Citizen Kane

Citizen Kane
Poster showing two women in the bottom left of the picture looking up towards a man in a white suit in the top right of the picture. "Everybody's talking about it. It's terrific!" appears in the top right of the picture. "Orson Welles" appears in block letters between the women and the man in the white suit. "Citizen Kane" appears in red and yellow block letters tipped 60° to the right. The remaining credits are listed in fine print in the bottom right. Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Orson Welles
Written by	Herman J. Mankiewicz Orson Welles
Produced by	Orson Welles
Starring	Orson Welles Joseph Cotten Dorothy Comingore Everett Sloane Ray Collins George Coulouris Agnes Moorehead Paul Stewart Ruth Warrick Erskine Sanford William Alland
Cinematography	Gregg Toland
Edited by	Robert Wise
Music by	Bernard Herrmann
Production company	Mercury Productions
Distributed by	RKO Radio Pictures
Release dates	May 1, 1941 (1941-05-01) (New York City) September 5, 1941 (1941-09-05) (United States)
Running time	119 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$839,727

Citizen Kane is a 1941 American drama film produced by, co-written by, directed by and starring Orson Welles. The picture was Welles's first feature film. The film was nominated for Academy Awards in nine categories; it won an Academy Award for Best Writing (Original Screenplay) by Herman J. Mankiewicz and Welles. Considered by many critics, filmmakers, and fans to be the greatest film ever made, Citizen Kane was voted the greatest film of all time in five consecutive Sight & Sound's polls of critics, until it was displaced by Vertigo in the 2012 poll. It topped the American Film Institute's 100 Years ... 100 Movies list in 1998, as well as AFI's 2007 update. Citizen Kane is particularly praised for its cinematography, music, and narrative structure, which were innovative for its time.

The story is a film à clef that examines the life and legacy of Charles Foster Kane, played by Welles, a character based in part upon the American newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, Chicago tycoons Samuel Insull and Harold McCormick, and aspects of Welles's own life. Upon its release, Hearst prohibited mention of the film in any of his newspapers. Kane's career in the publishing world is born of idealistic social service, but gradually evolves into a ruthless pursuit of power. Narrated principally through flashbacks, the story is told through the research of a newsreel reporter seeking to solve the mystery of the newspaper magnate's dying word: "Rosebud".

After the Broadway successes of Welles's Mercury Theatre and the controversial 1938 radio broadcast "The War of the Worlds" on The Mercury Theatre on the Air, Welles was courted by Hollywood. He signed a contract with RKO Pictures in 1939. Unusual for an untried director, he was given the freedom to develop his own story, to use his own cast and crew, and to have final cut privilege. Following two abortive attempts to get a project off the ground, he wrote the screenplay for Citizen Kane, collaborating on the effort with Herman Mankiewicz. Principal photography took place in 1940 and the film received its American release in 1941.

While a critical success, Citizen Kane failed to recoup its costs at the box office. The film faded from view after its release but was subsequently returned to the public's attention when it was praised by such French critics as André Bazin and given an American revival in 1956.

The film was released on Blu-ray Disc on September 13, 2011, for a special 70th anniversary edition.

Plot

Orson Welles as Charles Foster Kane

The film opens with shots of Xanadu, a vast palatial estate in Florida with a "No Trespassing" sign on the gate. Inside the estate's mansion an elderly Charles Foster Kane on his deathbed holds a snow globe and utters a single word, "Rosebud", before dying; the globe slips from his hand and smashes on the floor. A newsreel obituary tells the life story of Kane, an enormously wealthy newspaper publisher. The newsreel recounts Kane's entire life, including his mysterious last words. Kane's death becomes sensational news around the world. The newsreel's producer tasks reporter Jerry Thompson with discovering the meaning of "Rosebud".

Thompson sets out to interview Kane's friends and associates; he approaches Kane's second wife, Susan Alexander Kane, now an alcoholic who runs her own nightclub, but she refuses to talk to him. Thompson then goes to the private archive of the late banker Walter Parks Thatcher. Through Thatcher's written memoirs, Thompson learns that Kane's childhood began in poverty in Colorado. After a gold mine was discovered on her property, Mary Kane sends Charles away to live with Thatcher so that he may be properly educated. The young Kane is seen happily playing with a sled in the snow at his parents boarding-house and protests being sent to live with Thatcher. After gaining full control over his trust fund at the age of 25, Kane enters the newspaper business and embarks on a career of yellow journalism. He takes control of the New York Inquirer and begins publishing scandalous articles that attack Thatcher's business interests. After the stock market crash in 1929 Kane is forced to sell controlling interest of his newspaper empire to Thatcher.

