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JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NON PROFIT. Give a tax-deductible donation The Forward 2021 Oscar Edition Orson Welles and Heman J. Mankiewicz - Image by From "The Brothers Mankiewicz" by Sydney Ladensohn Stern How an 80-year-old feud fuels this year's Oscars There’s a story I heard from John Mankiewicz, the grandson of Herman J. Mankiewicz, the writer (or co-writer) of “Citizen Kane.” It involves a repast, a riposte and Orson Welles. “I was having dinner at this restaurant Lucy’s that’s across from Paramount, and I noticed he was sitting with a bunch of UCLA film students who were probably paying for the dinner -- he was just standing next to me for five minutes,” said Mankiewicz, who caught Welles around his Paul Masson period. “I looked up at him finally and said, ‘Mr. Welles, I’m John Mankiewicz. You worked with my grandfather.’ And he said, ‘Did I?’” It was another nasty salvo in Hollywood’s most contested authorship question, the partial subject of “Mank,” a biopic of Herman nominated for 10 Academy Awards. 80 years after Welles and Mankiewicz clashed on credit -- and, as seen in "Mank," exchanged bitter bon mots while separately accepting their joint Oscar for Best Screenplay -- there are still feuding camps about who wrote “Kane” and how much of it. (Pauline Kael’s journalistically-shoddy 1971 essay “Raising Kane” and Robert L. Carringer's well-researched response, 1978's “The Scripts of Citizen Kane," reached opposite conclusions. Neither was the final word.) No one I spoke with, including Mankiewicz’s niece, grandson and biographer, challenged the idea that the film was what it was because of Welles, even if they believe, like “Mank" and Kael, that Herman wrote it. In any case, as the dinner anecdote attests, no one would argue that Welles was at least as self-destructive as his binge-drinking creative partner. Both were helped along down that path by Hollywood, a town that took their talents for granted or, certainly in the case of Welles, sneered at their artistic vision. But as I learned, Welles didn’t do nearly as much to help others on his way to oblivion. A throwaway line from “Mank,” about saving an entire German village turned out to not be exaggerated, but Mank and his brother Joseph did help refugees in the 1930s. It’s also true that Herman’s films were boycotted in Germany after he wrote an early, unproduced takedown of Hitler (in the person of house painter “Adolf Mitler”). But, Herman was also an isolationist. He was complicated. If "Mank" speaks to the splendors of meticulous production, replete with crane shots and montage of melting ice sculptures, "Borat: Subsequent Moviefilm" is a masterclass in guerilla filmmaking. I enjoyed it immensely, but found fault with a regrettable joke and subplot that wrongly implicated Kazakhstan in the Holocaust -- all while making a point about Holocaust denial. While few might expect a true document of Kazakh history from a guy who swims in an over-the-shoulder Speedo, the jokes play different in 2020, when Sacha Baron Cohen is a vocal critic of Facebook’s role in spreading hate speech and disinformation.
When I spoke to Baron Cohen’s older brother, Erran, who wrote the score for both "Borat" films, he said Kazakhstan was selected as a point of origin for the eccentric correspondent for “kind of random” reasons, among them the nation’s obscurity. (Remember, the country was one of many SSRs until 1991; Borat debuted on "Da Ali G Show" in the year 2000.)
“The film’s not about Kazakhstan; it’s about America, it’s about prejudice, and politics, particularly, in this one,” Erran Baron Cohen told me, also noting the film was shot on location in Romania -- not in Central Asia -- and uses Romanian "Gypsy" music.
I may have been troubled by the film’s insistence that Kazakhstan hosts a bubble-filled rave for “Holocaust Remembrance Day, where we commemorate our heroic soldiers who ran the camps,” but the Kazakhstan's board of tourism wasn’t bothered sufficiently to nix the use of Borat’s catchphrase in an ad campaign. (A marked improvement from threatening Baron Cohen with a lawsuit.)
Courtesy of Amazon Studios Counterweighting Borat’s lunacy is the film for which Baron Cohen is receiving a supporting actor nomination, “The Trial of the Chicago 7.” It goes to show what the Academy values -- roles involving wigs, tricky accents and dead people of historical import. "Borat" was two for three. Baron Cohen’s turn as Yippie leader Abbie Hoffman checked all boxes.
I thought “Chicago 7” was a preachy affair that downplayed just how much of a miscarriage of justice the actual trial was. I’m far from alone in thinking Aaron Sorkin, nominated for his screenplay, but not his direction, missed the mark by a Magnificent Mile. Joshua Furst argued that the film, in flattering Democratic pieties, found “ways both to reimagine the Chicago 7 as people concerned with respectability politics and inoculate the Democratic Party (our ersatz liberators) from blame.”
Jeremy Kagan, who wrote and directed a previous film about the trial, claimed that Sorkin's version “does not do justice to the intense moral passion, irreverent humor and visceral dedication of these defendants and their lawyers.” Also, it just got basic facts wrong (and leaves out some kippah drama). Getty Images Even Sorkin defender Jackson Arn, in his love letter to the writer-director, admitted that the weight of this subject matter wasn't the best fit for Sorkin's gifts -- i.e. rat-a-tat dialogue laced with "Jeopardy!"-ready trivia -- or his "simple-minded" view of human nature from the stodgy center-left. But if his handiwork in the film feels belated or overly smug, there are fresher meditations on more urgent issues for your consideration.
“Judas and the Black Messiah,” nominated for Best Picture, speaks to the continuing dangers faced by Black activists, tracking the final days of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, whose assassination happens offscreen in “Chicago 7.” “Minari,” about a South Korean immigrant family, movingly interprets director-writer Lee Isaac Chung’s American story at a time when anti-Asian hate crimes are at a startling peak. In trenchantly macabre fashion, “Promising Young Woman” broaches the insidiousness of rape culture and “Pieces of a Woman” mines the ravages of crib death and second generation trauma. As Simi Horwitz wrote, the documentary "Collette" wrestles with memory, bringing a French resistance fighter to the concentration camp where the Nazis killed her brother.
“Sound of Metal” gives an intimate window into the lives of deaf addicts and the documentary "Crip Camp" shines a light on a sleepaway camp that produced disability activists like Judy Heumann. The international slate gives us a gutting account of the Bosnian genocide, an exposé of healthcare fraud in Romania and a wild fable of a Syrian refugee embraced by the art world as a display piece.
While the limited audience ceremony on April 25 won’t measure up to 1942’s Oscars, where “Kane” only won for screenplay and “How Green Was My Valley” took home Best Director and Motion Picture, the contemporary reception of Mank and Welles’ crowning opus -- and of the men themselves -- tells us something.
Hollywood gets it wrong a lot. They may get it wrong this time, despite efforts at inclusion. And yet, the final judgment of the awards and the winners’ fate will be written by latter day critics -- no matter who wrote “Citizen Kane.”
PJ Grisar is the Forward's culture reporter. Follow his coverage of the 93rd Academy Awards @JDForward.
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