It’s the Oscars tonight, which is good news for insomniacs because it’s likely to run through to breakfast.

The film tipped to take the top honours – it has 10 nominations – is Mank. If it wins Louis B Mayer, who originally set up the Academy Awards, will be be turning in his grave. 

Mayer created and ran MGM, the biggest Hollywood studio ,which led in the blacklisting of the Hollywood 10 in 1947, accused of being communists. And in the 1930s, amazingly as he was a Jew, he collaborated with the Nazis to censor anything critical.

He and other studio heads met with the German counsel in Los Angeles who sent reports to officials in Berlin about the cuts the studios had agreed to make.
The writer and historian Ben Urwand tracked down files in the German federal archives which show the correspondence.

As he put it: “It surprised me — who would have thought that Louis B Mayer would meet with a Nazi?”

One example of the censorship is the proposed film The Mad Dog of Europe, about Hitler and the mistreatment of European Jews, which studio heads, many of whom were Jewish, collectively joined in a boycott and also agreed to fire most of their Jewish salesmen in Germany. The film was never made. But it has a deep resonance to tonight’s event.

Growth of Nazism
In March 1933, Herman J Mankiewicz, or Mank, was a feted and highly-paid Hollywood screenwriter. He was a former newspaper man, one of the stars of the Algonquin Round Table with a sophistication and irreverent wit.

But he was also political. He had watched Nazism grow in Germany and he understood the implications. Hitler had taken power as Chancellor in January of 1933 and, in March, the first concentration camp, Dachau, was set up, imprisoning political opponents, homosexuals and communists. Two days later Hitler was made dictator of Germany

Mank took time out from MGM and wrote The Mad Dog of Europe. It’s set in Transylvania and has two strands. One tracks the rise of house painter “Adolf Mitler”, the other a pair of families, Jewish and Christian, in the real town of Gronau, and captures the interplay between them.

He wanted to use fake and real newsreel footage including “shots of Nazi disturbances being quelled by police clubs … to show the illegitimacy of the movement”. And “famous Americans arriving in Transylvania i.e Dempsey, WR Hearst, Charlie Chaplin, etc”. The technique was later used brilliantly in the 1942 movie Citizen Kane, directed by Orson Welles.

In the unmade film, Mitler rises to power, and Jews are persecuted and murdered. The screenplay has a scene where, in a classroom, a little boy sits in a corner wearing a dunce cap with the word “Jew” on it. “His shirt is torn. He screams as a pen strikes and imbeds itself in his shoulder. He pulls it out, wet with blood.” 

Mankiewicz understood Hollywood and the appeasers, and realised he would have to produce it himself. He told the press that he had backing for the filming and distribution, but he hadn’t. By the end of June he was back at Mayer’s MGM, needing his pay cheque.

In July, film producer Sam Jaffe, one of Mank’s closest friends, took out 
full-page ads in trade papers announcing that he had acquired the rights to Mankiewicz’s “anti-Hitler motion picture depicting the sacrifices of the Jews and Catholics in a Central European Nation and the indignities to which they are being subjected”. 

The script and the rights, after repeated brick walls, were sold on, but there was resistance at every turn. Even the Jewish Anti-Defamation League opposed it on the grounds that it would provoke accusations of Jewish warmongering, and that if it failed commercially, it would demonstrate American apathy to Hitler or even pave the way for pro-Nazi films.

The script had to be approved by the Hays Office, or the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, the US film censors. In 1934, Joseph Breen, a known anti-Semite, was in charge, and he wanted their bigotry also recognised – “It is to be remembered that there is strong pro-German and anti-Semitic feeling in this country, and, while those who are likely to approve of an anti-Hitler picture may think well of such an enterprise they should keep in mind that millions of Americans might think otherwise.” 

Film abandoned
In 1939, six years after Mank wrote the script, after many more fruitless attempts to shoot it and on the cusp of war, the film was finally abandoned.

Mankiewicz had seen the danger of Hitler and where it would lead in 1933, when the rest of the world either didn’t care, looked away or basked in ignorance. Who knows what would have happened had the film been made? Might Britain and the United States have geared up earlier to combat Nazism? Could it have changed history?

In 1942, Orson Welles’ film Citizen Kane was released. It’s often lauded as the greatest film ever made. Mankiewicz’ travails in writing it are the motor in the Oscar-nominated Mank. Arguably The Mad Dog of Europe is the greatest film never made.

If if isn’t Gary Oldman who wins the best male actor award for Mank, it could be 83-year-old Anthony Hopkins for The Father, or more likely Riz Ahmed, about whom the least interesting fact is that he would become the first Muslim to win. He plays drummer Ruben Stone who loses his hearing in Sound of Metal.

It is a brilliant performance. Ahmed looks a convincing drummer in the brief playing sequences and he clearly learned sign language, and yet? The central premise and the peg on which the plot hangs (spoiler alert) is that being deaf isn’t a handicap. I’m not (totally) deaf so I don’t presume to disagree, but it seems a pretty flimsy argument that not being able to hear does not inhibit you.

It stops Ruben Stone from being a drummer for a start.

It’s well meaning and there are some great sequences with deaf kids and silences for when Stone is unable to hear, but I found it hollow and meretricious. It will probably win big time.

 

Christie collection
I’m one of the organisers of a project to commemorate my old friend Stuart Christie with a library and archive to be hosted in the MayDay Rooms in Fleet Street. It will include his publishing works, personal memorabilia and film collection. 

We raised more than £12,000 through crowdfunding (gofundme.com, it’s still open!). He and I had many a jape together. Stuart was immensely funny and I miss him every day. After losing his wife, Brenda, he deserved to spend a lot more time with his grandkids. 

He died as he lived, bravely, with his daughter Branwen giving him sips of Glenmorangie along with the morphine. I’ll be insisting on Laphroaig or Bruichladdich. He is, of course, best known for trying to assassinate the Fascist dictator Franco.

His Spanish prison mugshot is the centrepiece of a poster on the wall of SWG3 in Glasgow. 

It’s part of an exhibition called the Art of Defiance. Stuart’s poster was created by a Barcelona-based artist called Roc Blackblock. Although I rather doubt that’s his real name.