Thompson then interviews Kane's personal business manager, Mr. Bernstein. Bernstein recalls how Kane hired the best journalists available to build The Inquirer's circulation. Kane then rises to power by successfully manipulating public opinion regarding the Spanish American War and marrying Emily Norton, the niece of a President of the United States.

Thompson also interviews Kane's estranged best friend, Jedediah Leland, in a retirement home. Leland recalls Kane's marriage to Emily disintegrates over the years, and he begins an affair with amateur singer Susan Alexander while he is running for Governor of New York. Both his wife and his political opponent discover the affair and the public scandal ends his political career. Kane marries Susan and forces her into a humiliating operatic career for which she has neither the talent nor the ambition. Susan consents to an interview with Thompson, and recalls her failed opera career. Kane finally allows her to abandon her singing career after she attempts suicide. After years spent dominated by Kane and living in isolation at Xanadu, Susan leaves Kane. Kane's butler Raymond recounts that after Susan left him Kane began violently destroying the contents of her bedroom. He suddenly calms down when he sees a snow globe and says "Rosebud".

Back at Xanadu, Kane's belongings are being cataloged or discarded. Thompson concludes that he is unable to solve the mystery and that the meaning of "Rosebud" will forever remain an enigma. As the film ends, the camera reveals that Rosebud was the name of the sled from Kane's childhood in Colorado. Thought to be junk by Xanadu's staff, the sled is burned in a furnace.

Cast

• Orson Welles as Charles Foster Kane, a wealthy newspaper publisher.
• Joseph Cotten as Jedediah Leland, Kane's best friend and a reporter for The Inquirer. Cotten also appears (hidden in darkness) in the News on the March screening room.
• Dorothy Comingore as Susan Alexander Kane, Kane's mistress and second wife.
• Everett Sloane as Mr. Bernstein, Kane's friend and employee at The Inquirer.
• Ray Collins as Jim W. Gettys, Kane's political rival and the incumbent governor of New York.
• George Coulouris as Walter Parks Thatcher, a banker who becomes Kane's legal guardian.
• Agnes Moorehead as Mary Kane, Kane's mother.
• Paul Stewart as Raymond, Kane's butler.
• Ruth Warrick as Emily Monroe Norton Kane, Kane's first wife.
• Erskine Sanford as Herbert Carter, editor of The Inquirer. Sanford also appears (hidden in darkness) in the News on the March screening room.
• William Alland as Jerry Thompson, a reporter for News on the March. Alland also voices the narrator of the News on the March newsreel.
• Harry Shannon as Jim Kane, Kane's father.
• Georgia Backus as Bertha Anderson, attendant at the library of Walter Parks Thatcher.
• Fortunio Bonanova as Signor Matiste, vocal coach of Susan Alexander Kane.
• Sonny Bupp as Charles Foster Kane III, Kane's son.
• Buddy Swan as Charles Foster Kane, age eight.
• Gus Schilling as John, headwaiter at the El Rancho nightclub. Schilling also appears (hidden in darkness) in the News on the March screening room.
• Philip Van Zandt as Mr. Rawlston, News on the March producer.
• Charles Bennett as the entertainer at the head of the chorus line in the Inquirer party sequence

Pre-production

Development

Welles's radio broadcast of "The War of the Worlds" in 1938 caught the attention of RKO studio head George J. Schaefer.

Hollywood had shown interest in Welles as early as 1936. He turned down three scripts sent to him by Warner Bros.; in 1937, he declined offers from David O. Selznick, who asked him to head his film company's story department, and William Wyler, who wanted him to test for a supporting role in Wuthering Heights. "Although the possibility of making huge amounts of money in Hollywood greatly attracted him," wrote biographer Frank Brady, "he was still totally, hopelessly, insanely in love with the theater, and it is there that he had every intention of remaining to make his mark."

