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Who actually wrote ‘Citizen Kane’? David Fincher’s ‘Mank’ revives the debate. (nationthailand.com)

Who actually wrote ‘Citizen Kane’? David Fincher’s ‘Mank’ revives the debate.

EntertainmentDec 05. 2020Gary Oldman stars as the screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz in “Mank.” MUST CREDIT: Netflix. Photo by: Netflix — Handout 

By The Washington Post · Sonia Rao 

One of the greatest films ever made also generated a great controversy. In 1971, the film critic Pauline Kael wrote a 50,000-word essay revisiting the debate over who wrote 1941′s “Citizen Kane,” officially credited to screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz and the film’s director, Orson Welles. The bold essay was published in back-to-back issues of the New Yorker.

Chief among Kael’s claims was that Mankiewicz was the principal author of “Citizen Kane,” an argument countering the auteurist stance that Welles – also the director, producer and star – was responsible for most of the work. Mankiewicz would have agreed with Kael. Though neither he nor Welles attended the Academy Awards, where the film won best screenplay, he said his acceptance speech would have been, “I am very happy to accept this award in Mr. Welles’s absence because the script was written in Mr. Welles’s absence.”

“Mank,” the new Netflix film directed by David Fincher, revives this age-old debate. The screenplay is credited to Fincher’s father, Jack, and favors Kael’s telling of events. Anchoring the flashback-filled story are the months Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman) spends on a ranch in Victorville, Calif., where he works on a draft while recovering from a car crash. Welles (Tom Burke) appears in the film, but it’s mostly about Mank.

The basic details are uncontested: Mankiewicz suffered terrible injuries in a crash and, while healing, wrote for Welles’s Mercury Theatre radio show. The two men agreed to work on a project inspired by the newspaper giant William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance in “Mank”), and the film picks up with Mankiewicz heading off to the ranch with Welles’s former collaborator John Houseman (Sam Troughton), secretary Rita Alexander (Lily Collins) and a German nurse (Monika Gossmann) hired to look after Mankiewicz’s health.

“Mank” also includes his decision to sign a contract giving up any writing credit on the “Citizen Kane” script, an agreement he later went back on by filing a complaint with the Screen Actors Guild.

Kael interviewed both Houseman and Alexander, who took dictation from Mankiewicz and told the critic “that Welles didn’t write (or dictate) one line of the shooting script of ‘Citizen Kane.’ ” Welles might have made suggestions early on and pointed out potential cuts, Kael stated, but Alexander held that she never even met him until after Mankiewicz had finished his first draft. Much of Kael’s essay reads as a defense of screenwriters in the studio system, particularly a portion in which she remarked that “in that period, it was well known that if a producer of a film wanted a screenplay credit, it was almost impossible to prevent him from getting it.”

Kael, highly regarded as a critic, received praise from many peers. In the New York Times review of a 1971 book that contained both “Raising Kane” and the actual film script, Mordecai Richler praised Kael’s essay as a “highly intelligent and entertaining study of a bona-fide film classic.” He also argued that her “excellent case for Mank is in the end more than somewhat vitiated by the publication of the script itself,” describing it as smart but superficial. Welles’s direction therefore deserved all the credit for “Citizen Kane” being a “miracle,” Richler wrote, something he said “Miss Kael would be the last to deny him.”

But the authorship claims, which director Peter Bogdanovich disputed in a 1972 Esquire article, remained. He spoke to Welles, his friend, who many suspected had contributed more than just an interview to the piece. Regardless, Welles claimed he penned his own draft of the script while Mankiewicz was in Victorville: “At the end, naturally, I was the one who was making the picture, after all – who made the decisions,” he said. “I used what I wanted of Mank’s and, rightly or wrongly, kept what I liked of my own.”

Aspects of “Raising Kane” continued to be discredited in the years after it was published, in part by the claim that Kael stole some of the research from an academic, Howard Suber, as well as by the notion that “her piece contained many factual errors of her own, all undetected by New Yorker fact-checkers and all contrived to reinforce her anti-auteurist argument,” as Frank Rich wrote in a 2011 article for the Times.

Film scholar Robert Carringer aimed to settle the matter in his 1985 book “The Making of Citizen Kane” and the preceding 1978 essay “The Scripts of ‘Citizen Kane,’ ” which presented a version of events widely accepted today. After evaluating a “virtually complete” set of script records at the RKO archives, he determined that “the full evidence reveals that Welles’s contribution to the ‘Citizen Kane’ script was not only substantial but definitive.” Kael seemed to base most of the “Raising Kane” argument off an early draft, he stated.

