the controversy behind David Fincher's MANK 

The real controversy: Mank distracted Fincher from Mindhunter and now he doesn’t want to finish it.

As someone who has already seen Mank, I’ll warn you that the film does not depict any of the nuances and variety of perspectives that this video explores

The Royal Ocean Film Society remains one of the most entertaining and informative video essayists on RU-vid!

Welles’ curse is that more people were emotionally invested in insisting that he was NOT a genius than ever proclaimed him to be one in the first place.

I look at clips from Citizen Kane and it still looks incredibly modern. The camera angles, camera movement and blocking are on a different level from anything around at that time.

In my opinion, the most damning evidence against Kael's position is Welles' previous play, Marching Song, which is effectively a proto-Kane about John Brown, and was written a full nine years before Kane was released. It has a lot of the same themes and elements as Kane did, and so it's just ridiculously absurd to claim he didn't make as great a contribution to Kane's script and story and Markiewicz did. Add in the fact that Welles was basically screwed over by Hearst and movie studios that either recut his films or refused to fund them at all, causing him to have to fight for the ability to make films for the rest of his life; and trying to take Kane away from him just comes off as a bit disgusting.

It's not just the script. Guy played in the movie and directed the movie and supervised the editing. You can't take that from Walles. Of course, masterpiece is not happening by chance: Mank, Tolland, Wise....all with their mastery and collaboration helped it out. But the glue and the main engine was still Walles.

I've never really got the line about Orson being an egomaniac. In most of his interviews he's crediting other people who helped him. He even outright dismissed the idea that he helped Carol Reed direct The Third Man. It doesn't paint a picture of some power-grubbing narcissist. He was however openly disdainful of work, and people, he didn't like. Which might have inspired some of these attacks on his character.

Hi. I produced the film Mank. Your video is outstanding, and thank you for that. (You did leave out one critical but important detail. Firstly why it was that Mank's credit issue was an open issue going into this--thank you Arnold Weisberger. And Secondly that Orson did not dispute giving it to Herman! In fact, it was Orson who not only approved of the credit, but instructed that Mank's name go ABOVE his!!! He did this by drawing a circle around Mank's name, and drawing an arrow pointing above his own name.) You are profoundly correct, I could find NOTHING to indicate that Orson was a credit hog, or even an egomaniac. He had confidence, which in the young and talented is often confused with egomania. Our film deals with Herman's "perspective" and in that sense it is 100% accurate. One can learn that from Orson's comments. "Mank always was looking for a villan" or "he went to Victorville as my friend and returned as my enemy." Also, reading John Houseman's 3 humorless (and somewhat self aggrandizing) memoirs the story of perspective tracks. Moreover, Houseman spends the rest of his life backtracking from his conversation with Kael. He ultimately concludes, as does Carringer and others, that the onscreen credit is the accurate and appropriate credit. Case closed? So, I ask myself, what exactly is the controversy--since there is none! Unless the controversy IS Kael herself--who clearly was a huckster who knew a good thing when she saw it--which explains why she never dug deeper or interviewed anyone. Worth also mentioning also is this--Orson was asked if he had any enemies. He said, "only one, John Houseman". One last thing---your technical abilities--you wanted a comment--well here it is--sensational, honestly--talented and impressive.

Anyone who knows how Orson is on a film set knows he throws everything he has into it. Those posters in the alleys that got the acid tossed on one of them in Touch of Evil were done by Welles, staying up all night working on them. He didn't just make films. He wrapped and presented them as gifts.

While I admire Kael's contribution to championing films and directors during the New Hollywood era, and inspiring other critics like Roger Ebert, I just could never get into her work itself. It always seemed to come off as needlessly scathing and mean-spirited, and she just seems like a person I'd never want to meet. I mean, for example, even though she praised Steven Spielberg's first feature, The Sugarland Express, after the success of Jaws and Close Encounters, she basically told him in a radio interview that she was waiting for him to fail. I mean, who does that? (She also seems to have not liked George Lucas' work very much either, even his more personal stuff like American Graffiti) But after hearing about this, I dislike her even more now. It just seems like she got a big head from her success and turned into the Hedda Hopper of film criticism

By sixteen years of age, Orson Welles had already adapted & rewritten hundreds of pages of Shakespeare. You know, Shakespeare. The most prominent example is his Three Kings.

