Designing Eye-popping Costumes for the Black & White ‘Mank’

Imagine working with David Fincher on a film about 1930s Hollywood featuring star Marion Davies, billionaire William Randolph Hearst, and screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz. Imagine having the opportunity to recreate the looks for Hearst and Davies’ famed parties featuring some of Hollywood’s biggest names and most exotic apparel.

Now, imagine designing all of that – making key color and material selections – for a film that will never be seen in color. Imagine never having worked with black and white cinematography before.

That was the initial challenge given to costume designer Trish Summerville for David Fincher’s masterpiece Mank.

And she wholeheartedly embraced the challenge.

“For me, that was one of the great challenges because I haven’t done a complete project in black and white. So that was a lot of fun. In the beginning, it was still doing all the same amount of research. I like to do a lot of extensive research. It’s such a fun part of our jobs,” Summerville enthused. “From that, it was photographing things. Whether it was complete garments, fabrics, buttons, trims, skin tone, hair, everything in black and white to see how that would translate, and then what would be the needs that I would have on how I wanted to go about designing the costumes in the film.”

As with all of the crafts on Mank, the process of finding the right tones and fabrics for the film’s costumes was a collaborative process. Summerville worked closely with director of photography Erik Messerschmidt to determine how her designs would be lit and shot. She also needed to work with production designer Don Burt to see how the costumes would appear next to his sets. Once she understood that approach, Summerville and team photographed every costume and every piece of jewelry to ensure they would look good in the black and white hues of the film.

Going with simple black and white outfits would not work for a black and white film. Some darker colors soaked up all light and looked very flat when photographed, and vibrant white colors came across as too vibrant. The selection of jewel tones and muted pastel tones ended up working best – even if the colors didn’t fit within Summerville or Fincher’s inherent tastes. They worked best for the needs of the film.

When designing specific looks for Mank’s iconic characters, Summerville had ample research material available to her. For Marion Davies (Amanda Seyfried), she used Davies’ book and publicity stills of the era to design her outfits. She mostly avoided mimicking historic photos directly, using them as a jumping off point instead.

Mostly.

There were two Marion Davies’ looks in the film directly pulled from historic photos: her famous circus party costume and her “going away” look as she leaves MGM.

“One of the items that I did mimic, besides the circus party costume was a picture of her in a coat with a fur collar, standing on the side of a car like she’s departing. That was an inspiration for me for the scene where she departs MGM,” Summerville revealed. “Mayer gives her the bouquet of flowers and sends her on her way. So I wanted to have this really beautiful coat where we used faux fur for the collar and had a big diamond brooch on her. There were a few areas that I did pull from her real life, and that I got inspired by.”

For Mank, himself, Summerville’s designs needed to look less fresh, less polished. Gary Oldman’s Herman Mankiewicz is a hopelessly disheveled smoker and functioning alcoholic. His looks needed to reflect those attributes plus carry the 10-15 extra pounds Oldman put on for the role. Old photos of Mank on backlots provided the inspiration and proved that he was never a fashionable, dapper man. Therefore, Mank’s suits needed to look worn, sometimes with cigarette burns and always pockets full of junk.

But the standout sequence for costumes in the film has to be the climactic circus party dinner sequence. Based on a real event at Hearst Castle, the party featured dinner guests dressed in circus themed attire. Standing out in the film as she would have in real life, Amanda Seyfried in Marion Davies’ ringleader/majorette costume became a sparkling focal point, but sprinkled in the background of the scene are a menagerie of circus-type costumers. There’s a cowboy who looks a little like Clark Gable. There’s a bearded lady in a plaid chiffon organza dress who resembles Bette Davis from photos of the real event.

One minor change from photos of the period was Charles Dance’s William Randolph Hearst. Original photos showed Hearst in a comical, polka-dotted tie and an ill-fitting costume. Dance’s Hearst received a little bit of a regal upgrade as it better fit the narrative of the film, particularly in the subsequent “organ grinder’s monkey” monologue.

Another major presence in the film is Louis B. Mayer (Arliss Howard). Since no photos exist of Mayer at the circus party, Summerville decided to dress him as a lion tamer. Get it? MGM? She dressed Mayer in a pith helmet that Howard used to great comic effect as he leaves the run angry at Mank’s outburst.

All of Summerville’s designs, comic and regal alike, were created in full partnership with Fincher himself. While he has concrete ideas in his head for the final look of the film, he allows his creative team great freedoms to design as they see fit.

“He’s seen the entire thing start to finish in his head, edited music laid in, color corrected, stabilized, the whole thing’s done in his head. So when he’s giving you the information, he’s already seen it all,” Summerville explained. “He doesn’t give you things specific about what color that suit has to be or what that lapel shape has to be. He just explains the whole world to you in such detail, and then he lets you run with it. It’s one of my favorite places to be. I know that anything I work on with him I will be very, very proud of, and it’s going to turn out beautifully.”

Mank is now streaming on Netflix.