood, though, was nothing like Mank’s. When he first came to town in 1986 to promote Sid and Nancy, his first lead role, he simply chatted at the press conference, he told me, about his father and where he came from. Nobody had given him the rulebook. He was so naive that he thought the press conference was a special event for Sid and Nancy, with no idea he would have to do it for every film. He was never part of the popular crowd, never a party person or a networker, and he remains something of a loner in the business.

Oldman stopped drinking in 1997 and became one of the great actors of his generation. Mank was rescued by Welles, another New Yorker at war with Hollywood, who hired him to write Citizen Kane while he lay in bed recovering from a car crash. So Oldman spends most of the film lying in that bed, dictating the script to a secretary Welles has hired for him.

Gary Oldman talks to Husam Sam Asi about Mank on BBC Cinematic.

Playing a writer is hardly the most cinematic thing, Oldman said, laughing, let alone a writer stuck in bed with a broken leg. The challenge was to make that interesting and entertaining. There is turmoil and self-loathing, so you try to make him charming through his wit. You have to sweeten the bitterness a little.

Nothing to copy

The bigger challenge was that Herman Mankiewicz left no footage, no recordings of his voice and hardly a photograph. For Churchill, Oldman told me, he had hours and hours of film. For Mank he had nothing to imitate. So he turned to the brother.

Joseph L. Mankiewicz wrote many of Hollywood’s classics, directed Cleopatra, Julius Caesar and The Quiet American, and won Oscars for writing and directing both A Letter to Three Wives and All About Eve. It was Herman who opened Hollywood’s doors for him, finding him a job as a writer at Paramount. In the film, Joseph tries in vain to save his brother from drink and from his collision course with Hearst.

There was plenty of material on Joseph, Oldman said. As he began studying his physical traits and the qualities of his voice, he reasoned that one brother might well resemble the other. The two were close, so it made sense to start with Joseph: you begin to inhabit the character there and set off from that point, until it becomes your own Mank.

Kane’s revenge

Mankiewicz used Citizen Kane to take revenge on Hearst, modelling Kane on him as a power-obsessed, disturbed and morally corrupt tycoon. Hearst was furious and barred his papers from promoting the film, and it flopped at the box office.

Welles packed Mankiewicz off to a remote ranch to keep him away from alcohol, but Mank talked his assistant into supplying it. He kept drinking, and it killed him in 1953, at 55. Oldman summed him up in Welles’s own words: a monument of self-destruction.

The irony is that Welles became Hollywood’s victim too. He accused the industry of moral and professional corruption, and he never matched the success of Citizen Kane.

Mank has led the Oscar predictions since it arrived on Netflix last month, for its photography, its performances, its storytelling and its sharp dialogue, and because Hollywood loves films about itself, flattering or not. A third Oscar nomination for Oldman looks certain, and a second win would surprise no one.