Times Mank Lied To You

After bringing to the screen such expertly crafted and thoroughly modern tales of human nastiness, including Seven, Fight Club, and Gone Girl, director David Fincher set his filmmaking sights on the Golden Age of Hollywood, in particular the inspiration and creation of the screenplay of Citizen Kane, the 1941 film about the death of a sad tycoon universally regarded as one of the best movies ever made. Mank, which hit theaters and Netflix in late 2020, tells how screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman), or "Mank," wrote Citizen Kane, a thinly veiled attack on newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance) and his orbit of associates.

Mank was made from a script about scripts, and Fincher employed one written by his late father, Jack Fincher. It's largely a thoroughly researched, heavily detailed, and very accurate movie, but as with all real-life stories turned into film, liberties had to be taken. Certain events and characters are invented, condensed, combined, clarified, or made more cinematic. Here are the moments in Mank when the truth is at least a little bit different than fiction.

Probably the reason that Mank screenwriter Jack Fincher made Charles Lederer a protégé of Herman J. Mankiewicz, rather than Ben Hecht, is because of Lederer's connection to the film's storyline. Lederer's aunt was Marion Davies (played in Mank by Amanda Seyfried), mistress of William Randolph Hearst and thus the inspiration for the Citizen Kane character Susan Alexander Kane. In Mank, Lederer shows the potentially incendiary Citizen Kane screenplay to Davies, but in her 1975 memoir, The Times We Had: Life With William Randolph Hearst, the actress states that she never saw the script before the film hit theaters, and even then, she didn't go see it. Nowhere in her memoir does she mention a moment depicted in Mank, in which she pleads with Mankiewicz to stop the release of Citizen Kane. 

That's one of many Mank/Davies scenes invented by filmmakers. The two didn't meet for the first time at Hearst's California estate, when Davies was filming a burned-at-the-stake scene for a religious film — because Davies never starred in a film of that nature. Nor were any of her movies ever filmed on Hearst's grounds, and there's little record of her and Mankiewicz even knowing each other.

Part of what dooms Upton Sinclair's 1934 California gubernatorial run is a smear campaign by MGM, which doesn't want an anti-business socialist to be the most powerful man in the state. The well-funded studio produces a series of newsreels that cast Sinclair in an extremely bad light, and he indeed goes down to defeat, despite Mankiewicz's attempts to get the reels pulled from distribution via his friendship with Marion Davies. 

While these newsreels are a real thing, the manner in which they were produced isn't quite as the film would have viewers believe. In Mank, they're directed by test shot director Shelly Metcalf (Jamie McShane), who jumps at the opportunity to work on something that was ordered personally by studio boss Irving G. Thalberg, thinking that it would will allow him to direct features for MGM in due time. Metcalf, suffering from Parkinson's disease already, ultimately takes his own life due to his guilt over the Sinclair-reputation-killing films. 

Making this tragic Mank subplot significantly less tragic is the fact that Shelly Metcalf is not a real person who worked for MGM in the 1930s — he was invented by filmmakers. As noted by Town & Country, the newsreels were actually helmed by a go-getter of a young director named Felix Feist, who parlayed his work on the special project into directing feature films by the 1940s.

Mank is about how Herman J. Mankiewicz is who really wrote Citizen Kane (not Orson Welles), but the individual who put the words on the page wasn't Mankiewicz at all but stenographer, assistant, and longtime ally Rita Alexander, portrayed in the film by Lily Collins. During his stay at a ranch in Victorville, California, Mankiewicz dictated the script to Alexander, who typed and cleaned it up. 

Alexander was an actual figure who worked with and for Mankiewicz for years, although the vast majority of her characterization in the film was created by screenwriters, along with Collins herself. "Rita is, of course, a real person, but there's little information to be found about her, other than that she's a stenographer from England and her husband was in the war," Collins told Vogue. The Mank team decided to make Alexander an encouraging and supportive character for Mankiewicz, the film's main character, because it could advance the plot if she inspired him to do what he did. But there's little real-life evidence confirming any actual incidences of that. Collins said she was only even ever able to see two photos of Alexander.

One of the most memorable scenes in Mank is also the grossest. Herman J. Mankiewicz attends a fancy dinner at the palatial home of media tycoon William Randolph Hearst, the inspiration for Citizen Kane, the masterwork which he helps write. During the meal, Mank becomes extremely ill and graphically vomits up the contents of his stomach. Mankiewicz was known throughout Hollywood for always having a perfectly executed quip at the ready for any situation, even during a time of great gastrointestinal distress. "Don't worry," he remarks. "The white wine came up with the fish." 

It's a line so perfect that it couldn't possibly be real, the way Mank makes fun of himself while also cutting the tension by invoking an axiom about etiquette, in that it's considered proper to serve white wine with fish. Amazingly, Mankiewicz actually did make this joke at a party, but he didn't say it to Hearst. According to Sydney Ladensohn Stern's The Brothers Mankiewicz, he said this when he threw up at a dinner party held by movie producer Arthur Hornblow Jr., who was apparently very big on proper etiquette.