Herman J. Mankiewicz

Herman Jacob Mankiewicz ( ; November 7, 1897 – March 5, 1953) was an American screenwriter who, with Orson Welles, wrote the screenplay for Citizen Kane (1941). Both Mankiewicz and Welles went on to receive the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for the film. Mankiewicz was previously a Berlin correspondent for Women’s Wear Daily, assistant theater editor at The New York Times, Alexander Woollcott said that Mankiewicz was the "funniest man in New York".

Mankiewicz was often asked to fix other writers' screenplays, with much of his work uncredited. His writing style became valued in the films of the 1930s—a style that included a slick, satirical, and witty humor, in which dialogue almost totally carried the film, and which eventually become associated with the "typical American film" of that period. In New York he met his wife, Johanna Blumenau, spent their childhood there. Census records indicate the family lived on Academy Street.

Mankiewicz was described as a "bookish, introspective child who, despite his intelligence, was never able to win approval from his demanding father" who was known to belittle his achievements. The family moved to New York City in 1913, where Herman's father accepted a teaching position, at Stuyvesant High School, and Herman graduated from Columbia College in 1917 where he was the “Off-Hour” editor of the Columbia Spectator student newspaper.

Early career

After a period as managing editor of the American Jewish Chronicle and a reporter at the New York Tribune, In 1919 and 1920, he was director of the American Red Cross News Service in Paris.

Marriage

After returning to the U.S., he married Sara Aaronson of Baltimore. He took her overseas on his next job as a newspaper writer in Berlin from 1920 to 1922; then returned to the U.S. to do political reporting for George Seldes on the Chicago Tribune. (1937–1974).

Reporter, publicist, playwright

While a reporter in Berlin, Mankiewicz also sent pieces on drama and books to The New York Times. he contributed to Vanity Fair, The Saturday Evening Post, and numerous other magazines. While still in his twenties, he collaborated with Heywood Broun, Dorothy Parker, Robert E. Sherwood and others on a revue; and collaborated with George S. Kaufman on a play, The Good Fellows, and with Marc Connelly on the play The Wild Man of Borneo (1927). From 1923 to 1926, he was at The New York Times as assistant theater editor to George S. Kaufman, and soon after became the first regular theater critic for The New Yorker, writing a column during 1925 and early 1926. He was a member of the Algonquin Round Table. His writing attracted the notice of film producer Walter Wanger, who offered him a contract to work at Paramount,

Kael notes that "beginning in 1926, Mankiewicz worked on an astounding number of films." In 1927 and 1928, he did the titles (printed dialogue and explanations) for at least twenty-five films starring Clara Bow, Bebe Daniels, Nancy Carroll, Wallace Beery and other public favorites. By then, sound had arrived, and in 1929 he wrote the script and dialogue for The Dummy, and scripts for many other directors, including William Wellman and Josef von Sternberg.

According to Kael, Mankiewicz did not work on every kind of picture. He did not do Westerns, for example; and once, when a studio attempted to punish him for his customary misbehavior by assigning him to a Rin Tin Tin picture, he rebelled by turning in a script that began with the craven dog frightened by a mouse and reached its climax with a house on fire and the dog taking a baby into the flames.

Style

Shortly after his arrival on the West Coast, Mankiewicz sent a telegram to journalist-friend Ben Hecht in New York: "Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots. Don't let this get around." He attracted other New York writers to Hollywood who contributed to a burst of creative, tough, sardonic styles of writing for the fast-growing movie industry.

Between 1929 and 1935, he worked on at least twenty films, many of which he received no credit for. Between 1930 and 1932 he was either producer or associate producer on four comedies and helped write their screenplays without credit: Laughter, Monkey Business, Horse Feathers, and Million Dollar Legs, which many critics considered one of the funniest comedies of the early 1930s.

The Wizard of Oz

In February 1938, Mankiewicz was assigned as the first of ten screenwriters to work on The Wizard of Oz. Three days after he started writing, he handed in a 17-page treatment of what was later known as "the Kansas sequence". While L. Frank Baum devoted less than a thousand words in his book to Kansas, Mankiewicz almost balanced the attention between Kansas and Oz, feeling it necessary that audiences relate to Dorothy Gale in a real world before she was transported to a magic one. By the end of the week he had finished 56 pages, and included instructions to film the scenes in Kansas in black and white. His goal, according to film historian Aljean Harmetz, was to "capture in pictures what Baum had captured in words—the grey lifelessness of Kansas contrasted with the visual richness of Oz." He was not credited for his work on the film.

