Fincher had created Propaganda with the express intent of storming the Hollywood bastille, and he did come storming back in 1995 with Se7en. Fincher retreated from Hollywood for three seething years after Alien 3, directing TV commercials and music vids for Propaganda Films, a company he cofounded in the 1980s while still in his twenties that ruled the MTV rotation. “I like the idea of having a body of work,” he told Premiere magazine, admitting that “it feels strange, after 40 years in this profession, to have only ten films to my credit.” 1Īctually, Fincher is credited with eleven features but refuses to include the first of them in his oeuvre, the disastrous Alien 3 (1992, also for Fox), on which he replaced a dismissed director, battled the studio throughout production, and watched helplessly as the film was butchered in postproduction and then flopped. Just before Netflix rolled out the film in November 2020, Fincher disclosed a four-year deal with Netflix specifically geared to features. Now Fincher is pivoting back to feature films, and not just with Mank. Since then, he’s been similarly involved in Netflix’s Mindhunter (2017– 2019). Fincher was an executive producer on the hit series and directed the first two episodes, which ran in 2013 and earned him an Emmy. It was Fincher’s first feature since Gone Girl, an enormous hit for Fox in 2014, released just after he pivoted to series work for Netflix on House of Cards.

Mank was directed by David Fincher from a screenplay by his long-deceased father, Jack Fincher (who died in 2003) and was financed and released by Netflix. And in terms of the story it tells, the manner of its telling, and the process of its making, Mank probes an elemental paradox of commercial cinema: the nagging issue of authorship. Mankiewicz while also conjuring (in an elaborate weave of flashbacks) the writer’s inspiration for Charles Foster Kane via his relationship with William Randolph Hearst. The film charts the writing of Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)-or, more precisely, the screenplay’s first draft-by Herman J.

Mank is a study in paradox-at once classical and modernist, retro and cutting edge, an exquisite recreation of Golden Age Hollywood and a blithely inaccurate recounting of how one of its greatest achievements came to be.

The genius of the system thomas schatz