For all the piles of research and miles of column inches that have been devoted to it, the controversy over the creative authorship of “Citizen Kane” — a kerfuffle that’s now 50 years old, and one that’s been given new heat by the release of David Fincher’s “Mank” — would seem to revolve around a relatively simple question: Who wrote “Citizen Kane”? Was it Herman J.
Mankiewicz, the brilliant, witty, slumming, past-his-prime, usually sloshed screenwriter played with dissolute droll charisma by Gary Oldman in “Mank”? Or did Orson Welles, the velvet-voiced boy-wonder genius-egomaniac who wound up splitting the screenplay credit with Mankiewicz, fully earn the right to that co-credit? Did Welles contribute enough of the structuring, editing, and — yes — writing of “Citizen Kane,” and did enough of the film’s animating ideas descend from him, to make the suggestion that Mankiewicz was the hidden engine of the movie a canard?
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