Joseph L. Mankiewicz
Joseph Leo Mankiewicz was an American filmmaker. A four-time Academy Award winner, he is best known for his witty and literate dialogue and his preference for voice-over narration and narrative flashbacks. Also known as an actor's director, Mankiewicz directed several prominent actors, including Bette Davis, Humphrey Bogart and Elizabeth Taylor, to several of their memorable onscreen performances.
Born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, Mankiewicz studied at Columbia University and graduated in 1928. He moved overseas to Europe, where he worked as a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune and translated German intertitles into English for UFA. On the advice of his screenwriter brother Herman, Mankiewicz moved back to the United States, and was hired by Paramount Pictures as a dialogue writer. He then became a screenwriter, writing for numerous films starring Jack Oakie. He next moved to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, where he served as a producer for several films, including The Philadelphia Story and Woman of the Year. Mankiewicz left MGM after a dispute with Louis B. Mayer.
In 1944, Mankiewicz began working for Twentieth Century-Fox, where he produced The Keys of the Kingdom. He made his directorial debut with Dragonwyck after Ernst Lubitsch had dropped out due to illness. Mankiewicz remained at Twentieth Century-Fox, directing a broad range of genre films. Consecutively, in 1950 and 1951, he won two Academy Awards each for writing and directing A Letter to Three Wives and All About Eve. In 1953, Mankiewicz formed his own production company Figaro, where he independently produced, as well as wrote and directed, The Barefoot Contessa and The Quiet American.
In 1961, Mankiewicz took over direction from Rouben Mamoulian for Cleopatra. The production was beset with numerous difficulties, including a heavily publicized extramarital affair between the film's stars Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. Relatively late into the production, Darryl F. Zanuck reassumed control of Twentieth Century-Fox as studio president and briefly fired Mankiewicz for the film's excessive production overruns. Released in 1963, Cleopatra became the year's highest-grossing film and earned mixed reviews from film critics. Mankiewicz's reputation suffered, and he did not return to direct another film until The Honey Pot.
Mankiewicz then directed There Was a Crooked Man... and the documentary King: A Filmed Record... Montgomery to Memphis, sharing credit with Sidney Lumet on the latter film. His final film Sleuth, starring Michael Caine and Laurence Olivier, earned Mankiewicz his fourth and final Oscar nomination as Best Director. In 1993, Mankiewicz died in Bedford, New York, at the age of 83.
Early life and education
Mankiewicz was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, to Franz Mankiewicz and Johanna Blumenau, Jewish emigrants from Germany and Courland, respectively. His siblings were Herman J. Mankiewicz and Erna Stenbuck. At age four, Joseph moved with his family to New York City, and graduated in 1924 from Stuyvesant High School. He followed his brother Herman to Columbia University, where he initially wanted to be a psychiatrist. Mankiewicz once stated, "I took a pre-med course at Columbia. Then came the part where you disembowel frogs and earthworms, which horrified and nauseated me. But what really finished me was physics." Mankiewicz failed the course, and switched his major to English and wrote for the Columbia Daily Spectator. He graduated in 1928 and moved to Germany. There, he intended to enroll in the University of Berlin and finish at Oxford for a potential career in pedagogy.However, Mankiewicz abandoned these plans, and was hired as an assistant correspondent for the Chicago Tribune. Sigrid Schultz, the Berlin bureau chief for the Tribune, gave Mankiewicz his first assignment, which was to interview explorer Umberto Nobile. Mankiewicz earned another job, translating film intertitles from German to English for UFA, and worked a third job as a stringer for the Variety trade magazine. He relocated to Paris, which Mankiewicz described as the "three most miserable months of my life." After receiving a despondent letter from his brother, Herman encouraged Joseph to move to Hollywood.
