Feast your eyes on hun­dreds of behind-the-scenes pho­tos from Mank

As long as it’s safe to use pan­dem­ic-relat­ed idioms again, we can safe­ly say that Mank fever has swept the LWLies offices with a swift­ness, leav­ing us all itch­ing with antic­i­pa­tion for the new film from David Finch­er. We’ve sprained our index fin­gers hit­ting replay on the full trail­er unveiled ear­li­er this week, and now as the week­end approach­es, a trea­sure trove of fresh mate­ri­als has sur­faced and giv­en us much more to pore over.

A curi­ous web site head­ed with the title The White Wine Came Up With The Fish (a line of dia­logue from the film, I’d wager, judg­ing by the script’s focus on the prof­li­gate alco­holism of main char­ac­ter Her­man J Mankiewicz) mate­ri­al­ized online to offer a cache of behind-the-scenes pho­tos num­ber­ing over two hun­dred. The site also auto-plays a pre­view of the score com­posed by Nine Inch Nails mem­bers and long­time Finch­er col­lab­o­ra­tors Trent Reznor and Atti­cus Ross.

The images seem to be a mix of stills from the movie itself, film snap­shots from the oth­er side of the cam­era on set, the odd gif show­ing how the script sprang to the screen, and the occa­sion­al sup­ple­men­tal screen­grab from the online pro­duc­tion process. (Take a nice gan­der at what appears to be Reznor’s liv­ing room set­up in pho­to 205.) The final few slides show off the offi­cial hand­paint­ed poster, or at least a poster in the clas­si­cal hand­paint­ed style com­mon to the Gold­en Age of Hollywood.

In Fincher’s lat­est, Mankiewicz sab­o­tages his own career and life after incur­ring the wrath of media tycoon William Ran­dolph Hearst, the inspi­ra­tion for the Cit­i­zen Kane script that ​‘Mank’ penned. See­ing as so much of the film takes place on active sets from the good ol’ days, it’s tricky to dis­cern which of these pho­tos depict the actu­al pro­duc­tion or the pro­duc­tions with­in, as in pho­to 143 through 150.

Either way, these images give the impres­sion of an exceed­ing­ly hand­some-look­ing motion pic­ture burst­ing with peri­od detail, both in keep­ing with Fincher’s obses­sive per­fec­tion­ism. But there is only one true cure for Mank fever. And that is Mank. We need Mank.

Mank will come to select the­aters in Novem­ber, and then arrive on Net­flix in the US and UK on 4 December.