[2] His parents were Austrian-born actress Rose Stradner and the celebrated screenwriter/director Joseph L. Mankiewicz, son of German-Jewish immigrants.
In 1950, his father, after winning four Oscars in two years for the screenplays and direction of A Letter to Three Wives and All About Eve, decided to move his family back to New York City, where he had been raised.
[3] In 1963, two young producers, Stuart Millar and Lawrence Turman, took Mankiewicz on as their assistant while making The Best Man, the 1964 film version of Gore Vidal's Broadway play starring Henry Fonda.
Mankiewicz began to write, finishing an original screenplay, Please, about the last ninety minutes in the life of a suicidal young actress.
It was optioned at times by three different studios, never made, but served as an example of his talent and was responsible for his first writing assignment, an episode of Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theatre, directed by Stuart Rosenberg.
And it wasn't until I had been asked back several times and, as awful as it sounds, for a lot of money, that I could finally convince myself that these people really want me because they think that I'm the best person to write the script.
[4]In 1967, Mankiewicz joined forces with a friend, Jack Haley Jr. to come up with a musical television special tailored for the then hugely popular Nancy Sinatra: Movin' with Nancy, co-starring Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr. and Lee Hazlewood.
Simultaneously, 20th Century Fox had optioned his original screenplay and after reading it, producer Joe Pasternak hired him to write The Sweet Ride about the California surfing community, starring Tony Franciosa, Bob Denver, and introducing Jacqueline Bisset.
Attending one of the four performances of Georgy was United Artists production head David Picker, who admired Mankiewicz's book for the musical.
He was hired on a two-week guarantee, stayed on the film for six months and received shared screenplay credit with the original writer, Richard Maibaum.
In 1975, Mankiewicz wrote the screenplay for Mother, Jugs and Speed, a dark comedy about ambulance drivers starring Bill Cosby, Raquel Welch and Harvey Keitel.
"[5] He next performed a similar function on The Cassandra Crossing, starring Richard Harris, Sophia Loren, Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner, receiving shared screenplay credit.
This was followed by his screenplay for The Eagle Has Landed, a World War II thriller with Michael Caine, Donald Sutherland and Robert Duvall.
During this time actor Peter Falk asked Universal Studios to hire Mankiewicz to read the scripts for his television series, Columbo, and make plot suggestions.
At the time the script drafts combined were more than four hundred pages long (an impossible length to shoot) and Donner felt they were much too campy as well.
The Writer's Guild strenuously objected on two grounds; first, that the traditional script arbitration process was being bypassed and second, that Mankiewicz's credit came after the original screenwriters and not before them, implying that his contribution was more important.
"[4] During this time, television producers Aaron Spelling and Leonard Goldberg had five successful series on the ABC Network simultaneously.
He also directed the final cable film, Till Death Do Us Hart, in Munich, Germany, coming full circle on the show.
Following Superman: The Movie, Warner Bros. signed Mankiewicz to an exclusive deal and kept him busy "fixing" films.
[7] Then Richard Donner brought him onto Ladyhawke, the medieval romantic fantasy starring Matthew Broderick, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Rutger Hauer.
He's never said he's disappointed, but I know he is, and I know that come Oscar night some year, he would love to see some wonderful film that I wrote and directed being honored.
"[6] Things worked out well for Mankiewicz, who got along well with co-writers Dan Aykroyd and Alan Zweibel and wound up directing Dragnet.
[6] Mankiewicz next did an uncredited rewrite on Legal Eagles, a romantic comedy with Robert Redford and Debra Winger.
This was followed by his directing the Showtime film, Taking the Heat, with Alan Arkin, Peter Boyle, George Segal and Tony Goldwyn.
When I started out, I sort of thought of myself as an enormously sensitive young writer who wanted to do these deeply personal films.
Mankiewicz remained active in the Writer's and Director's Guilds and was a former member of the board of governors of the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences.
He also had affairs with actresses Dorothy Provine, Suzy Kendall, Carol Lynley,[8] Tuesday Weld,[9] Diane Cilento, Elizabeth Ashley, Jean Simmons, Kate Jackson, Stefanie Powers and Margot Kidder.