Career
1929–1933: Paramount
In 1929, Joseph was hired by Paramount Pictures, becoming the studio's youngest hired staff writer at the age of 20. Within eight weeks, Joseph wrote titles for 1929's The Dummy, The Man I Love, and Thunderbolt. David O. Selznick, then an assistant to Paramount general manager B. P. Schulberg, proposed that Joseph write the dialogue to Fast Company, an adaptation of the 1928 play Elmer The Great by George M. Cohan and Ring Lardner. Mankiewicz's name later appeared in the Los Angeles Records 1929 list of the ten best dialogue writers. The recognition earned Mankiewicz the assignment of writing several films, which starred Jack Oakie.At age 22, Joseph was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for Skippy, which starred Jackie Cooper. Based on the nomination, Herman petitioned to Schulberg to give Joseph a pay raise. Schulberg declined, and Herman threatened to resign. Eventually, Schulberg relented and signed Joseph to a seven-year contract, which earned him a weekly salary of "somewhere between $75 to $100". He co-wrote the screenplay of Sooky, a sequel to Skippy. Meanwhile, Joseph dated actress Frances Dee, who co-starred in June Moon and This Reckless Age, which he had co-scripted.
Joseph wrote four films with Paramount Pictures in 1932, which included writing segments for If I Had a Million. The segments included "Rollo and the Roadhogs" which featured W. C. Fields and Alison Skipworth as two retired vaudevillians, and "The Three Marines" with Jack Oakie and Gary Cooper. He also contributed to other segments, including "The China Stop" with Charlie Ruggles as a bookkeeper in a china stop and "The Forger" with George Raft as a run-away criminal who is unable to cash his check. After six months of courtship, Joseph became engaged to Frances Dee but one week before their marriage, Dee eloped with Joel McCrea, whom she co-starred with on The Silver Cord. Feeling devastated, Joseph ran a fever and was hospitalized for a "partial nervous breakdown."
Joseph wrote an original story treatment titled In the Red, which satirized the League of Nations. Paramount studio executives accused him of plagiarizing the next Marx Brothers film Duck Soup, in which Herman was the film's producer. Joseph contested the charge and resigned from Paramount in December 1932. He then moved to RKO Pictures, where Sam Jaffe hired Joe and Henry Myers to complete the script, which was retitled Diplomaniacs. Jaffe later hired Joseph to script Emergency Call. He returned to Paramount for Too Much Harmony with Jack Oakie and Bing Crosby. Selznick selected Joseph to do uncredited rewrites for MGM's Meet the Baron, which Herman had written the screenplay for.
Joseph's last Paramount film was Alice in Wonderland, in which he co-authored the screenplay with William Cameron Menzies. An adaptation of Lewis Carroll's 1865 novel and Alice Through the Looking-Glass combined into a singular film, Alice in Wonderland featured an ensemble cast of Paramount's contract stars, including Gary Cooper as The White Knight, Cary Grant as the Mock Turtle, W. C. Fields as Humpty Dumpty, and Edward Everett Horton as the Mad Hatter. Years later, Joseph reflected: "The result was a disaster, but a well-intentioned disaster. The costumes and the headpieces were so heavy that the actors couldn't carry them, so they had doubles walking through all the master or long shots."
1934–1942: MGM
Herman began working for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in March 1933, and David O. Selznick hired Joseph as a screenwriter with a weekly salary of $750. At the age of 25, Joseph co-wrote Manhattan Melodrama with Oliver H. P. Garrett, which starred Myrna Loy and William Powell. The film was a critical and commercial success, and two months into its release, federal agents shot John Dillinger as he left a Chicago theater having viewed the film. At the 1935 Academy Awards, Arthur Caesar won the Academy Award for Best Story. Meanwhile, Joseph contributed additional dialogue for King Vidor's 1934 film Our Daily Bread.Mankiewicz's next project was adapting Forsaking All Others based on the 1933 play by Edward Barry Roberts and Frank Morgan Cavett. Bernard H. Hyman was the producer, and Joe was instructed to write for Loretta Young, George Brent, and Joel McCrea. When Mankiewicz delivered the script, Hyman replied: "We're going to use Joan Crawford, Clark Gable and Robert Montgomery." He told Mankiewicz to arrive at Crawford's residence and read the script to her. Mankiewicz at first declined the offer, but later drove to Crawford's Brentwood home. During the reading, Crawford was delighted at the line: "I could build a fire by rubbing two boy scouts together." Forsaking All Others became a success, and Mankiewicz was assigned another Joan Crawford vehicle I Live My Life, after Louis B. Mayer told Mankiewicz: "You're the only one on the lot who knows what to do with her."
