“There but for the grace of God goes God,” Herman Mankiewicz once remarked on seeing Orson Welles pass by in a restaurant. It was a suitably pithy remark from the screenwriter of Citizen Kane, with a bitter undertone of resentment. Now Mankiewicz himself is the subject of a new Netflix film, Mank, directed by David Fincher.
The film stars Gary Oldman in the role of the witty and alcoholic writer and enters into the longstanding controversy about the authorship of Kane, often considered the greatest film ever made. Pauline Kael, in an influential 1971 New Yorker essay titled “Raising Kane”, argued that, despite Welles getting a screenwriting credit, Mankiewicz was in fact the sole author. Her claims were opposed by Welles’ allies such as Peter Bogdanovich and have since been largely debunked by documentary evidence.
But Kael was pushing back against the idea of the genius director as the sole creator of a film, which, as writer, director, producer and star, Welles represented for many. To use a phrase coined by François Truffaut, the film director was the auteur — the author of the film. A mere screenwriter ranked fairly low by comparison.
Whereas in the theatre, the playwright is sacrosanct, in the movies the writer is the drummer of the band, the butt of jokes. The culture shock of moving from theatre to film is played out in the Coen Brothers’ film Barton Fink, in which a fictional playwright played by John Turturro heads to Hollywood where his experiences become a hellish nightmare. He asks a producer where he can find a fellow writer to give him advice and is told: “Jesus, throw a rock in here, you'll hit one. And do me a favour, Fink: throw it hard.”
What makes this all the more galling is how reverentially directors speak of the script. Alfred Hitchcock once said: “To make a great film you need three things — the script, the script and the script.” But, paradoxically, it is the importance of the script that ends up devaluing the writer. Why entrust something so vital to a multimillion-dollar project to just one person? Casablanca is based on an unproduced play by two writers and has three further credited writers, with some of its most famous lines, including “Here’s looking at you, kid” and “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship” being added by, respectively, star Humphrey Bogart and Hal Wallis, the producer of the film.
Billy Wilder might have been contemptuous of the auteur theory, cracking, “What does the director shoot, the telephone book?” But writing the script was too important to be left solely to writers. Wilder co-wrote his screenplays with scribes such as Charles Brackett and I.A.L. Diamond, often in cantankerous relationships. His collaboration with Raymond Chandler on Double Indemnity was infamously stormy and Diamond’s wife claimed the quarrelling couples of their films, which included The Apartment and Some Like It Hot, were inspired by their own fractious process. Wilder once wrote about collaboration: “If there are two guys that think the same way, that have the same background, that have the same political convictions and all the rest, it’s terrible. It’s not collaboration. It’s like pulling on one end of the rope.”
Director-writer partnerships are common, but it is frequently the writer who gets left out of the mix. Leigh Brackett wrote several films for Howard Hawks and John Michael Hayes wrote four films for Alfred Hitchcock, but Hawkes and Hitchcock were the prime examples Truffaut used when writing about the auteur and took all the limelight. Even more shocking is the case of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, who wrote 22 films for director James Ivory and producer Ismail Merchant, but it’s Merchant Ivory that is celebrated, not Merchant Ivory Jhabvala.
This is not to say that there are no famous screenwriters. Paddy Chayefsky, writer of Network and winner of three Academy Awards, is revered in screenwriting circles. Likewise, William Goldman and Robert Towne were rival gods, dominating the 1970s with such beautifully written films as Chinatown and All the President’s Men. But even the most successful screenwriters will have a side gig as novelists or uncredited script doctors. The only way for them to ensure more visibility and work is to move into directing their own films, the path followed by the likes of Taxi Driver and Raging Bull scribe Paul Schrader, Silkwood and When Harry Met Sally . . . writer Nora Ephron and, more recently, Charlie Kaufman and Aaron Sorkin.
But the most famous screenwriters are those who cut out the middleman completely and go straight to directing. Woody Allen, Joel and Ethan Coen and Quentin Tarantino are justly famous for their clever, witty scripts, which also sell well as published screenplays. Interestingly, however, David Fincher is not one of these, happy to direct others’ scripts and never taking co-writing credits. As befits a movie hailing the screenwriter as an unsung hero, Mank gives sole screenwriting credit to the actual screenwriter, Fincher’s late father, Jack Fincher.
In interviews, Fincher has been at pains to foreground his father’s work. And yet despite the re-evaluation of Mankiewicz’s creative contribution, and a wider reassessment of the role of screenwriters, the figure of the director — in many significant ways created by Orson Welles — remains paramount. After all, Mank is David Fincher’s new film.
‘Mank’ is on Netflix from December 4
"film" - Google News
November 24, 2020 at 12:00PM
https://ift.tt/2HtePeb
'Mank' and the screenwriters written out of film history - Financial Times
"film" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2qM7hdT
https://ift.tt/3fb7bBl
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "'Mank' and the screenwriters written out of film history - Financial Times"
Post a Comment