Netflix Drops First Images of David Fincher’s Mank - Vanity Fair

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“I run a couple of newspapers. What do you do?”

September 5, 2020

On Saturday, the 79th anniversary of RKO declaring it “Citizen Kane Day” (who knew?), streaming giant Netflix released images of one of its big 2020 Oscar-push pictures, Mank.

The film stars Gary Oldman as Herman J. Mankiewicz, and details his struggles working with Orson Welles on the screenplay for Citizen Kane. The black & white movie, directed by David Fincher, was written by his late father Jack Fincher, and promises a score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.

Tom Burke plays Welles, Amanda Seyfried is actress (and William Randolph Hearst’s mistress) Marion Davies, Lili Collins is Mankiewicz’s secretary Rita Alexander, Arliss Howard is Louis B. Mayer, and Sam Troughton is John Houseman. Charles Dance plays Hearst, the newspaper magnate upon whom Citizen Kane is not-very-loosely based.

Netflix’s release of these images came via social media, along with what is presumedly an excerpt of Fincher’s screenplay in a stylized font.

“Radio boy,” of course, is Orson Welles, the then 25-year-old theater and radio director who barnstormed Hollywood when he made his first film.

If a movie about the tumultuous creation of Citizen Kane sounds familiar, you aren’t imagining things.

In 1999, director Benjamin Ross cast Liev Schreiber, John Malkovich, Melanie Griffith, and James Cromwell as Welles, Mankiewicz, Davies, and Hearst respectively.

Welles’s creative endeavors were also dramatized in Tim Robbins’s 1999 film Cradle Will Rock, Richard Linklater’s 2008 film Me and Orson Welles, and, to a lesser (and extremely fictional) extent, Tim Burton’s 1994 biopic Ed Wood.