In the autumn of 1935, having written three successful films, Mankiewicz personally requested Mayer to direct his own feature film. Mayer declined his proposition and instead replied: "You have to learn to crawl before you can walk." Mankiewicz was instead promoted as a film producer, beginning with Three Godfathers. Adapted from the 1913 short story by Peter B. Kyne, the film is a biblically-inspired Western about three outlaws—Chester Morris, Lewis Stone and Walter Brennan—rescuing a baby in the Mojave Desert.
Mankiewicz's next project was Fury, that was inspired by a real-life mob lynching in which two suspects, held in a San Jose prison, were hanged for the murder of a department store heir. While in New York, screenwriter Norman Krasna read the story in The Nation, and during the summer of 1934, he pitched the idea to Mankiewicz and Samuel Marx, who were interested in it, which prompted an early story treatment. After some time, Krasna had no recollection of the story, so Mankiewicz wrote a ten-page treatment titled Mob Rule and paid Krasner for the screen rights. Mankiewicz was assigned with Fritz Lang on a film "about a crooked D.A." but the project was shelved.
MGM general manager Eddie Mannix then handed Lang the Mob Rule treatment, with the subsequent drafts written by Bartlett Cormack. During filming, Lang had an adversarial relationship with the cast and crew, in which Mankiewicz reflected on years later, calling Lang a "a strange man" and a "terrible tyrant on the set." Released in June 1936, Fury was acclaimed by several film publications and was a box office success, catapulting Mankiewicz with his first major hit as a producer.
Mankewicz reteamed with Crawford on the 1936 film The Gorgeous Hussy—her first costume drama film—as an innkeeper's daughter, with Robert Taylor, Franchot Tone, Melvyn Douglas and James Stewart as potential tutors. Their collaboration continued with Love on the Run, a romantic comedy with two newspaper men, Clark Gable and Franchot Tone vying for Crawford. Retroactively seen as a pale imitation of It Happened One Night, it was a box office success. Crawford next starred in The Bride Wore Red, directed by Dorothy Arzner.
Beginning with Mannequin, Mankiewicz collaborated with director Frank Borzage in a story about a Delancey Street working-class girl torn between her chiseler husband and a shipping magnate. Their follow-up film, Three Comrades, with Margaret Sullavan and Robert Taylor, began F. Scott Fitzgerald writing the initial script. However, Sullavan complained to Mankiewicz that her passages were unspeakable, which led to Mankiewicz and other screenwriters redrafting Fitzgerald's dialogue. Mankiewicz later joked, "If I go down at all in literary history, in a footnote, it will be as the swine who rewrote F. Scott Fitzgerald." Borzage's next film The Shining Hour, starring Crawford, Sullavan and Melvyn Douglas, was well received by critics but was a box-office flop.
Mankiewicz produced A Christmas Carol. At least four film versions had already existed before Lionel Barrymore, who had played Ebenezer Scrooge on the radio, prompted MGM to have his filmed version. However, Barrymore broke his hip after tripping over a cable while filming Saratoga. Mankiewicz offered to delay filming for a year, but Barrymore insisted the production continue. Mankiewicz selected Reginald Owen as Scrooge, who had been hired to portray Jacob Marley. Production was completed in November 1938 and the film was screened as a holiday attraction at the Radio City Music Hall. A review in Variety wrote the film wielded "superb acting, inspired direction and top production values into an intensively interesting exposition of the Dickens story." Since its release, A Christmas Carol has become a perennial television favorite.
