Word: mankiewicz
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Taken as a whole, however, Superman works, and works well. That is all the more surprising because, despite the years of hoopla over Cannes, real production work did not begin until January 1977, when Donner was brought in as director, Barry, 42, was hired as set designer, and Tom Mankiewicz, 35, was asked to do a third rewrite of the script (after Mario Puzo and the team of Robert Benton and David and Leslie Newman...
...Columnist Alexander Woollcott called Herman Mankiewicz the funniest man in New York, a town that then included Robert Benchley, George S. Kaufman, Dorothy Parker and other luminaries of the Algonquin Round Table. As a screenwriter in the Hollywood of the '30s and '40s, "Mank" continued to shoot from the quip. Dining at the home of a pretentious gourmet, he suddenly rushed to the bathroom. "Don't worry," he assured his host later, "the white wine came up with the fish." When movie attendance dropped, he offered a unique solution: "Show the movies in the streets, and drive...
...Richard Meryman's delightful biography shows, Mank's wit had an undertow of bitterness and desperation. "I am the most serious man in the world," he said, "even when I'm joking." The son of a German immigrant who believed in Prussian discipline, Mankiewicz was ceaselessly downgraded by his father. The old man, a professor of languages, seemed jealous and resentful of Herman's precocity. Early on, the boy became convinced that he was a failure and spent the rest of his life trying to prove himself right...
...from New York largely established the funny, irreverent film style of the '30s. He wrote or collaborated on a score of scripts and had an uncredited influence on the structure and content of many other major films. But Hollywood also evoked the worst in him. During the Depression, Mankiewicz and his colleagues were earning $1,250 a week. Mank gambled it away, with as much disdain as if he had stolen it from his children's Monopoly set. "Hollywood money," explained his friend Charles MacArthur, "is something you throw off the ends of trains...
Just as his welcome was wearing out in Los Angeles, Mankiewicz was saved by the arrival of another brilliant talker, Orson Welles. The young director suggested a collaboration. The result, a thinly disguised biography of Press Lord William Randolph Hearst, was Citizen Kane. Even before the classic flickered onscreen, Welles and Mank were disputing the writing credits; who contributed what remains a matter of acrimonious debate. After exhaustive research, Meryman convincingly concludes that though the script was a cooperative venture, the controlling interest belongs to Mankiewicz...