Early success Paramount paid Mankiewicz $400 a week plus bonuses, and by the end of 1927, he was head of
Paramount's scenario department. Film critic
Pauline Kael wrote about him and the creation of
Citizen Kane in "
Raising Kane", her 1971
New Yorker article: "In January, 1928, there was a newspaper item reporting that he (Mankiewicz) was in New York 'lining up a new set of newspaper feature writers and playwrights to bring to Hollywood... Most of the newer writers on Paramount's staff who contributed the most successful stories of the past year' were selected by 'Mank.'" 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. 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." Neither Welles nor Mankiewicz attended the dinner, which was broadcast on radio. Welles was in
South America filming ''
It's All True'', and Herman refused to attend. "He did not want to be humiliated," said his wife, Sara.
Richard Meryman describes the evening: On the night of the awards, Herman turned on his radio and sat in his bedroom chair. Sara lay on the bed. As the screenplay category approached, he pretended to be hardly listening. Suddenly from the radio, half screamed, came "Herman J. Mankiewicz." Welles's name as coauthor was drowned out by voices all through the audience calling out, "Mank! Mank! Where is he?" And audible above all others was
Irene Selznick: "Where is he?"
George J. Schaefer accepted Herman's Oscar. "Except for this coauthor award, the
Motion Picture Academy excommunicated Orson Welles," wrote Meryman, "[and] as
Pauline Kael put it, 'The members of the Academy ... probably felt good because their hearts had gone out to crazy, reckless Mank, their own resident loser-genius." Richard Meryman concludes that "taken as a whole ...
Citizen Kane was overwhelmingly Welles's film, a triumph of intense personal magic. Herman was one of the talents, the crucial one, that were mined by Welles. But one marvels at the debt those two self-destroyers owe to each other. Without Welles there would have been no supreme moment for Herman. Without Mankiewicz there would have been no perfect idea at the perfect time for Welles ... to confirm his genius ...
The Citizen Kane script was true creative symbiosis, a partnership greater than the sum of its parts." ==Alcoholism and death==