But following "The War of the Worlds" broadcast of his CBS radio series The Mercury Theatre on the Air, Welles was lured to Hollywood with a remarkable contract. RKO Pictures studio head George J. Schaefer wanted to work with Welles after the notorious broadcast, believing that Welles had a gift for attracting mass attention. RKO was also uncharacteristically profitable and was entering into a series of independent production contracts that would add more artistically prestigious films to its roster. Throughout the spring and early summer of 1939 Schaffer constantly tried to lure the reluctant Welles to Hollywood. Welles was in financial trouble after failure of his plays Five Kings and The Green Goddess. At first he simply wanted to spend three months in Hollywood and earn enough money to pay his debts and fund his next theatrical season. Welles first arrived in Hollywood on July 20, 1939. On his first tour Welles called the movie studio "the greatest electric train set a boy ever had".

Welles signed his contract with RKO on August 21. This legendary contract stipulated that Welles would act in, direct, produce and write two films. Mercury would get $100,000 for first film by January 1, 1940, plus 20% of profits after RKO recouped $500,000, and $125,000 for second film by January 1, 1941, plus 20% of profits after RKO recouped $500,000. The most controversial aspect of the contract was granting Welles complete artistic control of the two films so long as RKO approved both project's stories and so long so the budget didn't exceed $500,000. RKO executives would not be allowed to see any footage until Welles chose to show it to them, and no cuts could be made to either film without Welles’s approval. Welles was allowed to develop the story without interference, select his own cast and crew, and have the right of final cut. Granting final cut privilege was unprecedented for a studio since it placed artistic considerations over financial investment. The contract was deeply resented in the film industry, and the Hollywood press took every opportunity to mock RKO and Welles. Schaefer remained a great supporter and saw the unprecedented contract as good publicity. Film scholar Robert L. Carringer wrote: "The simple fact seems to be that Schaefer believed Welles was going to pull off something really big almost as much as Welles did himself."

Welles spent the first five months of his RKO contract trying to get his first project going, without success. "They are laying bets over on the RKO lot that the Orson Welles deal will end up without Orson ever doing a picture there," wrote The Hollywood Reporter. It was agreed that Welles would film Heart of Darkness, previously adapted for The Mercury Theatre on the Air, which would be presented entirely through a first-person camera. After elaborate pre-production and a day of test shooting with a hand-held camera — unheard of at the time — the project never reached production because Welles was unable to trim $50,000 from its budget. Schaefer told Welles that the $500,000 budget could not be exceeded; revenue was declining sharply in Europe by the fall of 1939.

He then started work on the idea that became Citizen Kane. Knowing the script would take time to prepare, Welles suggested to RKO that while that was being done — "so the year wouldn't be lost" — he make a humorous political thriller. Welles proposed The Smiler with a Knife, from a novel by Cecil Day-Lewis. When that project stalled in December 1939, Welles began brainstorming other story ideas with screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, who had been writing Mercury radio scripts. "Arguing, inventing, discarding, these two powerful, headstrong, dazzlingly articulate personalities thrashed toward Kane", wrote biographer Richard Meryman.

Screenplay

Mankiewicz as co-writer

Welles and Herman J. Mankiewicz co-wrote the script in early 1940. They separately re-wrote and revised each other's work until Welles was satisfied with the finished product.

Herman J. Mankiewicz was a notorious personality in Hollywood. "His behavior, public and private, was a scandal," wrote John Houseman. "A neurotic drinker and a compulsive gambler, he was also one of the most intelligent, informed, witty, humane and charming men I have ever known." Welles told Peter Bogdanovich that "Nobody was more miserable, more bitter, and funnier than Mank ... a perfect monument of self-destruction. But, you know, when the bitterness wasn't focused straight at you, he was the best company in the world."

Welles admired Mankiewicz, and had met him in New York in 1938 at the time of the Mercury Theatre's Broadway successes. In September 1939 Welles visited Mankiewicz while he was hospitalized in Los Angeles after a car accident, and offered him a job writing scripts for the Mercury Theatre's show on CBS radio, The Campbell Playhouse. "I felt it would be useless," Welles said later, "because of Mank's general uselessness many times in the studios. But I thought, 'We'll see what he comes up with.'" Mankiewicz proved very useful, particularly working with Houseman as editor, and wrote five scripts for Campbell Playhouse shows broadcast between November 12, 1939, and March 17, 1940.