This video was so informative and well edited. Great job as always.

People remember mostly the direction of Citizen Kane rather than the screenplay

Kael’s article was a complete hatchet job likely done more for trying to puncture Auteurism and fans of Andrew Sarris than even attacking Welles. I will never have any respect for her works whatsoever as it goes against everything a critic should do. The article’s damage continues to haunt Orson’s legacy because so many only know the general ideas and not what actually happened much in the same fashion that Spoto’s Dark Side of Genius warped the story of Hitchcock. The credit issue was primarily due to RKO’s insistence on wanting to sell a picture as completely done by the boy wonder of radio. Contractually he was supposed to write, produce, direct and star. This was something that fell into gray areas but went back and forth with all parties aware until Mank decided he did want credit and went into arbitration. One could also make the case for there being input by others involved like John Houseman who stayed with Mank to make sure he wrote instead of drinking. But there is no question whatsoever that it was developed and written by both Mank and Orson. I just hate that all this effort went into a new picture that couldn’t even be bothered with trying to do anything factual or to be honest worth anything. The real story of Mank is fascinating and was beautifully chronicled in the recent book THE BROTHERS MANKIEWICZ which was a sort of double biography of both Herman and his vastly underrated brother Joe.

The real controversy: that this channel doesn't have 1M + subscribers.

The people will think- *WHAT I TELL THEM TO THINK* my favourite part of Kane. It’s so hilarious how abruptly maniacal he becomes.

4:43 what a twist. This channel doesn’t get enough credit

i don’t think people realised how much welles contributed to the script by being its editor-in-chief. you gotta keep in mind that the original screenplay was WAYYYY too long for a feature film then. without welles, the rhythm would be way too draggy. also, mank’s script mostly depicted kane as a villain (because mank had beef w/ hearst), and welles added more depth to kane by making him a lil more charismatic & lovable

I've never had the feeling that Pauline Kael ever really liked movies. Every review of hers i've tried to read was an exercise in her placing herself 'above it all'.

Wow, your editing and animation just keeps getting better. Really interesting topic and just fantastically well made!

The direction movie is what made it a masterpiece...

Orson Welles is a Sociopath? I've never heard such a ridiculous claim.

4:50 OHHHH! I just realised that Herman J. Mankiewicz and Joseph L. Mankiewicz (director of All About Eve) aren't the same person! I feel so dumb.

With so many video essays on this website being so self indulgent... an in-depth video about such an interesting subject and iconic figure is appreciated.

Kael's the kind of writer every "smart" kid who hated their parents loved.

This is fantastic. I adore your use of visual Saul Bass references and inspirations, and your animations are clean and fitting with the story.

God, I love this channel. Your research and editing is top notch. I feel so guilty I can't afford to be a Patron, since this is definitely something that deserves my money.

EXCELLENT video essay. Thanks for making and posting it!

Citizen Kane is only PARTLY based on Hearst's life. It also uses material from the legend of the Lyric Opera house in Chicago , (where Kane builds an Opera house for wife to sing in) . It was close enuf that Hearst offered MGM $$$ to destroy the negative. The film is also a kind of Rashamon where numerous people tell the same story differently (that is they each show a different side of Kane while making themselves look good). Citizen Kane has more special effects shots than Stars Wars. Some people see Kane and are not impressed: pearls before swine. Kane is literally film making 101.

The sound effects and animation are as informative as the references! So magnificently edited.

Great video. It serves as a reminder that the so-called "fact checkers" and wannabe narrators of our history are often as a "problematic" as the people they write about.

Pauline Kael worked for Hearst and she was upset someone made a brilliant film about her sponsor 🙄. The power of the pen. How many great films has any critic including Pauline Kael , given us? None last I checked. Welles will forever be one of the greatest directors that walked the earth.

