Little White Lies Issue 87: November/December 2020

Directed by DAVID FINCHER  Starring GARY OLDMAN, AMANDA SEYFRIED, TUPPENCE MIDDLETON  Released 4 DECEMBER “Ladies and gentlemen, by way of introduction, this is a film about trickery and fraud, about lies.” So said Orson Welles in the opening of his revolutionary 1973 film F For Fake. A fair number of David Fincher’s films are, come to think of it, similarly elaborate games of cat and mouse, some which span genres and decades. He has made a habit of delightfully wrongfooting viewers for much of his career, and in taking on the contentious history of a film frequently cited as The Greatest of All Time, he shows no signs of stopping. Mank, his alternative history of Citizen Kane, might as well begin with a direct quote from Kurt Vonnegut: “All of this happened, more…

From the pen of Jack Fincher comes Mank, the story of how perma-soused Hollywood hack Herman Mankiewicz happened to write one of the greatest screenplays of all time. Sadly, Jack didn’t live long enough to see the words he had written transformed into sound and light, but it’s something that his son David had wanted to realise for close to three decades. It’s been six years since Fincher Jr’s last feature film, 2014’s Gone Girl, and in the interim we’ve had two series of Rolls Royce TV drama in the form of Mindhunter. For someone who has already made a tech bro riff on Citizen Kane (2010’s The Social Network), and a melancholic homage to his late father (2008’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button), Mank combines these two career…

Pauline Kael, in her 1971 essay for The New Yorker, titled ‘Raising Kane’, wrote, “The only evidence of an instinct for self-preservation in the life of Herman Mankiewicz is his choice of keen-eyed Sara.” The long-suffering wife of the brilliant but difficult Mankiewicz inspired several epithets – “keen-eyed Sara”, “ravishing Sara” – but only one, less complimentary choice appears several times in the script of David Fincher’s Mank: “Poor Sara.” It’s a nickname caught in the act of belittling a woman while its true target, her self-destructive husband, jumps in on the joke himself. And “Poor Sara” she is not. While much of her own life is not depicted in the film, her appearances throughout, often at pivotal moments in Mank’s career, reinforce Sara as the sturdy backbone to the…

In Hollywood, being a costume designer can transport you to any place and any time. Trish Summerville has been plying her trade for nearly 25 years, and here discusses how she helped make Mank. “Choosing costumes for a black and white movie is a very different job to when you’re choosing them for a colour movie. With Mank, it involved working with David Fincher and [cinematographer] Eric Messerschmidt to figure out exactly how they’re going to shoot, because there’s nothing regular about how Dave shoots – there’s always some innovative, amazing technique up his sleeve. During the early camera tests, we tested several different lights and processes, each time looking at how colour reads in black and white, but also how print and texture reads in that format. Generally, when I…

Wend your mind back to Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons to recall that it contains what might be the earliest recorded example of a mic drop. It occurs right at the end of the film when a boom arcs away from the camera before disappearing behind a screen of bright studio lights – a fitting sign-off to one of the all-time great end credits sequences. Welles was hardly known for his magnanimity, so it comes as something of a surprise to see him park his ego and show sincere appreciation to some of the people who worked on the picture, from the principal cast, cinematographer and editor to the assistant director, set dresser and sound recordists. It’s certainly a far cry from Citizen Kane, in which only the actors and key technicians are…

There was a time, not so long ago, when imagining the movies without MGM would’ve been as unthinkable as imagining soft drinks without Coke. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer built Hollywood into the planet’s biggest film factory but, by the early ’70s, the industry had gotten too big for one of its principal architects. Resort tycoon Kirk Kerkorian purchased a controlling share of MGM in 1969 with plans to strip the studio for parts, deemphasising film production and funnelling capital into the company’s more lucrative hotel and casino divisions. The most dramatic component of this plan involved parcelling off the land on which their famed backlot had been built and selling it to the highest bidder. Cinema’s heritage would be bulldozed to make way for condo developments. The final theatrical release produced on this…