A Name on the Line: David Fincher’s 'Mank' (2020)

Elliott, Tomas (2025) A Name on the Line: David Fincher’s 'Mank' (2020). Adaptation. ISSN 1755-0637 (In Press)

Abstract

It seems fitting that the first name to appear on screen in David Fincher’s 2020 biopic, 'Mank', is not that of its protagonist but of the towering figure who for so long supposedly overshadowed him: Orson Welles. ‘In 1940’, the film’s prologue informs us, Welles was given the chance to ‘make any movie, about any subject, with any collaborator he wished’. That collaborator, and the screenplay they produced together, are the focus of Fincher’s film, which provides a fictionalized re-imagining of the genesis of Citizen Kane (1941), told from the perspective of that most marginal of figures, the Hollywood screenwriter, in the visual style of the film that did not make his name.

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Official URL:	https://doi.org/10.1093/adaptation/apaf009
Item Type:	Article
Keywords:	David Fincher, Herman J. Mankiewicz, Orson Welles, Citizen Kane, Biopic
Disciplines:	Humanities > English
Depositing User:	Tomas Elliott
Date Deposited:	24 Mar 2025 13:57
Last Modified:	24 Mar 2025 13:57
URI:	https://nul.repository.guildhe.ac.uk/id/eprint/2442

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