Houseman and Welles were partners in the Mercury Theatre, but when Mercury productions moved from New York to California the partnership ended and Houseman became an employee, working primarily as supervising editor on the radio shows. In December 1939, after a violent quarrel with Welles over finances, Houseman resigned and returned to New York. To Welles, his departure was a relief.

In late December the RKO executive board all but ordered Schaefer to stop paying salaries to the Mercury staff until Welles submitted an acceptable script and set a start date for filming. Over the next five weeks Welles spent many long evenings brainstorming plot ideas in the bedroom of the small rented house where Mankiewicz was in traction with his shattered leg. Mankiewicz testified in a court proceeding a few years later that the idea for the film began with a March of Time-style sequence that set out the life of a particular character whose life would then be the subject of the film. Welles later said the germinal idea was to create a posthumous portrait of a man through many points of view, in the recollections of those who knew him.

"I'd been nursing an old notion," Welles told Bogdanovich, "the idea of telling the same thing several times – and showing exactly the same thing from wholly different points of view. Basically, the idea Rashomon used later on. Mank liked it, so we started searching for the man it was going to be about. Some big American figure – couldn’t be a politician, because you’d have to pinpoint him. Howard Hughes was the first idea. But we got pretty quickly to the press lords."

Welles and Mankiewicz soon settled on the idea of using newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst as their central character.

By late January their disagreements over plot details were more frequent and their collaboration less creative. "That's why I left him on his own, finally," Welles said later, "because we'd started to waste too much time haggling." In February 1940, Welles arranged a lunch at New York's 21 Club and persuaded Houseman to return to California. He was hired to supervise Mankiewicz as he put a rough draft on paper.

On February 19, 1940, Mankiewicz signed a contract with Mercury Productions to work on the screenplay. He would receive $1,000 a week for his work as long as he was not "incapacitated by illness or any other reasons", and would be paid a $5,000 bonus on delivery of the script. Mankiewicz was to receive no credit for his work as he was hired as a script doctor; a similar clause was present in the writers' contracts for The Campbell Playhouse. Mankiewicz was advised by his agents, Columbia Management of California, and before he signed the contract it was again made clear that all credit for his work belonged to Welles and the Mercury Theatre, the "author and creator".

Welles hesitated to officially agree to give Mankiewicz credit. His contract with RKO stated that the film would be produced, directed, performed and written by Welles, and his "boy wonder" persona had great publicity value for the studio. Welles's attorney, Arnold Weissberger, did not want to give RKO any cause to break Welles's contract should they wish to promote the film as solely his work. The contract with Mankiewicz left the matter of his receiving credit open; Welles's correspondence with his lawyer indicated that he did not wish to deny credit to Mankiewicz.

After he came to agreement with Welles on the story line and character, Mankiewicz was given the job of writing the first draft that Welles could rework. In the last week of February or the first week of March 1940, Mankiewicz retreated to the historic Verde ranch on the Mojave River in Victorville, California, to began working on the script. Welles wanted the work done as inconspicuously as possible, and the Campbell Ranch offered the additional advantage of prohibiting alcohol. Mankiewicz was accompanied by a nurse, secretary Rita Alexander, Houseman, and a 300-page rough script of the project that Welles had written. The preliminary work consisted of dialogue and some camera instructions.

Author Clinton Heylin wrote that Mankiewicz "… probably believed that Welles had little experience as an original scriptwriter … [and] may even have felt that John Citizen, USA, Welles's working title, was a project he could make his own."

Mankiewicz and Houseman worked together in seclusion at the Campbell Ranch for 12 weeks. Houseman was to serve as editor, Carringer noted, "but part of his job was to ride herd on Mankiewicz, whose drinking habits were legendary and whose screenwriting credentials unfortunately did not include a reputation for seeing things through." There was continual communication with Welles, and Houseman often travelled to Los Angeles to confer with him. Welles visited the ranch occasionally to check on their progress and offer direction. With his own secretary, Katherine Trosper, Welles was reworking the draft pages in Hollywood. These pages were given to RKO script supervisor Amalia Kent, who broke the material down in continuity form for the production units. Welles respected her for her service on the unproduced Heart of Darkness script.