In an interview with Vulture, even Fincher offered a gentle critique of Kael. In response to a question asking him about his response to a line from “Raising Kane” – specifically that “the director should be in control, not because he’s the sole creative intelligence, but because only if he is in control can he liberate and utilize the talents of his coworkers” – he said Kael knew loads more about watching movies than making them. Tons of work goes into the planning, he argued, but much of a film’s vision comes down to the on-set execution.

“The movie business is an incredibly couture boutique storytelling venture,” Fincher said, “and every single designer at the head of his house works in a different way. You are stitching those garments onto bodies up to the last 45 seconds before that person walks that runway.”

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Andrew Lloyd Webber believes in the imminent return of Broadway and the West End (nationthailand.com)

Andrew Lloyd Webber believes in the imminent return of Broadway and the West End

EntertainmentDec 05. 2020

British composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, at the Gillian Lynne Theatre in London on Nov. 19, is ready for a post-pandemic world. MUST CREDIT: Photo for The Washington Post by Tori Ferenc /Photo by: Tori Ferenc — For The Washington Post 

By The Washington Post · Peter Marks 

Andrew Lloyd Webber was not throwing away his shots. The first was administered in June, the follow-up in September. As a result, he is a billionaire Broadway songwriter and British lord with a new title to add: guinea pig in the University of Oxford coronavirus vaccine trials.

“I thought, if I’m going to try and start getting people into the theater again, I might as well have a go myself,” Lloyd Webber says by Zoom from one of the London theaters he owns, the Gillian Lynne, renamed for the late choreographer of his megahit “Cats.”

“They said, ‘Well, we really want old, dilapidated people like you for a trial with old, dilapidated people.’ So I got onto that one and the interesting thing in the Oxford vaccine results that were published: They find the vaccine is working better on older people. And I mean, I have had no bad response to it at all. None.”

Carrie Hope Fletcher, with Andrew Lloyd Webber, holds the titular role of Webber’s new version of “Cinderella.” MUST CREDIT: Really Useful Group

Photo by: Really Useful Group — Really Useful Group

At 72 years of age (that’s 14 in cat years), Lloyd Webber bears no signs of decrepitude. As the composer of 20 musicals – with a 21st, a new version of “Cinderella,” being prepped for the West End – and proprietor of six London theaters through his company, Really Useful Group, this lord is unique in the business. He’s an all-inclusive impresario, the one artist in musical theater who can dream up a show, write it, raise money for it, cast it, put it on one of his own stages and sell souvenir T-shirts to the clamoring crowds.

So maybe it makes sense that a creative force of this magnitude would be the antsiest theatermaker on either side of the Atlantic for a return to something like normality. On the topic of getting theaters reopened safely worldwide, Lloyd Webber is a Pied Piper, testifying at government hearings, pressing industry leaders, giving interviews – participating in vaccine trials.

He’s so invested in how to envelop theatergoers in a protective antiviral cocoon that he spent a fortune bringing to his 2,200-seat London Palladium devices from South Korea that emit antibacterial mist as ticket holders pass through them. He said he was about to install them – as they had been used for a Seoul production of “The Phantom of the Opera” – when authorities from Public Health England stopped him out of concern that the spray might damage contact lenses or cause skin rashes.

“So those machines are sitting around,” Lloyd Webber says. “I’m going to say they’re art installations.”

The composer describes such run-ins with British bureaucracy in the wearily incredulous tones of a person toggling between the worlds of fairy tale princesses and Kafka. He is, after all, trying to save theater.

“He’s a remarkable cheerleader,” says Charlotte St. Martin, president of the Broadway League, the trade organization for Broadway producers and theater owners. She has had a standing weekly call with Lloyd Webber and other Really Useful Group executives for seven months, and she notes that he has even kept her spirits up. While some have scoffed at Lloyd Webber’s optimism over reopening, St. Martin says, any naysaying “hasn’t slowed him down one bit.”

“You know, he volunteered for the vaccine,” she adds. “We were all trying to talk him out of it because he isn’t a spring chicken, But he was adamant. He wanted to prove people of a certain age could take it and be healthy.”

“The Phantom of the Opera” celebrated its 33rd birthday in London in 2019. MUST CREDIT: Tom Mraz/The Phantom of the Opera World Tour

Photo by: Tom Mraz — The Phantom of the Opera World Tour

Theater in Britain, as in the United States, has been on hold since early this year, although for a spell this fall, authorities allowed the Palladium to open again at 50 percent capacity. Van Morrison performed there in late September, and a concert of American composer Jason Robert Brown’s “Songs for a New World” was staged in October, before the lockdown was reimposed in London and other parts of Europe later that month.

On the recent morning we spoke, members of Lloyd Webber’s team met with government officials – “Hopefully, he’ll have fresh dish from No. 10!” his New York publicist emailed – for an update on the shutdown, as the novel coronavirus numbers rose. (Reality check, here: Can we Yanks possibly wrap our heads around the idea of an urgent White House confab with theater executives?)

