Word: mankiewicz
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DIED. Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 83, film director, writer and producer; in Bedford, New York. Mankiewicz loved words; he filmed words; he realized that talking pictures were just that. Born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, he started off as a reporter for the Chicago Tribune before entering the world of film. He won an Oscar for best director and best screenplay for A Letter to Three Wives (1949) and won both those awards again for All About Eve (1950). He also directed one of the biggest film flops of all time: Cleopatra (1963, starring Elizabeth Taylor). But his cinematic successes were legion...
...during the primaries, Clinton was inevitably more accessible than a sitting President, who must split his time between campaigning and governing. Moreover, as a matter of style and strategy, even when they are on the road, "access to the Bush and Quayle campaigns has been almost nil," notes Josh Mankiewicz, political reporter at Los Angeles's K-CAL. Says Mary Tillotson of CNN: "The President used to come back and schmooze with us on Air Force One. We haven't seen him up close for months...
...Hecht was lounging between careers -- he had written seven novels and two Broadway plays and was now dead broke -- when in 1926 he received a telegram from his pal Herman J. Mankiewicz, then a Hollywood scriptwriter. "Will you accept three hundred per week to work for Paramount Pictures?" the wire read. "The three hundred is peanuts. Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots." Then a mock-wily P.S.: "Don't let this get around...
...around -- the news that Hollywood needed somebody to write the words for talking pictures. And it stayed around -- the contempt for self and cinema that Mankiewicz's cable winks at. How could one be paid so much to have one's literature ground into pulp by the coarse merchants who ran the movies? In the '30s and '40s a few screenwriters, pre-eminently Preston Sturges, seized the means of production and became their own directors. The rest mostly complained about their six-figure serfdom, partly because they were so good at it. "It is as difficult to make a toilet...
...biographer, who teaches film courses at St. John's University in New York City, also provides valuable evidence that blunts film critic Pauline Kael's assertion that Herman J. Mankiewicz, not Welles, was mainly responsible for the final script for Citizen Kane. Mank, as he was known, does get credit for the basic plot and the "Rosebud" sled gimmick, but most of the words belong to Welles, who, after all, had to speak them as the film's protagonist, Charles Foster Kane. Among the footnotes to this classic is Steven Spielberg's purchase at auction of one of three sleds...