‘Mank’ Featurette Goes Behind the Scenes of David Fincher’s Ode to Classic Hollywood

mank featurette

Netflix takes you behind the black-and-white curtain of David Fincher’s ode to Classic Hollywood with a newly released Mank featurette, dropped online just as awards season is beginning to ramp up. While Mank was effectively shut out of the Golden Globes Sunday night, winning none of its six nominations, Netflix hasn’t lost heart for the Oscar chances of the black-and-white drama. Watch the Mank featurette below.

Mank Featurette: Behind the Scenes

Hollywood loves their movies about movies, and now you can see how such a film was made with the new 28-minute Mank featurette, which goes behind the scenes of the making of David Fincher’s latest film. Penned by his father Jack Fincher, Mank is Fincher’s passion project that he had been working on since at least 1997, but only now had the chance to make. In the featurette, Fincher speaks about how he persuaded his late father to write the screenplay, and the work and strain that went into making a movie so dedicated to looking and sounding like a film from the 1930s.

Whether you love or hate the film, you can’t deny Netflix’s Oscar hopes for Mank, the streamer throwing its weight behind Fincher’s black-and-white ode to not only Hollywood, but the screenwriting process, warts and all. With Mank rounding out an all-star group of Oscar contenders like Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7, Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods, and George C. Wolfe’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Netflix has several shots to win Best Picture. Of the contenders, Mank — as a movie about the movie industry — has the most chance to ride the buzz all the way to the Oscars, hence Netflix dropping 28-minute featurettes like the one above on YouTube.

Gary Oldman stars as Mankiewicz, with Tom Burke playing Orson Welles, Amanda Seyfried as Marion Davies, Lily Collins as Rita Alexander, Arliss Howard as Louis B. Mayer, Charles Dance as William Randolph Hearst, Tom Pelphrey as Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Tuppence Middleton as Sara Mankiewicz, Joseph Cross as Charles Lederer, Craig Robert Young as Charlie Chaplin, Sebastian Faure as Clark Gable, Michelle Twarowska as Joan Crawford, Scarlet Cummings as Bette Davis, Natalie Denise Sperl as Greta Garbo, Trevor Wooldridge as Darryl F. Zanuck, Ferdinand Kingsley as Irving Thalberg, and Toby Leonard Moore as David O. Selznick.

Here is the (brief) synopsis for Mank:

1930s Hollywood is re-evaluated through the eyes of scathing social critic and alcoholic screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz as he races to finish the screenplay of Citizen Kane for Orson Welles.

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