The things that convinced me that Kael were wrong were three things in the Kane Mutiny article: that Kael never attempted to contact Welles to get his perspective on the matter; that although pretty much everyone involved with the production was still alive at that time, Kael didn't attempt to contact any of them; and that nothing else Herman Mankiewicz ever wrote even remotely reached the level of Kane. (If we're talking Joseph Mankiewicz, we might have an argument.)

Best graphic design on RU-vid. I have a hard time thinking of other videos with even half this much style and polish. Amazing work!

This is in my opinion your best video essay...so far.I love them all, but this just stands out.

That is one of the best produced, slickest (in a good sense) videos I’ve seen. You are really good at telling a story visually. Keep up that excellent quality and you will go far.

Your videos are brilliant works of art. Not just because of the topics and the amount of sheer insight you put in them, but because they genuinely are well-crafted documentaries with brilliant storytelling techniques implied.

That was super interesting and your editing keeps on getting better and better. Amazing!

Wow, your graphics and animation work in every video is great! It's really inspiring, keep it up

This is genuinely one of the best channels on RU-vid!

Brilliant video, great work on the in-depth research and stellar editing. Keep doing what you do!

This was an amazing story told so creatively. Amazing work!

I've read essentially this account recently in a New Yorker piece by Richard Brody, but it's so much more fun to hear it in video essay form! Great work, Royal Ocean Film Society. You've earned yourself a new and fervent subscriber!

Kael's over the top praise of Last Tango in Paris was kind of demented so I never really trusted her opinion.

Seriously awesome video. My filmmaker buddy just showed me the trailer for Mank and explained how Welles wrote none of the script. Time to send him this! Cheers and thanks

amazing essay, the editing skills are fantastic. i enjoyed it very much

Bless you, brilliant composition of video editing. Subscribed, I love Welles. 🌹

You have reached a very high level of quality in your videos, congratulations!

From what Mark Kermode said in his review, it looks like that Fincher leant more towards the Kael version, probably because it would be better drama.

I probably watched almost all of this channel's video. They all are so good.🙏🏻

Pauline Kael remains me of Armond White, a contrarian for contrarian’s sake.

That was wonderful, thank you. My kid was an extra in MANK and according to him, it's gonna be great..

I think the important thing to remember about all this is: No matter what draft you’re at, the script is NOT the final film! While scripts are important, they’re really just the foundation. All they are are words on paper. It’s important to have a solid story as the foundation for your movie, but it’s the director’s job to interpret what was written in a way that can get the desired emotional reaction from the audience. If things like performances and shot choices were written, I think they’d break the page per minute rule.

Once again I’m blown away by the honesty, research, and the care you put in your videos. Watching this video should be a requirement before anyone watches Mank.

Great video as always, excited as well to see how MANK would depict the controversy. BTW, the marriage scene is a cinematic achievement... hats off to Orson Welles.

Truly amazing work here! Thanks!

"Mank", like ALL other movies based on history, is a MOVIE, NOT a documentary. It is to Hollywood history as "Braveheart" is to English/Scottish history, presenting comprehensively demolished myths but, considered as entertainment and NOT as history lesson, it is beautiful and engrossing.

Orson Welles carried the germinal idea for "Citizen Kane" in his head for nearly a decade BEFORE the making of the film. In 1931, while waiting in New York for the ship that would take him to Ireland (where he would begin his career as a professional actor), Welles attended a performance of the Susan Glaspell play, "Alison's House." And while there's no Rosebud in "Alison's House," the plots could hardly be more similar. Alison is a world-renowned poet about whose personal life almost nothing is known. So, a newspaper tasks a reporter to get behind her public image and reveal the real Alison. After a series of unsatisfactory interviews, the reporter realizes what how futile his research is going to be. I came upon the Glaspell connection during my own research, for "The Theatre of Orson Welles," but (regrettably) withheld it because of the focus of my book. By the time he boarded that ship at age 16 -- Welles' thoughts were on radio and the theatre, not the movies, and how - if given the chance (which turned out to be soon enough in coming) - he wanted to transform the germinal ideas he also had in his head for such landmark stage productions as "Dr. Faustus" (1936), "Julius Caesar" (1937) and "Five Kings" (1938). In 1965, Welles would turn again to "Five Kings" to make his TRUE cinematic masterpiece, "Chimes at Midnight."

