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Herman J. Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman) and his wife Sara (Tuppence Middleton) enjoy a beverage in Mank.
Mank Is Fake News About Fake News But by inventing a plot point in his biopic about Herman J. Mankiewicz, David Fincher creates an inadvertent truth about our political moment. BY HAROLD MEYERSON
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entral to the lore of classic Hollywood are tales of disconsolate screenwriters rendered cynical and selfloathing by the indignities that producers and studio moguls heaped upon them, and by their own failures to walk away because they were being paid too much to leave. From F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon to the Coen brothers’ Barton Fink and Hail, Caesar! the story of
the hard-bitten and much putupon screenwriter has long been the subject of novels and plays, of screeds and parodies. But stories of screenwriters at work don’t really lend themselves to the big screen, or even the small one. Typing, dictating, even wadding up paper and throwing it away isn’t the stuff of high drama. William Holden’s occupation as a screenwriter in Sunset Boulevard is a
sidelight to a larger story about the evolution of movies, in which Gloria Swanson’s faded star is central. Humphrey Bogart’s screenwriter is the main character of In a Lonely Place because he may be a murderer. That may be why films about actual screenwriters are so rare. The sole exception to this rule is Trumbo, which dealt with the struggles of screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, who was briefly
imprisoned for contempt of Congress for his refusal to testify to the House Un-American Activities Committee, and then blacklisted by the studios for what they believed was his onetime membership in the Communist Party and his decision not to rat on his fellow lefties. During his decade on the blacklist, Trumbo authored screenplays under various pseudonyms, which won Oscars for other writers who’d been given the credit. He then broke the blacklist when Kirk Douglas and Otto Preminger each decided they’d credit him for writing their respective films (Spartacus and Exodus). In other words, Trumbo told the story
JAN/FEB 2021 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 55