“From what I’m hearing, it’s the usual three steps forward, two steps backwards,” Lloyd Webber avers. “It was another government committee today, one wanting to report back to the prime minister about where various businesses are.

“Of course, you keep having to educate them all the time about theater. I mean, the one question I had as I was getting debriefed was, ‘Do they realize that theater isn’t like a football match?’ That … even if it’s an old production, you’re going to have to take several weeks to rehearse and get it back up again?”

Lloyd Webber says his company, with its worldwide reach – his “Phantom,” produced with Cameron Mackintosh, is the longest-running show in Broadway history – has become a “little bit of a clearinghouse” for information on restarting. “Every other day, I get a call from producers in America and producers around the world,” he says, adding: “It’s what I love, theater is what I love! We’ve got to do this!”

That assertion goes unquestioned by his peers and by his Peers. As Mackintosh pointed out in an opinion piece in July for London’s Evening Standard that took health officialdom to task for overzealousness, Lloyd Webber’s exertions come from a place of passion. “Even the expensively imported Korean hygienic fog machine got condemned as unsafe by PHE – the Marx Brothers would have difficulty topping that,” he wrote. “Andrew is trying his best for the profession he loves, for goodness’ sake.”

A “Phantom” leaflet from May 1986 announcing the opening of show. MUST CREDIT: Tom Mraz/The Phantom of the Opera World Tour

Photo by: Tom Mraz — The Phantom of the Opera World Tour

The pandemic life of a particularly prolific composer does not, it turns out, offer all that much in the way of downtime. Lloyd Webber has turned the music room in his country house into a studio of sorts to produce the album for “Cinderella,” with music by him, lyrics by his “The Woman in White” collaborator David Zippel, and the title role performed by London-born actress Carrie Hope Fletcher. His name and work surfaces regularly in popular culture: An episode of Netflix’s recently released fourth season of “The Crown” features Emma Corrin’s Diana surprising Josh O’Connor’s Prince Charles with an onstage rendition of “Phantom’s” “All I Ask of You.” Lloyd Webber says it is possible that it really happened, but he cannot be sure: “Gillie (Lynne) may very well have directed her doing that. I can’t say 101 percent that I know it’s true.”

And only reluctantly does he get drawn into a regurgitation of how he stomached the film version last year of “Cats,” so widely reviled that some people were reported only to be able to watch it in an altered state. “I’ll be diplomatic,” he says, and then, entertainingly, he isn’t. “I just think it was an extraordinary, possibly, kind of one of the most unpleasant experiences that I’ve had, being in any way involved in it. But you know, what can you do?” Wistfully, he adds that years ago, Steven Spielberg had expressed a desire to make an animated version. “Anyway,” he declares, “it has come and gone.”

Right now, though, his focus is on lobbying officials and coaxing back audiences with a full palette of precautions and procedures. In contrast to generally more reticent American producers, who rarely go on the record on this subject, Lloyd Webber seems willing to talk about his efforts for as long as there is battery life in a recording device.

“If you went into the auditorium of, say, the Palladium, the first thing that would happen to you is your temperature is taken,” he begins. “They would do that very very quickly. … The second thing is everything to do with the ticketing … is contactless. There is no need for any kind of paper.”

He goes on to explain the ins and outs of contact tracing through ticket purchasers, the “fogging” of the auditorium with a disinfectant that “stays around for, oh, can be a month but in fact we do it every week.” Also, air circulation has been upgraded: “I’ve spent a lot of money on that,” he says. “The theater I’m in at the moment, the air is purer in here than it is outside.

“You would then obviously be asked to wear a mask,” he continues. “There would be other factors … door handles, and anything you touch on the doors are sanitized automatically.”

72-year-old Andrew Lloyd Webber has composed of 20 musicals, showing no signs of slowing down. A 21st, a new version of “Cinderella,” is being prepped for the West End. MUST CREDIT: Photo for The Washington Post by Tori Ferenc

Photo by: Tori Ferenc — For The Washington Post

The advances on the vaccine front further fuel Lloyd Webber’s optimism, a fervor you might describe as evan-Jellicle.

“I prefer not to wring my hands and moan,” he says. “I think it’s much, much better to try and find solutions, and I think we’re likely to see things get much better come about April. I’m reckoning for getting into rehearsal with ‘Cinderella’ in March and opening in May. And I want ‘Phantom of the Opera’ to open in June here. It would be good to think it could open on Broadway again – and we could get Broadway up earlier than people are saying. There’s talk of September, but maybe it can be earlier now that the vaccine exists.”

A vaccine, or at least one of them, that the lord of the theater has taken himself. Now, if only they’d let him turn on those South Korean anti-bacterial machines …