7/14/23
Newsletter #396
The Crack of Dawn
The brothers, Herman and Joseph Mankiewicz, had a huge impact on Hollywood in the 1920s, ‘30s and ‘40s. One of their many legacies to the film business was the introduction of smart, snappy dialogue.
Throughout the 1920s the most powerful drama critics in New York were the two critics at The New York Times: playwright, George S. Kaufman, and Herman Mankiewicz. In 1926 Mankiewicz became the first drama critic at The New Yorker magazine. Herman, called Mank (who recently had a film made about him called Mank [2020]), was considered the funniest and sharpest of the NY literary group known as the Algonquin Round Table. This informal grouping was composed of writers, actors and directors, who lunched at the Algonquin Hotel, and it lasted from 1919 to 1929. It included such wits as Dorothy Parker, Ben Hecht, Harpo Marx (he could talk), Robert Benchley (he grandson, Peter, wrote Jaws), and many others.
Members and associates of the Algonquin Round Table ca. 1919: (standing, left to right) Art Samuels and Harpo Marx; (sitting) Charles MacArthur, Dorothy Parker, and Alexander Woollcott
The first of the NY writers to venture out to Hollywood was Mank in 1926, who first went to work for Warner Brothers. The hot shit wunderkind writer/producer at Warners was 24-year-old Darryl Zanuck. He had found a huge moneymaking formula with Rin-Tin-Tin pictures. He wrote and produced over 40 of these between 1924-1929. Mank arrived – and remember, he was a really big deal in NY; he was the drama critic at The New Yorker – and this bucktoothed punk Zanuck assigned him to write a Rin-Tin-Tin story. He wrote a story about a sniveling dog that gets frightened by a mouse, then mistakenly takes a baby into a burning house. Unsurprisingly, Zanuck fired him. Herman Mankiewicz managed to get fired from a number of the studios.
I digress. In the 1940s Herman Mankiewicz was working for Columbia Pictures and the hot-tempered, foul-mouthed Harry Cohen. In a tirade, Cohen had all of the top people at the studio, including Mank, in a conference and yelled at them, “We have got to get the people into the theaters!” Mank said, “That’s easy, Harry. Show your movies in the streets, that’ll force them into the theaters.” He got fired again.
Anyway, back in 1926, Mank got a job writing title cards for Paramount at $400 a week. It was the easiest, best-paying job of his life. It paid more a week than The New Yorker paid a month. Within a year Mank was the head of Paramount’s scenario department because – this is a great example of being in the right place at the right time – just as sound came to the movies, and nobody in Hollywood knew how to write dialogue. Mankiewicz sent a telegram to his 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." He then sent for his little brother, Joe.
Both of the Mankiewicz brothers were big, tall, fleshy, Jewish guys from New York. I think Herman was six-three and 250. He has been portrayed in film by John Malkovich in RKO 281 (1999) and Gary Oldman in Mank. Although both men are fine actors, I don’t think either of them caught what Herman Mankiewicz was really like. He was the funniest guy at the Algonquin.
Herman and Joe led Paramount Pictures through the transition from silent films to sound, and along with other Algonquin members, introduced their own brand of wise-cracking Broadway slang to the early talkies. This short period in Hollywood, from 1929 to 1934, is known as “Pre-Code.” Basically, for four years you could get away with almost anything, until the Breen Code was instituted and put a stop to all the wild shenanigans and sexual innuendo. Mank was the conduit from Broadway to Hollywood, and the hottest thing on Broadway was the Marx Brothers in Coconuts. So Paramount put the Marx Brothers under contract and made Coconuts (1929), one of Paramount’s first all-sound movies, and it made a lot of money. So Paramount put the Mankiewicz brothers in charge of transferring the Marx Brothers stage vehicle, Animal Crackers (1930), then creating, Monkey Business (1931), Horse Feathers (1932) and Duck Soup. These are in my opinion the Marx Brothers’ best movies.
Meanwhile, Herman and Joe made my favorite W.C. Fields movie, Million Dollar Legs (1932), where Fields is the president of Klopstockia, and they go to the 1932 Olympics, which happen to be in Los Angeles that year.
Well, I didn’t even get to what I started out for, which was Joe Mankiewicz’s great dialogue in All About Eve (1950, Best Picture).
Let me find some good photos.
It looks like a nice day here.