#Film screenwriter francis marion movie#

They kicked around a biopic of Alexandre Dumas, author of The Three Musketeers, and settled on newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst and his mistress, the movie star Marion Davies.

Mankiewicz, a once-swaggering studio screenwriter brought low by alcoholism and gambling, was scraping by adapting literary classics like Huckleberry Finn into radio dramas for Welles’ Mercury players at $200 a pop when the wunderkind invited him to collaborate-uncredited-on a Hollywood script, topic TBD. That was the truth when the film premiered at Broadway’s RKO Palace in May 1941, and 80 years of rumors, animosity, and investigation have only entrenched it. Nikolai Loveikis/NETFLIXĬitizen Kane’s closing credits attribute the original screenplay to Herman J. Gary Oldman as Herman Mankiewicz in David Fincher’s Mank, streaming now on Netflix. What's real in the world of Mank? We found out. “I don’t want to get mawkish about that,” Fincher said recently-and, fair enough. It's also an awards-season behemoth: The film earned six Golden Globe nominations and is currently nominated for 10 Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actress, and Best Costume Design.įincher's father’s fervor could spiral out, well, forever. Mayer’s ambitions as a political kingmaker to the tumultuous production of The Wizard of Oz. Mank is so crammed with Hollywood trivia that every line of dialogue could be the opening words of a whole other historical epic, from Louis B. Mankiewicz, a brilliant, but broken-down drunk who puts his personal demons into the Citizen Kane script only to fight Tom Burke’s Orson Welles for credit. And while Jack passed away in 2003, he lives on in this finally produced film, which stars Gary Oldman as screenwriter Herman J. Jack considered Citizen Kane the best movie ever made his son grants it a slot in the top three. The director’s father, journalist Jack Fincher, wrote this script about the construction of Citizen Kane in the early 1990s, back when the younger Fincher was merely a whizkid music video director who lacked the Hollywood mojo to get it made.