By 1938, Katharine Hepburn had been labeled "box office poison" by box office exhibitors after several unsuccessful films. Hepburn departed Hollywood and starred as Tracy Lord in Philip Barry's 1939 play The Philadelphia Story. It became one of the year's successful Broadway plays, and Howard Hughes secured the film rights enabling Hepburn to forge a screen comeback. Several Hollywood studios declined to produce the film on the basis of Hepburn's box office record and male actors who demurred being potentially outshined by her. Louis B. Mayer took Hughes's offer on the assurance that Hepburn should appear with "two important male stars."
Cary Grant and James Stewart were cast in the leading male roles, while George Cukor was hired to direct. At Hepburn's insistence, Donald Ogden Stewart wrote a faithful adaptation of Barry's play, though he added two brief scenes based on Mankiewicz's suggestions. Mankiewicz claimed credit for the film's opening scene—a silent comic prologue featuring Grant and Hepburn in a tableau of their temperamental and fracturing marriage. Released in December 1940, The Philadelphia Story was a critical and commercial success, making it Mankiewicz's biggest hit as a producer. At the 1941 Academy Awards, the film earned six Oscar nominations, including one for Outstanding Production for Mankiewicz. James Stewart won the Academy Award for Best Actor, as well as Odgen Stewart winning for Best Adapted Screenplay.
Mankiewicz reteamed with Hepburn on the romantic comedy Woman of the Year. Deriving inspiration from his father and newspaper columnist Dorothy Parker, Ring Lardner Jr. had written a story outline before collaborating with Garson and Michael Kanin. Both men drafted a 99-paged script, tentatively titled The Thing About Women, which they showed to Hepburn. Eager to make it her next film, Hepburn presented the script directly to Mayer, who then consulted Mankiewicz for his opinion. He was enthusiastic for the script, believing it had been written by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur.
Retitled Woman of the Year, the premise involves Tess Harding, a high-browed foreign affairs reporter, pitted against Sam Craig, a sports columnist. Spencer Tracy was Hepburn's first choice, though he was initially unavailable until The Yearling was cancelled. Mankiewicz introduced the two stars, who at the time had never met before. Hepburn greeted Tracy, commenting, "I fear I may be too tall for you, Mr. Tracy." "Don't worry," Mankiewicz chimed in, "He'll cut you down to size." George Cukor was also unavailable as he was directing Two-Faced Woman so at Hepburn's behest, George Stevens was loaned out to MGM from Columbia Pictures.
During test screenings, preview audiences were disdainful of the original ending, which had Tess accepting her newfound role as a housewife. Stevens, Mankiewicz and Mayer agreed a new ending was needed, with Tess attempting to make breakfast but failing miserably. Hepburn deplored the new scene, but test audiences responded favorably. Released in February 1942, Woman of the Year was praised by film critics for the chemistry between the stars. At the 1943 Academy Awards, Hepburn was nominated for Best Actress, while Michael Kanin and Lardner Jr. won for Best Original Screenplay.
By 1942, Mankiewicz was romantically involved with Judy Garland. As a vehicle for Garland, he began adapting S. N. Behrman's 1942 play The Pirate. The adaptation was never completed, but eventually became a 1948 musical unrelated to Mankiewicz's involvement. To reduce Garland's dependency on prescription medicine, Mankiewicz advised her to seek psychiatric therapy sessions with Ernst Simmel. Garland's mother Ethel Gumm reported the incident to Mayer, who later called Mankiewicz into his office. There, Mayer chastened him for his involvement, stating, "You mustn't mess with our property." The two fell into an argument, and Mankiewicz decided to quit MGM negotiating for an early termination with one year left on his contract. Mankiewicz's final productions at MGM were Reunion in France starring Joan Crawford and John Wayne, and Cairo with Jeanette MacDonald—the latter film Mankiewicz had his producing credit removed at his request.