‘Mank’ is a great movie about the greatest movie ever made

By Tom Siebert

 

“You’re asking a lot of a motion picture audience,” John Houseman tells screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz in the verbally and visually elegant film “Mank,” now streaming on Netflix and nominated for a leading ten Academy Awards.

 

Houseman, best known for “The Paper Chase” movie and television series, was referring to Mankiewicz’ Oscar-winning screenplay for 1941’s “Citizen Kane,” which is regarded by most film critics as the best cinematic feat of the past 80 years.

 

But the legendary actor/producer could have been referring futuristically to “Mank,” which almost requires advanced degrees in film, U.S. history, and Hollywood lore to fully “get.”

 

For instance, you kind of have to know that Orson Welles was a 23-year-old radio director who narrated a historic adaption of H.G. Wells’ science fiction book, “War of the Worlds,” in 1938.

 

The “breaking news” nationwide broadcast was so realistic that thousands of panicked listeners lit up telephone switchboards at CBS affiliates across the country, asking if Martians had really landed in New Jersey and attacked nearby New York City.

 

The scary you-are-there authenticity of “War of the Worlds” prompted RKO Pictures to give the wunderkind Welles carte blanche to write, direct, and produce a major film, which would become “Citizen Kane,” the Big Bang of moviemaking.

 

To write the script, Welles hired alcoholic, cynical wordsmith Mankiewicz, who once sent a telegram to his former newspaper colleague Ben Hecht (“The Front Page") inviting him to Tinseltown.

 

“Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots,” he wrote.

 

“Mank” has the screenwriter sending the infamous missive to director Charles Lederer (“His Girl Friday") but never mind, this is Hollywood.

 

In another instance of “Mank” playing fast and loose with film facts, movie mogul Louis B. Mayer is shown telling his writers: “I’m not interested in educating our customers. You want to send a message? Call Western Union.” The paraphrased quote is most often attributed to fellow studio head Samuel Goldwyn.

 

It’s almost as if “Mank” director David Fincher (“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” “Gone Girl”) wanted to slightly fictionalize his Old Hollywood story to maintain plausible legal deniability, in the same way that “Citizen Kane” is a flimsily disguised assault on media magnate William Randolph Hearst, who at one time owned 28 newspapers in major American cities.

 

No one really knows why Welles chose Hearst as the inspiration for his first and most famous film, but “Mank” would have us believe that it was Mankiewicz, a bleeding-heart progressive, who was writing out his resentments against the newspaper titan, an ultraconservative who also tried his hand at politics and producing movies.

 

In the movie­­, Mankiewicz gets to know Hearst through a platonic relationship with his mistress, actress Marion Davies, played by Amanda Seyfried, in a breathtaking breakthrough performance that introduces her being burned at the stake in a B-picture and jonesing for a “cig-a-boo.”

 

Gary Oldman, who won the Academy Award for Best Actor in 2018 for his role as British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in “Darkest Hour,” may garner that top honor again on April 25 for his transfiguring performance as Mank.

 

Oldman portrays him as a half-happy drunk, bedridden with a broken leg sustained in an auto accident, and holed up in a remote desert cottage in Victorville, Calif., 90 miles northeast of Los Angeles.

 

Struggling with booze and memories of his painful past, Mank raises “Kane” over a 12-week period with the help of his handlers: Houseman (Sam Troughton); British secretary Rita Alexander (Lily Collins), who takes dictation to type the script; and German nurse Frieda (Monika Gossmann), who treats his hurts and hangovers.

 

The “Great One” Welles, played by a charismatic Tom Burke, phones or shows up to trade barbs with Mankiwiecz and remind him of his impending deadline to turn in the script.

 

“I have final cut, final everything,” Welles tells Mank. “There are no studio notes. We’ll have no one but ourselves to blame.”

 

In dizzying flashbacks, we learn that the brilliant screenwriter attended parties with assorted Hollywood bigwigs at Hearst’s castle, constructed on 40,000 acres of hillside overlooking the Pacific Ocean near San Simeon.

 

The Gothic estate, known as Xanadu in “Citizen Kane,” is now a state park, preserved as both a California and U.S. historical landmark.

 

Mank’s dislike for Hearst is intensified when the newspaper publisher sabotages the 1934 California gubernatorial campaign of journalistic giant Upton Sinclair (“The Jungle”), smearing him in fake newsreels as a socialist.

 

But dirty-tricks politics and Hollywood mythology aside, “Mank” is a gorgeous homage to “Citizen Kane,” with its quick-witted dialogue, smoky silhouettes, and deep-focused black-and-white cinematography by Eric Messerschmidt.

 

As for the real Herman Mankiewicz, he wrote or contributed to more than 40 American screenplays, including “The Wizard of Oz,” “The Pride of St. Louis,” and “The Pride of the Yankees.”

 

He died in 1953 at the age of 55, and his grandson Ben is now a host on the Turner Classic Movies cable network.

 

And “Mank” ranks among the best films in the movies-about-the-movies genre, alongside Stanley Donen’s “Singin’ in the Rain” (1952); Robert Altman’s “The Player” (1992); and Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” (2019).