Citizen Kane

Mankiewicz is best known for his collaboration with Orson Welles on the screenplay of Citizen Kane, for which they shared an Academy Award. The authorship later became a source of controversy. Pauline Kael attributed Kanes screenplay to Mankiewicz in a 1971 essay that was and continues to be strongly disputed. Much debate has centered on this issue, largely because of the importance of the film itself, which most agree is a fictionalized biography of newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst. According to film biographer David Thomson, however, "No one can now deny Herman Mankiewicz credit for the germ, shape, and pointed language of the screenplay..."

Mankiewicz biographer Richard Meryman notes that the dispute had various causes, including the way the movie was promoted. When RKO opened the movie on Broadway on May 1, 1941, followed by showings at theaters in other large cities, the publicity programs included photographs of Welles as "the one-man band, directing, acting, and writing." In a letter to his father afterwards, Mankiewicz wrote, "I'm particularly furious at the incredibly insolent description of how Orson wrote his masterpiece. The fact is that there isn't one single line in the picture that wasn't in writingwriting from and by mebefore ever a camera turned." "Mankiewicz found himself on story-swapping terms with the power behind it all, Hearst himself. When he had been in Hollywood only a short time, he met Marion Davies and Hearst through his friendship with Charles Lederer, a writer, then in his early twenties, whom Ben Hecht had met and greatly admired in New York when Lederer was still in his teens. Lederer, a child prodigy who had entered college at thirteen, got to know Mankiewicz." Herman eventually "saw Hearst as 'a finagling, calculating, Machiavellian figure.' But also, with Charlie Lederer, ... wrote and had printed parodies of Hearst newspapers." Hearst's thoughts about the film are unknown; what is certain is that his extensive chain of newspapers and radio stations blocked all mentions of the film, and refused to accept advertising for it, while some Hearst employees worked behind the scenes to block or restrict its distribution.

Academy Award celebration

Citizen Kane was nominated for an Academy Award in every possible category, including Best Original Screenplay. Meryman writes, "Herman insisted he had no chance to win, though The Hollywood Reporter had given the film first place in ten of its twelve divisions. The fear of Hearst, he felt, was still alive. And Hollywood's resentment and distrust of Welles, the nonconformist upstart, were even greater since he had lived up to his wonderboy ballyhoo." Ten years before his death, he wrote: "I seem to become more and more of a rat in a trap of my own construction, a trap that I regularly repair whenever there seems to be danger of some opening that will enable me to escape. I haven't decided yet about making it bomb proof. It would seem to involve a lot of unnecessary labor and expense." A future Hollywood biographer went so far as to suggest that Mankiewicz’s behavior "made him seem erratic even by the standards of Hollywood drunks." at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Los Angeles. Orson Welles said of him, "He saw everything with clarity. No matter how odd or how right or how marvelous his point of view was, it was always diamond white. Nothing muzzy."</blockquote>

In 2024, Mankiewicz was announced as a posthumous inductee into the Luzerne County Arts & Entertainment Hall of Fame.

Depictions

Mankiewicz is played by John Malkovich in RKO 281, a 1999 American film about the battle over Citizen Kane.

Mank, a black-and-white Mankiewicz biopic directed by David Fincher and starring Gary Oldman in the title role, was released on Netflix in December 2020. Oldman was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance.

