Mank

Mank (2020) is about how the screenplay of Citizen Kane was written. Herman Mankiewicz has broken his leg in a crash and is confined to bed in a house in the desert. Orson Welles gives him sixty days: write a screenplay, do not drink, and we will bring you anything you need. A secretary types for him. The film runs in two periods: the writing, and the thirties. The flashbacks cover his relationship with the newspaper proprietor William Randolph Hearst and his companion Marion Davies. He ate at the man's house for years, took part in his games, and then wrote him. The best thing in it is Marion Davies. Citizen Kane depicts her as talentless; this film gives her a character and shows what Mankiewicz owed her. David Fincher's father Jack Fincher wrote the screenplay. It was written in the nineties and could not be made for years; he died in 2003 and never saw it. To bring it close to the language of the period, Fincher shot in black and white, mixed the sound to a single channel and added the marks of old film to the image. The argument about screenplay credit is the background: who wrote Kane, Welles or Mankiewicz. That dispute has run since the seventies; the film stands with Mankiewicz and was criticised for it. Gary Oldman and Amanda Seyfried star. It was made by Netflix and took ten Oscar nominations, winning cinematography and production design. It runs 131 minutes. Good for: film history, Fincher, and period drama. Less good for: the density of names is heavy without knowledge of thirties Hollywood, and the plot is scattered.