There’s a scene, for instance, showing Herman refusing to join the Screen Writers Guild in a private conversation with Joseph, but much of the dialogue actually comes from a full-page ad Herman took out in Variety taunting the would-be unionists, “ You have nothing to lose but your brains.” But if Mankiewicz was no unionist, he wasn’t a fascist, either.
Mankiewicz’s politics were complicated but mostly skewed conservative Mank shows a little of this but downplays how public it was. Mankiewicz’s relationship to those events seems to be Jack Fincher’s invention. Those events are the political backdrop Mank is playing with, and they’re all true, but Herman J. Mayer (Arliss Howard) tearfully asks his employees to take a temporary 50 percent pay cut during FDR’s bank holiday, really happened, and Mayer really did promise to make his workers whole when the banks reopened, but never bothered to follow through. The most outrageous incident in this section of Mank, a scene in which Louis B. Mankiewicz (Tom Pelphrey), whose career eclipsed Herman’s own over the course of the 1930s. Whatever his telegrams said, Herman helped assemble a murderer’s row of East Coast talent at Paramount, including his younger brother Joseph L. In Mank, a version of the telegram is sent to Charles Lederer (Joseph Cross) in 1930 and another character remarks that Herman has been sending them to “anyone who can rub three words together,” but I couldn’t find any evidence this happened in real life. Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots. Will you accept three hundred dollars to work for Paramount Pictures.
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