It’s hard to believe this, but it’s been six years since we got a David Fincher movie. The legendary director was last seen with his adaptation of Gone Girl, a major hit that should have paved the way for plenty more. Instead he’s struggled to get project off the ground, working mostly in television. That cold streak ends soon, when Netflix — the home for daring filmmakers inexplicably ignored by major studios, from Martin Scorsese to Charlie Kaufman to the late Orson Welles — releases Fincher’s new film Mank, whose first images have finally dropped.
Speaking of Welles, Mank concerns the life and career of Herman J. Mankiewicz, the seasoned Hollywood screenwriter whose most famous credit was co-writing Citizen Kane. Gary Oldman plays the colorful scribe, with The Souvenir’s Tom Burke as Welles, the 24-year-old wunderkind given carte blanche to make whatever he wanted. He was teamed with Mankiewicz, a seasoned Tinseltown veteran who’d worked on everything from Marx Brothers movies to The Wizard of Oz.
Mank will largely focus on the making of Kane, which had an adversary in the figure it was loosely portraying: newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, played by Charles Dance. (Amanda Seyfried appears as his much younger mistress, the actress Marion Davies.) Fincher shot the film, which was written by his late father Jack, in black-and-white, and the luminous cinematography is one of the stand-outs of the handful of images made available ahead of its as-yet-to-be-announced release date.
Here’s Oldman as Mankiewicz.
And Charles Dance as Hearst.
And Oldman alongside Arliss Howard as MGM co-founder Louis B. Mayer and Tom Pelphrey as Joe Mankiewicz.
And ily Collins as Rita Alexander, Mankiewicz’s secretary, opposite Oldman.
Finally, here’s the screenplay for the film that would for decades be called cinema’s crowning achievement, under its original title.
As of now, Mank does not have an official release date, but you can expect it at some point during the fall.
