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, and the first regular drama critic at The New Yorker. 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 addition to Citizen Kane, he wrote or worked on films including The Wizard of Oz, Man of the World, Dinner at Eight, The Pride of the Yankees and The Pride of St. Louis.
Film critic Pauline Kael credits Mankiewicz with having written, alone or with others, "about forty of the films I remember best from the twenties and thirties...He was a key linking figure in just the kind of movies my friends and I loved best." Nearly seventy years after his death, Mankiewicz was portrayed by actor Gary Oldman in the 2020 Oscar-winning film Mank.
Early life
Mankiewicz was born in New York City in 1897. His parents were German-Jewish immigrants: his father, Franz Mankiewicz, was born in Berlin and emigrated to the U.S. from Hamburg in 1892. In New York he met his wife, Johanna Blumenau, a seamstress from the Kurland region of Latvia. The family lived first in New York, then moved to Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, where Herman's father accepted a teaching position. In 1909, Herman's brother, Joseph L. Mankiewicz—who later became a successful writer, producer, and director—was born, and both boys and a sister, Erna, 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. and a member of the Philolexian Society.
Early career After a period as managing editor of the American Jewish Chronicle and a reporter at the New York Tribune, he joined the United States Army Air Service to fly planes, but because of airsickness, enlisted instead as a private first class with the Marines, A.E.F.HERMAN J. MANKIEWICZ, Screenwriter - BIOGRAPHY Turner Classic Movies. Retrieved July 12, 2022.Herman Mankiewicz, Pauline Kael, and the Battle Over “Citizen Kane” The New Yorker via Internet Archive. Retrieved July 12, 2022.5 Things You Don’t Know About Herman J. Mankiewicz Algonquin Round Table. Retrieved July 12, 2022. 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. Herman and Sara had three children: screenwriter Don Mankiewicz (1922–2015), political adviser Frank Mankiewicz (1924–2014), and novelist Johanna Mankiewicz Davis (1937–1974).
Reporter, publicist, playwright While a reporter in Berlin, Mankiewicz also sent pieces on drama and books to The New York Times. At one point he was hired in Berlin by dancer Isadora Duncan to be her publicist in preparation for her return tour in the United States. At home again in the U.S., he took a job as a reporter for the New York World. Known as a "gifted, prodigious writer," 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, and Mankiewicz soon moved to Hollywood.
Hollywood 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.'" Film historian Scott Eyman notes that Mankiewicz was put in charge of writer recruitment by Paramount. As "a hard-drinking gambler," however, he hired men in his own image, such as Ben Hecht, Bartlett Cormack, Edwin Justus Mayer—writers comfortable with the iconoclasm of big-city newsrooms who would introduce their sardonic worldliness to movie audiences.Eyman, Scott. The Speed of Sound: Hollywood and the Talkie Revolution, 1926–1930, Simon and Schuster (1997)
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.
Other screenwriters made large contributions to Hollywood's early sound films, but "probably none larger than Mankiewicz," according to Kael. At the beginning of the Talkies era, he was one of the highest-paid writers in the world, because, Kael writes, "He wrote the kind of movies that were disapproved of as 'fast' and immoral. His heroes weren't soft-eyed and bucolic; he brought good-humored toughness to the movies, and energy and astringency. And the public responded, because it was eager for modern American subjects." Ben Hecht described him as "a Promethean wit bound in a Promethean body, one of the most entertaining men in existence ... [and] called the 'Central Park West Voltaire' ".Louvish, Simon. Man on the Flying Trapeze: The Life and Times of W.C. Fields, W.W. Norton & Co. (1999)
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." In the film The Front Page, when the sheriff asks who threw a bucket out the window, Walter Catlett's character replies, "Judge Mankiewicz threw it," a nod to his friend by Hecht. 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 for which he received no credit. 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. In 1933, he moved to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer where, along with Frances Marion, he adapted Dinner at Eight, which was based on the George S. Kaufman/Edna Ferber play, and became one of the most popular comedies at that time and remains a "classic" comedy.
In 1933, he went on leave from MGM to write a film warning Americans about the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany. No studio was willing to produce his screenplay, The Mad Dog of Europe, and in 1935, MGM was notified by Joseph Goebbels, the Minister of Education and Propaganda under Hitler, that films written by Mankiewicz could not be shown in Nazi Germany unless his name was removed from the screen credits. During World War II, Mankiewicz officially sponsored and took financial responsibility for many refugees fleeing Nazi Germany for the United States.
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."Harmetz, Aljean. The Making of the Wizard of Oz, Hyperion (1998) 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..."Thomson, David, A Biographical Dictionary of Film, 3rd ed. (1995) Alfred A. Knopf
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 biographer Sydney Ladensohn Stern discounts his assertion as his defensiveness with his father, especially because he and other family members had recently bailed him out financially.