Welles considered suing Kael over this but instead got his posthumous revenge via The Other Side of The Wind, which has a clear Kael stand-in character, and she wasn't around to critique it. Now that's lastwording.

Mank was brilliantly cast, well acted, interestingly shot, cleverly edited, and a complete bore. A rare miss for Fincher in my view.

Bernard Herrmann in 1973: " I think the greatest thing that ever happened to Herman Mankiewicz, whatever his contribution, was that he met Welles, not the other way round. If Welles hadn't created Kane, he would have made some other equally remarkable picture. Mankiewicz's credits don't show any other remarkable scripts. His only moment in the sun was when he came across Orson Welles. . . . You know, most screenwriters of the period were 'the Great American Novelist' being whores and hoping for better things. They were always about to write a great novel or great play while demeaning themselves with movie writing. I was at a party at William Dieterle's house which Thomas Mann attended. One of these writers, quite drunk, came up to him and said something like 'How could a wonderful writer like you even talk to miserable whores like us?' Mann looked at him and said, 'My dear sir, you are not big enough to make yourself so small.'"

This is such beautiful video work, impressive and well written as well.

I enjoyed watching "Mank", viewing it as a drama, not a documentary.

Thank you for this corrective of Kael's ridiculous book, and Fincher's movie. It's far past time her theory be taken behind the barn and shot, and I'm very sad to see Fincher, quite a researcher in his own right, swallow whole the lies of Kael, the most overrated author of the 20th Century... and, as you point out, a HUGE hypocrite.

There are more problems with David Fincher's tale: His account of the 1934 gubernatorial election leaves at least two things unsaid that need highlighting: 1) Upton Sinclair wasn't an "idealist," a naif as the incredible, literally incredible, writers room of Hecht, MacArthur, Kaufman, Epstein, et al. describe him. He was a Stalinist. Hardcore. He met with Stalin. He corresponded with Stalin. Sinclair's defenders even tout how Sinclair tried to save a Soviet writer's life by interceding with Stalin. He defended the Show Trials, the first of which took place in 1935, the year after his run for governor of California. I'd recommend doing a Google search and reading "Upton Sinclair on the Soviet Union" which was published in the "New Masses" on 8 Mar 1938; it's available on-line. It includes one of his favorite lines: "Fascism is capitalism plus murder." 2) William Randolph Hearst was a *Democrat*. He opposed Sinclair, but Sinclair had only changed his party affiliation from Socialist Party of America to Democrat for the 1934 election. Hearst was part of the majority of the DP who hated Upton Sinclair and opposed him. Louis B. Mayer was a Republican. I don't know about Irving Thalberg; I suspect Fincher made up the story about having his testicles crushed by Tammany Hall thugs. If it happened, Fincher should have made clear that Tammany was the New York City Democrats. The liberal American Federation of Labor also opposed Upton Sinclair for his radical Marxism and hatred of the United States. Heck, many SPA members opposed Sinclair because of his admiration for the Soviet Union; it's surprising he was in the SPA at all. As I was watching MGM engage in every imaginable dirty trick to defeat Upton Sinclair, the thought occurred to me "Mank" might be a subversive take on today's media and the way it did the same thing to defeat President Trump. For a minute I started to think there might be something more to David Fincher's film. Then I recalled Fincher's unknowing, silly celebration of Upton Sinclair and realized, No, there's nothing here. As an aside, I just finished reading Donald Rayfield's "Stalin and His Hangmen" (2004) and there's a healthy section on pages 229-230 on Western writers' culpability in the mass murder of 10,000,000 Soviet peasants. And I'm now reading Simon Sebag Montefiore's "Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar" (2003) which describes in passing Upton Sinclair's friendship with the Joseph Stalin. And lasty, the whole business about the suicide of "Shelly Metcalf" was made up entirely. If David Fincher meant the audience to be believe it happened, then Fincher lied.

