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Frank Mankiewicz - Joseph McBride - 24-10-2014
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/24/us/politics/frank-mankiewicz-press-secretary-to-robert-f-kennedy-dies-at-90.html?hpw&rref=obituaries&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=HpHedThumbWell&module=well-region®ion=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujPidSx7Vus
Frank Mankiewicz has died at age 90. In addition to his work for the Peace Corps in the JFK administration and serving
as RFK's spokesman during the 1968 presidential primary campaign (including making his moving announcement
of the senator's death), Mankiewicz at Hill & Knowlton advised
Oliver Stone on how to handle the release of and controversy over his film JFK. Of course, the NY Times doesn't mention that.
Mankiewicz was a rare New Frontiersman who supported what Stone was doing.
Mankiewicz's father, Herman, cowrote CITIZEN KANE with Orson Welles.
Frank Mankiewicz - Jim DiEugenio - 25-10-2014
A really interesting guy who was also a key source for Talbot's book, Brothers.
Like many of the RFK people, he ended up backing McGovern in both 68 and 72.
WHen McGovern got swamped, he really did not have anywhere to go.
So he made some big money in Washington. But he did help Stone with his film.
And his Dad did write the first draft of what I think is the best AMerican movie ever made, Citizen Kane.
Frank Mankiewicz - Ashley Wood - 25-10-2014
I didn't realise his dad was "that" Mankiewicz and i'm very impressed that Frank supported Oliver Stone in some way regarding JFK. Did Frank have any opinions re RFK's murder ? The silence from the Californian Legal System re Sirhan's appeal is deafening.
Jim, I would argue that despite the damage done to Ambersons it is even better than Kane. I remember the first time i saw it (only about ten years ago) and i was completely floored.
Joseph, i'm a great admirer of Orson Welles. Your work in that area is fantastic. I hope one day we will see some more of Orson's unfinished work and more than that, at some stage maybe in a very far away and unknown film archive there is a can marked The Magnificent Ambersons Directors Cut.
This meeting of the Orson Welles fan club is now adjourned !
Frank Mankiewicz - Tracy Riddle - 25-10-2014
His son Ben is a host on Turner Classic Movies and was on the Young Turks.
Frank Mankiewicz - Joseph McBride - 26-10-2014
Ashley Wood Wrote:I didn't realise his dad was "that" Mankiewicz and i'm very impressed that Frank supported Oliver Stone in some way regarding JFK. Did Frank have any opinions re RFK's murder ? The silence from the Californian Legal System re Sirhan's appeal is deafening.
Jim, I would argue that despite the damage done to Ambersons it is even better than Kane. I remember the first time i saw it (only about ten years ago) and i was completely floored.
Joseph, i'm a great admirer of Orson Welles. Your work in that area is fantastic. I hope one day we will see some more of Orson's unfinished work and more than that, at some stage maybe in a very far away and unknown film archive there is a can marked The Magnificent Ambersons Directors Cut.
This meeting of the Orson Welles fan club is now adjourned !
Ashley, Thanks for your kind words. One of my greatest hopes is that the
uncut AMBERSONS will turn up, maybe in Brazil. As for Frank Mankiewicz,
I am not aware of what opinions he had on RFK's murder.
Frank Mankiewicz - Jim DiEugenio - 26-10-2014
Its pretty clear from Brothers, that Mankiewicz thought that the JFK case was a conspiracy. And he also thought that Bobby was intent on reopening the case once he won the WH.
What he thought about the RFK case, I don't really know since Brothers sort of ends with that event.
As per Welles and Citizen Kane and Ambersons, not only do I think Citizen Kane is the best American movie ever, I would argue that its probably the most revolutionary American movie ever made as far as technique goes. I will also say that in that one film, Welles took the art of film directing to a point that no other American has passed since. Including him.
What is so incredible about that is the fact he was only 25 and it was his first movie.
BTW, as Joe will tell you, I am not the only one who feels that way about Kane.
Frank Mankiewicz - Joseph McBride - 26-10-2014
The French director-critic François Truffaut called CITIZEN KANE
"the film of films." He wrote in 1959 that KANE "consecrated a great
many of us to the vocation of cinéaste. . . . We loved this film because it was
complete: psychological, social, poetic, dramatic, comic, baroque, strict, and demanding.