 

 

Filmmaker Sorkin soars high with ‘The Trial of the Chicago 7’

By Tom Siebert

 

“The West Wing,” which ran from 1999 until 2006, was one of the most awarded and rewarding series in television history, known for its long shots of quick-speaking political aides walking with high-minded alacrity down the corridors of corruption––all in the service of a super-smart, bleeding-heart president.

 

Although set in modern America, when everyone seemed to collectively decide to dislike politicians, the TV show hearkened back to the 1960s, when the brothers Kennedy, in life and death, set politics on an idealistic course that would turn U.S. history for the better.

 

“West Wing” creator Aaron Sorkin said he got the idea to write and direct “The Trial of the Chicago 7” in 2015, when then-presidential candidate Donald J. Trump “started being nostalgic about the good old days of beating up protestors,” a sentiment that was often met with cheers by supporters at his mega-MAGA campaign rallies.

 

Much like the historical and sometimes hysterical 1969–70 court proceedings, “The Trial of the Chicago 7” is a Shakespearean farce about a dead-serious subject that ultimately brought about systemic reform.

 

The loosely affiliated defendants were all charged with conspiracy to incite the riots that erupted during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August 1968, rebranding Mayor Richard J. Daley’s “city that works” into the city whose cops beat up anti-Viet Nam War protestors with billy clubs.

 

Granted, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, leaders of the Youth International Party (Yippies), had issued pre-convention press releases threatening that the protestors would frolic naked in Grant Park, supply the convention delegates with prostitutes, and pollute the city’s water system with LSD.

 

Moreover, some of the doped-up demonstrators did provoke the police officers and National Guardsmen with taunts and trash. But three months after the bloody convention, a federal commission headed by future Illinois governor Dan Walker concluded that a “police riot” led to the 668 arrests and more than 1,000 injured, including 192 law enforcement officers.

 

The two-hour-plus docudrama, now streaming exclusively on Netflix, moves rapidly with fast flashbacks between courtroom antics and convention clashes.

 

It is hard to stand out in an exceptional ensemble cast that features Joseph Gordon-Levitt, John Carroll Lynch, Eddie Redmayne, Jeremy Strong, Ben Shenkman, and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Black Panther co-founder Bobby Seale, whose court objections over having no legal representation possess U.S. District Judge Julius Hoffman to order him gagged and tied to a chair.

 

But performance artist Sacha Baron Cohen (“Borat”) landed the role with the most potential as colorful counter-culturist Abbie Hoffman (no relation to the judge), deservedly attaining an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor.

 

I would have voted to also nominate Mark Rylance (“Bridge of Spies”) as defense attorney William Kuntsler, who had to referee verbal skirmishes among his motley clients, while projecting a wry tone in court to impress the establishment judge and jury.

 

Other Oscar nods for this entertaining and edifying film are in the categories of Best Picture, Cinematography, Film Editing, Original Song, and Original Screenplay.

 

Acting great Michael Keaton shows up late in the movie but immediately commands the screen as former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, whose witness-chair takedown of the state’s case is deemed inadmissible by the prejudicial Judge Hoffman, portrayed credibly by venerable character actor Frank Langella.

 

But the pithiest piece of dialogue is delivered Sorkin-style by Redmayne, who plays Tom Hayden, founder of the Students for a Democratic Society.

 

In the attorneys’ quarters, Hayden implores his fellow defendants to clean up their courthouse acts or else: “For the next 50 years, when people think of progressive politics, they’re not gonna think of equality or justice. They’re not gonna think of education or poverty or progress. They’re gonna think of a bunch of stoned, lost, disrespectful, foul-mouthed, lawless losers. And so, we’ll lose elections.”

 

And when the social activist is forced to defend his convention rallying cry for blood “all over the city,” Hayden reminds everyone in the courtroom why the tens of thousands of protestors showed up in Chicago in the first place, as he begins to read the names of the 4,752 soldiers who were killed in the Vietnam War since the trial began.

 

This moving moment inspires many in court to stand, applaud, and raise their fists in solidarity with the Chicago 7, who would later be convicted but win on appeal.

 

We learn in the film’s postscript that Hayden knew what he was talking about in regard to elections. He would go on to win seven of them, serving first as representative and then senator in the California General Assembly.

I covered him as a newspaper reporter in the 1980s, and politics aside, he was one of the most earnest elected officials whom I’ve ever met.

 

The Chicago 7 were originally the Chicago 8, until Seale’s motion for a mistrial was granted in November 1969. Connecticut prosecutors later dropped murder charges against him in the death of a police informant, and he was finally freed from prison when his contempt of court convictions were commuted in 1972.

 

In August of that year, I was a high school student visiting southern Florida when I witnessed Seale making a protest speech outside the Republican National Convention in Miami Beach.

 

Those demonstrations were peaceful because the city and police chief had set aside areas for protestors, a security––and free speech––protocol that has been put in place at every political convention since then, as well as at global events held by international organizations such as the United Nations and World Bank.

 

“The whole world is watching,” shouted thousands of anti-war protestors on a hot Chicago night in late August 1968. And they were right.