Spoiler alert: Citizen Kane only won one Oscar, and that was for Best Writing (Original Screenplay).
And now that man behind the award-winning script is getting his own biopic, courtesy of director David Fincher (Seven, Gone Girl). Herman Mankiewicz, who co-wrote Kane with director/star Orson Welles, will be played by Gary Oldman in a new film entitled Mank.
According to Variety, the film will actually be based on a script by Fincher’s late father Jack. The flick follows the tortured development of the Citizen Kane script, which centered around newspaper publisher Charles Foster Kane and the meaning behind his mysterious last word, which was simply “Rosebud.”
Welles and Mankiewicz famously butted heads during the screenplay’s development — “Arguing, inventing, discarding, these two powerful, headstrong, dazzlingly articulate personalities thrashed toward Kane,” as biographer Richard Meryman wrote in Mank: The Wit, World and Life of Herman Mankiewicz. The 1941 film was eventually nominated for nine Oscars, but only won for the Mankiewicz-Welles script.
Mank will be shot in black and white, with a release date yet to be determined.
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