It is a demonstration of the force of power and an attack on the force of power, it is a hymn
to youth and a meditation on old age, an essay on the vanity of all material ambition and at the
same time a poem on old age and the solitude of exceptional human beings, genius or monster
or monstrous genius. It is at the same time a 'first' film by virtue of its quality of catch-call
experimentation and a 'last' film by its comprehensive picture of the world. . . . To shoot CITIZEN
KANE at twenty-five years of age, is this not the dream of all the young habitués of the cinematheques?"
KANE changed my life, as it did so many others' lives. It is remarkable too -- and less often
discussed -- how bold Welles was politically in taking on Hearst and the reactionary American
power structure. For that he paid a heavy price, losing his Hollywood directing career, having
the FBI follow him from 1941 until 1956, being blacklisted and having to move to Europe, and being maligned
by much of the media on false premises, a process that continues today. And yet
he managed to make other great films (I consider his 1966 Shakespeare film CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT his masterpiece) and to keep making films continuously
until he died in 1985. Some of those films have yet to be completed -- notably the ambitious features
THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND and DON QUIXOTE. Welles was a radical artist in every
sense of the word, which is his glory and also was the source of his many problems.
Welles also left behind
numerous unfilmed screenplays, including ASSASSIN, aka THE SAFE HOUSE, written in 1975-76, about the CIA brainwashing
of Sirhan Sirhan to serve as a patsy in the RFK shooting. Welles would
have played Sirhan's programmer, a character evidently based on Dr. William Joseph Bryan Jr.,
who William Turner and Jonn Christian, in their book on the RFK assassination, suggest did Sirhan's programming for the CIA. As I write,"The script identifies the FBI as the agency behind the plot, which is delegated to a paramilitary group, some of whose members evoke real-life characters who later surfaced in the Watergate
scandal." This is a powerful script based on an earlier
version by Donald Freed. I write about Welles's many unfinished and unfilmed works
at length in my book WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO ORSON WELLES?: A PORTRAIT OF AN INDEPENDENT CAREER,
which also gives my firsthand account of the filming of OTHER WIND as a cast member-historian.
I would note that while KANE is Welles's first feature, it was not his first film.
I discovered his 1934 short film THE HEARTS OF AGE in 1970 with the help of my
film professor Russell Merritt. It can be watched on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9EbQj3cgIc
Welles also filmed the dress rehearsal of a Todd School
stage production of TWELFTH NIGHT in 1933 (that film apparently is lost). And his unfinished 1938
film TOO MUCH JOHNSON recently has been rediscovered. You can watch the
workprint of that film online as well as a version edited by Scott Simmon: http://www.filmpreservation.org/preserved-films/screening-room/too-much-johnson-work-print
http://www.filmpreservation.org/preserved-films/screening-room/too-much-johnson-reimagined
I wrote about TOO MUCH JOHNSON earlier this year: http://brightlightsfilm.com/too-much-johnson-orson-welles-film-recovering-orson-welless-dream-of-early-cinema/#.VE1L7BaD8yE
Frank Mankiewicz - Jim DiEugenio - 26-10-2014
That is a great quote by Truffaut. What is the source?
I actually had heard about the RFK film in another book by a former Hollywood agent who had actually brought the idea to Welles.
I did not know Welles actually wrote the script though.
Frank Mankiewicz - Joseph McBride - 26-10-2014
Jim DiEugenio Wrote:That is a great quote by Truffaut. What is the source?
I actually had heard about the RFK film in another book by a former Hollywood agent who had actually brought the idea to Welles.
I did not know Welles actually wrote the script though.
The Truffaut article is "CITIZEN KANE," L'Express (Paris), November 26, 1959, trans. Mark Bernheim
and Ronald Gottesman, in FOCUS ON "CITIZEN KANE," ed. by Gottesman, Prentice-Hall, Englewood
Cliffs, N.J., 1971.
Frank Mankiewicz - R.K. Locke - 26-10-2014
Is the screenplay for Assassin/Safe House available online? A long shot, I know, but I would very interested to read that (as would many other people, I'm sure.)