Filmography

He was involved with the following films:

The Road to Mandalay (1926) — Writer (story credit)
Stranded in Paris (1926) — Writer (adaptation)
Fashions for Women (1927) — Writer
A Gentleman of Paris (1927) (titles)
The City Gone Wild (1927) — Writer (titles)
Honeymoon Hate (1927) — Writer (titles)
The Gay Defender (1927) — Writer (titles)
Two Flaming Youths (1927) — Writer (titles)
Love and Learn (1928) — Writer (titles)
The Last Command (1928) — Writer (titles)
Something Always Happens (1928) — Writer (titles)
A Night of Mystery (1928/I) — Writer (titles)
Abie's Irish Rose (1928) — Writer (titles)
His Tiger Lady (1928) — Writer (titles)
The Dragnet (1928) — Writer (titles)
The Magnificent Flirt (1928) — Writer (titles)
The Mating Call (1928) — Writer (titles), Newspaperman (uncredited)
The Water Hole (1928) — Writer (titles)
Take Me Home (1928) — Writer (titles)
Avalanche (1928) — Writer (screenplay) (titles)
The Barker (1928) — Writer (titles)
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1928) — Writer (titles)
Three Weekends (1928) — Writer (titles)
What a Night! (1928) — Writer (titles)
The Love Doctor (1929) — Writer (titles)
The Canary Murder Case (1929) — Writer (titles)
The Dummy (1929) — Writer
The Man I Love (1929) — Writer (story)
Thunderbolt (1929) — Writer
The Mighty (1929) — Writer (titles)
The Vagabond King (1930) — Writer (screenplay) (story)
Men Are Like That (1930) — Writer (adaptation)
Honey (1930) — Writer (scenario) (titles)
Ladies Love Brutes (1930) — Writer (screenplay)
True to the Navy (1930) — Writer (dialogue)
Love Among the Millionaires (1930) — Writer (dialogue)
Laughter (1930) — Writer
The Royal Family of Broadway (1930) — Writer (adaptation)
Salga de la cocina (1931) — Writer (adaptation)
The Front Page (1931) — Bit (uncredited)
Every Woman Has Something (1931) — Writer (adaptation)
Man of the World (1931) — Writer (screenplay) (story)
Ladies' Man (1931) — Writer
Monkey Business (1931) — producer
The Lost Squadron (1932) — Writer (additional dialogue)
Dancers in the Dark (1932) — Writer
Girl Crazy (1932) — Writer
Million Dollar Legs (1932) — producer
Horse Feathers (1932) — producer (uncredited)
Another Language (1933) — Writer
Dinner at Eight (1933) — Writer (screenplay)
Meet the Baron (1933) — Writer
Duck Soup (1933) — producer (uncredited)
The Show-Off (1934) — Writer
Stamboul Quest (1934) — Writer (screenplay)
After Office Hours (1935) — Writer
Escapade (1935) — Writer
Three Maxims (1936) — Writer
Love in Exile (1936) — Writer
John Meade's Woman (1937) — Writer
The Emperor's Candlesticks (1937) — contributor to dialogue (uncredited)
My Dear Miss Aldrich (1937) — Writer (original story and screenplay)
It's a Wonderful World (1939) — Writer (story)
The Wizard of Oz (1939) — Writer (uncredited)
The Ghost Comes Home (1940) — Writer (contributing writer)
Comrade X (1940) — Writer (uncredited)
Keeping Company (1940) — Writer (story)
The Wild Man of Borneo (1941) — Writer (play)
Citizen Kane (1941) — Writer (screenplay), Newspaperman (uncredited)
Rise and Shine (1941) — Writer (screenplay)
This Time for Keeps (1942) — Writer (characters)
The Pride of the Yankees (1942) — Writer (screenplay)
Stand By for Action (1942) — Writer (screenplay)
The Good Fellows (1943) — Writer (play)
Christmas Holiday (1944) — Writer
The Enchanted Cottage (1945) — Writer
The Spanish Main (1945) — Writer (screenplay)
A Woman's Secret (1949) — Writer (screenplay), producer
The Pride of St. Louis (1952) — Writer
Lux Video Theatre (TV series episode, 1955): The Enchanted Cottage — Writer (original screenplay)

Works

Essays and reporting

Short Fiction

Mankiewicz, Herman J., "The Big Game," The New Yorker, November 14, 1925, p. 11
Mankiewicz, Herman J., "A New Yorker in the provinces," The New Yorker, February 6, 1926, p. 16

Novelization

for The Road to Mandalay (1926 film)

Plays

Critical studies, reviews and biography

Stern, Sydney Ladensohn (2019). The Brothers Mankiewicz: Hope, Heartbreak, and Hollywood Classics

Notes

References

External links

Herman J. Mankiewicz at the TCM Movie Database
Herman J. Mankiewicz at AllMovie