‘I’m Not Lamenting the Existence of Marvel’

David Fincher’s new film, Mank, begins with a title card announcing the arrival of one of cinema’s first real auteurs. “In 1940, at the tender age of 24, Orson Welles was lured to Hollywood by a struggling RKO Pictures with a contract befitting his formidable storytelling talents,” it reads. “He was given absolute creative autonomy, would suffer no oversight, and could make any movie, about any subject, with any collaborator he wished.” Then the score’s ominous piano notes kick in, as if Hollywood is greeting this proclamation of artistic control with dread.

, however, isn’t about the famed director who went on to make . It’s about a man who spent a short but pivotal time in Welles’s orbit: Herman J. Mankiewicz, the co-writer of . A lowly scriptwriter might seem like a curious subject for Fincher, one of cinema’s best-known filmmakers, whose reputation for exacting attention to detail and on-set rigor is unmatched. And there’s a sweet sort of irony to the fact that this modern-day auteur’s first film about moviemaking spotlights a Hollywood gadfly who had to fight to be recognized for his contribution to a masterpiece. But in some ways, Fincher has been waiting almost 30 years to make , which feels steeped in his observations of, and grievances with, the movie industry.