7/15/23
Newsletter #397
The Crack of Dawn
In 1932 MGM scored a huge hit, as well as the Oscar for Best Picture, with the first all-star movie, Grand Hotel. Nobody had ever put multiple movie stars together in the same film, and it worked. MGM immediately made plans to follow up with an all-star comedy called Dinner at Eight (1933), based on a play by George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber. They hired the top screenwriter in Hollywood, Francis Marion, who had already won an Oscar for Best Screenplay (for The Big House [1930]) – there had only been five Oscar ceremonies at that point – and she was a great screenwriter, but not very funny. So, you want funny, get Mank, the funniest guy at the renowned Algonquin Round Table (I meant to put this photo in yesterday).
The beginning of the Algonquin Round Table, 1919: (standing, left to right) Art Samuels and Harpo Marx;(sitting) Charles MacArthur, Dorothy Parker, and Alexander Woollcott
MGM lured Herman Mankiewicz away from Paramount, had him rewrite Dinner at Eight, and it was a smash success. Mank’s little brother, Joe, then came over to MGM too. Joe immediately wrote Manhattan Melodrama (1934), which was also a big hit, and was the movie that John Dillinger had just seen when he was gunned down. Joe Mankiewicz was promoted to producer in 1936, instantly proving to be a talented producer with Fritz Lang’s first American movie, the classic, Fury (1936), with Spencer Tracy and Sylvia Sydney. Fury is an important movie. It's an indictment of lynch mobs and is a solid step forward in the development of intelligent, adult filmmaking.
Meanwhile, in 1933, brother Herman, along with one other person in the world, Winston Churchill, saw that Hitler taking power in Germany was a gigantic problem, and nobody would listen to either one of them. Herman wrote a script called The Mad Dog of Europe and spent a couple years trying to get it financed, but to no avail. Herman returned to writing screenplays. He was the first of ten screenwriters on The Wizard of Oz (1939), seven of whom were not credited, Mank among them. His first draft, known as the “the Kansas sequence,” established the Kansas bookend, and stated that it should not only be shot in black & white (I love this), but on location in Kansas. Every other draft kept the Kansas Sequence, but alas, they shot the scene in Hollywood.
With Fury Joseph Mankiewicz became a big producer in Hollywood, and he followed with high-quality successful films: A Christmas Carol (1938); The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1939) with Mickey Rooney; then he had a huge hit with The Philadelphia Story (1940) starring Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant and James Stewart; then he was the first producer to pair up Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in Woman of the Year (1942), yet another success.
Herman, meanwhile, was busily drinking himself to death. This is the time period of the story of David Fincher’s Mank (2020). Even at his drunken worst, Herman Mankiewicz managed to write Citizen Kane, which is saying something. Orson Welles rewrote it, but it’s mostly Mankiewicz’s work. No matter what controversies arose after the film came out, and there were several, at the time Orson Welles figured out and ordered his front titles from the RKO title department, Herman Mankiewicz’s name is both bigger and above Orson Welles’s name. Welles knew who did what.
Being both a successful screenwriter and producer, Joe now wanted to direct, and MGM wouldn’t let him. He jumped ship and signed up with Darryl Zanuck at 20th Century Fox who would let him direct. It took a few years, then Joe had two years in a row that are awesome, 1949 and 1950.
In 1949 Joseph Mankiewicz made A Letter to Three Wives, which was huge, huge, huge, and one of those oddball years where Joe won the Oscars for both Best Director and Best Screenplay, but Best Picture went to All The King’s Men, which actually makes perfect sense in its own way.
I remember seeing A Letter to Three Wives when I was about 14 and I was just enchanted and found it funny and clever. My mom loved the movie and clearly remembered seeing it in 1949, when she was 18. Though forgotten now, the whole relationship between Linda Darnell and Paul Douglas is a hoot. He drops her off after their first date, and she’s so hot and he can’t take his eyes off of her that he lights his cigarette with the car lighter, then tosses it out the window. The movie was also an important step in the career of Kirk Douglas.
Then in 1950 Joe Mankiewicz knocked it out of the park with All About Eve, getting the Best Picture Oscar he didn’t get the year before. He also received Oscars for Best Director and Best Screenplay again, two years in a row, which is unequaled.
But beyond any of that – and this is where this whole thought began – Joseph Mankiewicz was a terrific writer, particularly of dialogue. I’ve been trying to point out really good dialogue, and Bette Davis’s dialogue in All About Eve is fabulous. Here’s one exchange between her and Gary Merrill (who Ms. Davis married):
Bill: So when you start judging an idealistic dreamy-eyed kid by the barroom, benzedrine standards of this megalomaniac society – I won’t have it! Even Harrington has never by word, look, thought or suggestion indicated anything to me but her adoration for you and her happiness at our being in love! And to intimate anything else doesn’t spell jealousy to me – it spells paranoiac insecurity that you should be ashamed of!
Margo: Cut! Print it! What happens in the next reel? Do I get dragged off screaming to the snake pit?
OK. Have a swell day.