Herman J. Mankiewicz - Writer and Screenwriter - Success in Hollywood

Success in Hollywood

After a month in the movie business, Mankiewicz signed a year’s contract at $400 a week plus bonuses. By the end of 1927, he was head of Paramount’s scenario department, and film author and historian Pauline Kael writes that "in January, 1928, there was a newspaper item reporting that he was in New York 'lining up a new set of newspaper feature writers and playwrights to bring to Hollywood,' and that 'most of the newer writers on Paramount’s staff who contributed the most successful stories of the past year' were selected by 'Mank.'" Film historian Scott Eyman notes that Mankiewicz was put in charge of writer recruitment by Paramount. However, as "a hard-drinking gambler, he hired men in his own image: Ben Hecht, Bartlett Cormack, Edwin Justus Mayer, writers comfortable with the iconoclasm of big-city newsrooms who would introduce their sardonic worldliness to movie audiences.

Becoming a major screenwriter

Kael notes that "beginning in 1926, Mankiewicz worked on an astounding number of films." In 1927 and 1928, he did the titles (the printed dialogue and explanations) for at least twenty-five films that starred Clara Bow, Bebe Daniels, Nancy Carroll, Wallace Beery, and other public favorites. By then, sound had come in, and in 1929 he did the script as well as the dialogue for The Dummy, and did the scripts for many directors, including William Wellman and Josef von Sternberg.

Other screenwriters made large contributions, too, but "probably none larger than Mankiewicz’s," according to Kael. At the beginning of the sound era he was one of the highest-paid writers in the world, because, Kael writes, "he wrote the kind of movies that were disapproved of as "fast" and immoral. His heroes weren’t soft-eyed and bucolic; he brought good-humored toughness to the movies, and energy and astringency. And the public responded, because it was eager for modern American subjects." He was described as "a Promethean wit bound in a Promethean body, one of the most entertaining men in existence... called the 'Central Park West Voltaire' by Ben Hecht.

According to Kael, Mankiewicz did not work on every kind of picture. He didn’t do Westerns, for example, and once, when a studio attempted to punish him for his customary misbehavior by assigning him to a Rin Tin Tin picture, he rebelled by turning in a script that began with the craven dog frightened by a mouse and reached its climax with a house on fire and the dog taking a baby into the flames.:246

Writer of satire and comedy

Shortly after his arrival on the West Coast, he sent a telegram to journalist-friend Ben Hecht in New York: "Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots. Don't let this get around." He attracted other New York writers to Hollywood who contributed to a burst of creative, tough, and sardonic styles of writing for the fast-growing movie industry. What distinguished his screenplays were "occasional flashes of the Mankiewicz humor and satire that proved to be a foreshadowing of a new type of slick, satirical, typically American film that depended almost totally on dialogue for its success."

Between 1929 and 1935, he was credited with working on a least twenty films, many of which he received no credit for. Between 1930 and 1932 he was either producer or associate producer on four comedies and helped write their screenplays without credit: Laughter, Monkey Business, Horse Feathers, and Million Dollar Legs, which many critics considered one of the funniest comedies of the early 1930s. In 1933, he co-wrote Dinner at Eight, which was based on the George S. Kaufman/Edna Ferber play, and became one of the most popular comedies at that time and remains a "classic" comedy.

According to Pauline Kael, Mankiewicz didn’t work on every kind of picture. He didn’t do Westerns, for example, and once, when a studio attempted to punish him for his customary misbehavior by assigning him to a Rin Tin Tin picture, he rebelled by turning in a script that began with the craven Rin Tin Tin frightened by a mouse and reached its climax with a house on fire and the dog taking a baby into the flames.

The Wizard of Oz

In February 1938, he was assigned as the first of ten screenwriters to work on The Wizard of Oz. Three days after he started writing he handed in a seventeen-page treatment of what was later known as "the Kansas sequence". While Baum devoted less than a thousand words in his book to Kansas, Mankiewicz almost balanced the attention on Kansas to the section about Oz. He felt it was necessary to have the audience relate to Dorothy in a real world before transporting her to a magic one. By the end of the week he had finished writing fifty-six pages of the script and included instructions to film the scenes in Kansas in black and white. His goal, according to film historian Aljean Harmetz, was to "to capture in pictures what Baum had captured in words—the grey lifelessness of Kansas contrasted with the visual richness of Oz." He was not credited for his work on the film, however.

In looking back on his early films, Kael writes that Mankiewicz had, in fact, written (alone or with others) "about forty of the films I remember best from the twenties and thirties. I hadn’t realized how extensive his career was. ... and now that I have looked into Herman Mankiewicz’s career it’s apparent that he was a key linking figure in just the kind of movies my friends and I loved best. These were the hardest-headed periods of American movies ... the most highly acclaimed directors of that period, suggests that the writers...in little more than a decade, gave American talkies their character." Director and screenwriter Nunnally Johnson claimed that the "two most brilliant men he has ever known were George S. Kaufman and Herman Mankiewicz, and that Mankiewicz was the more brilliant of the two. ... spearheaded the movement of that whole Broadway style of wisecracking, fast-talking, cynical-sentimental entertainment onto the national scene."

Banned by the Nazis

According to the New York Times, in 1935, while he was a staff writer for MGM, the studio was notified by Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels, then Minister of Education and Propaganda under Adolf Hitler, that films written by Mankiewicz could not be shown in Nazi Germany unless his name was removed from the screen credits.