Mank: The Wit, World and Life of Herman Mankiewicz

The authorship of Citizen Kane has become one of film history's major controversies.
--Richard Meryman, The Wit, World and Life of Herman Mankiewicz (William Morrow and Company, 1978)

The obvious answer to the Kane dilemma is that Herman Mankiewicz wrote the film and Orson Welles directed it.
--Richard Corliss, Talking Pictures: Screenwriters in the American Cinema (The Overlook Press, 1974).

Film is a collaborative art, with the director as first among equals (to use the term for Augustus from the Ara Pacis) and the mostly forgotten battle between film critics Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris was about this issue.  But a comparison between the filmographies of Mankiewicz and Welles will make clear that Welles deserves most of the credit for Citizen Kane while the rest of it goes to Mankiewicz, Gregg Toland (cinematographer) and Bernard Hermann (music).  Welles did not generally write his own screenplays but worked closely with Mankiewicz, just as Ford, Hawks, and Hitchcock supervised the work of their writers.  Meryman talked to most of those who worked on the film who were still around in 1978, including original producer John Houseman, and came to the conclusion that the screenplay was a collaboration and it is impossible to sort out who wrote exactly what.

Meryman's biography of Mankiewicz is not mainly about the films -- like many biographers of screenwriters he does not tell us which films he's seen and their relationship, if any, to Citizen Kane (Corliss does find some) - but mostly chronicles the dissolute life of Mank, who came from the New York theatre world and the Algonquin roundtable and, like others from that milieu (Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, et al.) came to Hollywood for the money, condescended to movies, and drank and partied himself to death, his supposedly witty comments forgotten.