Great video! The best I have seen so far about the subject. Besides, the animation is fantastic!

Just want to say that your editing and animation are incredible!

I have watched many interviews with Orson Welles, he seems to have no difficulty giving credit where credit is due, he was also quite vocal in criticizing his own work (like most great artists) Also, when offered "Touch of Evil" (called Badge of Evil at the time) Welles agreed to direct if he could rewrite the entire script himself. He did it in 2 weeks and according to Charlton Heston it was vastly improved. Clearly Welles could write, and according to Robert Wise (the editor) Kane was Welles' complete obsession while making it because it was his first film. It makes perfect sense then, that he would be involved in some aspect of the writing as well as every other aspect of production including even the lighting. It was his baby. GREAT VIDEO!

The editing in this video is phenomenal

Love the graphic style… thank you!

Excellent video, and well executed. You've earned a subscriber.

Umm love the editing. Great video!

Damn, amazing video! Very informative and well made. Thank you!

Pauline Kael was a gifted and insightful film reviewer but had a weird cruel streak. At the height of her power Kael eviscerated David Lean so brutally in person that he almost gave up filmmaking entirely. Her review of Blade Runner (my favourite science fiction film) is hilarious but entirely inaccurate, excessively cruel and contributed to the film's unfairly poor reception. I enjoy Kael's work as a reviewer but only in terms of taking her with a pinch of salt and treating her views as entirely comedic and without honest merit.

your style has gotten so clean cut! keep it up

: Welles shared his director card in the credits because as he didn't hesitate to admit his gratitude to Toland for helping him put his vision of the film on the screen, as in imagewise, getting the film images he wanted captured to tell his story.

The royal ocean film society once again being at the top of the game. Great video man!

Anyone else believe Pauline Kael provided inspiration for JK Rowling when she was writing Rita Skeeter’s character in Harry Potter?

Having already seen 'Mank' at one of my local theaters (#SaveYourCinema), well, let me just say I'm hoping for a follow-up to this video. Another fun and intriguing essay from Royal Ocean. Keep it up.

What a great video essay!

This was Brilliant! Great Job!

I don't know how I found this but so fascinating bravo

Always such a good day when it begins with some royal ocean

Great episode!

This was so well done and engaging.

Every film is a collaboration and credit rarely is only deserved by one person. Who deserves how much credit is often difficult to define perfectly.

You find it very common that when somebody is calling another person a narcist to reinforce their critique that they them self may very well be a narcist.

dude, BRAVO on your research, this was fantastic.

Fascinating video man.

A fascinating, well told piece. Bravo!

can we please talk about how fantastically this essay has been presented

They will always try to tear down the greats. Its terrible. Thank you for the video.

Excellent visualization. I did, however, wince when you identified Houseman as "actor John Houseman." Not in 1940. His association with Wells was as a writer and producer in theatre and radio.After splitting with Welles, he worked as mainly as a producer in films and TV. His acting career came late in life (beginning with his role as Professor Kingsield in "The Paper Chase," 1973).

Amazingly done video!

Great essay. The video title on RU-vid should be the "Citizen Kael" one you used at the end. I realize the Fincher's Mank keywords will probably get more search hits, but the Citizen Kael title seems more accurate.

Good to see the vid. But I'll suggest a story, a real story that there's so many things in you wouldn't know what to leave out. It's how Hearst and the movie establishment tried to stop Kane from coming out. Sabotaged the distribution so it would be a financial failure. Got an under aged girl undressed in Welles's hotel room with photographers standing by - Welles would of gone to jail. And according to Robert Wise, Welles gave his best performance when they flew to New York to convince the big wigs not to burn the negative of Kane. And in the end Welles went to Europe in the late 40's just to get work. Ok , there's your film.

Great assessment. Well done!

Some great information here, I’m looking forward to seeing the perspective fincher takes with his movie. Thanks ROFS!

Dude I love you, please keep making videos