By RAY KELLY
Mank enters Hollywood’s award season with six Golden Globe nominations and a dozen more Critics Choice nods — a feather in the cap of director David Fincher (Social Network, House of Cards) and the film’s distributor, Netflix.
Netflix touted those nominations in a full-page ad in The Los Angeles Times on Valentine’s Day as it pitched Mank to Academy Award voters.
But some of those closest to the late Orson Welles are angry that the fictionalized account of the writing of Citizen Kane has been embraced by the Hollywood establishment. Welles loyalists Peter Bogdanovich and Joseph McBride have publicly criticized how Mank resurrects film critic Pauline Kael’s discredited notion that Welles did not co-author Citizen Kane with Herman J. Mankiewicz, despite enormous physical evidence to the contrary.
In an interview with Wellesnet, Welles’ youngest daughter, Beatrice, who manages his estate, said Mank is a slap in the face of the maverick filmmaker.
“I am talking as his daughter, not the representative of the estate,” she said. “Why did Netflix have to make a movie that makes him look bad? That’s not the man he was. It’s like that dreadful RKO 281, which made him out to be a spoiled brat.”
She added, “Mank didn’t have to be inaccurate. There is a good story there.”
Beatrice Welles, who was an executive producer on Netflix’s completion of The Other Side of the Wind in 2018, said that Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos once told her how much he and others in the industry owed to her father — which makes its release of Mank even more disturbing.
She noted Netflix did an incredibly poor job promoting The Other Side of the Wind, a film her father labored on for the last 15 years of his life, and pulled it from the Cannes Film Festival over a snit with organizers. In contrast, the streaming giant has seemingly spent a fortune hyping Mank — a movie she described as “not Oscar material, other than Gary Oldman’s usual brilliant performance.”
Beatrice Welles said she had held off on criticizing Mank and Netflix, but was troubled that the industry establishment was now throwing laurels at the feet of a film that insults her father’s legacy, portrays him in a negative light, and revives the Kael fantasy that he did not co-write the script of arguably his finest film.
Kael’s “Raising Kane” essay in 1971 deeply wounded her father, she said.
“He was devastated. I was young, but I remember it well,” Beatrice Welles said. “He wasn’t just ‘the maverick,’ he was a human being. It destroyed him.”
Citizen Kane‘s roots can be traced to some of Welles’ boyhood writings at the Todd School for Boys, she said. Mankiewicz co-wrote the script with Welles and the latter refined it into a cinematic masterpiece.
“We know my father’s brilliance in writing was his ability to take something and make it better,” Beatrice Welles said. “Nobody can take that away from him – even though they continue to try.”
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