Welles came to suspect that Houseman had turned Mankiewicz against him. "When Mank left for Victorville, we were friends. When he came back, we were enemies," Welles told Meryman. "Mank always needed a villain."

Ideas and collaboration

For some time, Mankiewicz had wanted to write a screenplay about a public figure – perhaps a gangster – whose story would be told by the people that knew him. In the mid-1930s Mankiewicz had written the first act of an unproduced play about John Dillinger, titled The Tree Will Grow.

"It was something [Mankiewicz] had been thinking about for years," Houseman wrote, “the idea of telling a man’s private life (preferably one that suggested a recognizable American figure), immediately following his death, through the intimate and often incompatible testimony of those who had known him at different times and in different circumstances.”

Welles himself had worked with the concept. As a teenager in 1932 he wrote a play about the life of abolitionist John Brown called Marching Song. Like that of Citizen Kane, the play’s plot is structured around a journalist attempting to understand Brown by interviewing people who knew him and have different perspectives on him. The plot device of the unseen journalist Thompson in Citizen Kane is also reminiscent of the unseen Marlow in Welles's proposed film Heart of Darkness, in which the narrator's point of view is that of the audience.

"Orson was from Chicago," said the Mercury Theatre's Richard Wilson, "and I believe he was as much influenced by Samuel Insull and Colonel Robert McCormick as he was by the figure of Hearst." Roger Hill, head of the Todd Seminary for Boys and Welles's mentor and lifelong friend, wrote that Welles once told him about a project he was considering: "He had outlined to me, years earlier, a plan for a stage play based on the life an American tycoon who would be a composite of Insull, McCormick and Hearst." Hill said that even as a boy Welles was interested in the lives of the controversial tycoons: "He sensed, even then, the theatrical impact that could be gained in assaulting, and possibly toppling, giants," wrote Brady.

Welles did not know Hearst, but he knew much about him through drama critic Ashton Stevens. He also said that his father and Hearst knew each other. When Welles arrived in Hollywood in 1939 everyone was talking about Aldous Huxley's new book, After Many a Summer Dies a Swan, a novel that dealt with the film colony and seemed to be a portrait of Hearst. Welles was invited to celebrate Huxley's birthday at a party where the consensus was that the book could never be made into a film due to Hearst's influence. How much Huxley's book influenced Welles's choice of subject is unknown; Brady wrote that "a more personal coincidence, however, might have helped fuel the idea." Welles's first wife Virginia moved to Los Angeles shortly after their divorce, and on May 18, 1940, she married screenwriter Charles Lederer, favorite nephew of Hearst's mistress Marion Davies.

Mankiewicz was welcomed into Hearst's private office at San Simeon, where he mingled with Arthur Brisbane and Walter Winchell while Hearst presided over his empire.

In his earlier years as a journalist, Mankiewicz sought political reporters who kept him up on gossip about Hearst, and he had even started to write a play about him. Soon after moving to Hollywood in 1926, Mankiewicz met Hearst and Davies through his friendship with Lederer.

"There were two castes in Hollywood," wrote biographer Richard Meryman, "those who had been guests at San Simeon and those who had not." Mankiewicz and his wife were part of the social set invited to Hearst Castle on several occasions. They were always given the same apartment in La Casa del Monte guest cottage — "like a little castle of our own," said Sara Mankiewicz. A celebrated wit, Mankiewicz was valued for his conversation and was seated near his hosts at dinner. He respected Hearst's knowledge and was privileged to be invited to his private office where he mingled with Hearst's editors and columnists. "For the first time Herman's Hollywood pleasure merged with his political scholarship", wrote Meryman.

Described by biographer Simon Callow as "a keen student of power and its abuses", Mankiewicz was fascinated by Hearst, and Hearst in turn was interested in the former journalist with so much political knowledge. Mankiewicz and Lederer delighted in concocting facsimile newspapers that needled Hearst and his publications, for the amusement of Hearst and Davies. By 1936, however, Mankiewicz was no longer welcome in Hearst's circle due to his drinking and political arguments.

"Mankiewicz, nursing his resentment, had subsequently become obsessed by both Hearst and Davies," Callow wrote, "collecting stories about them the way small boys collect stamps."

Scripting

John Houseman helped Mankiewicz write drafts of the script and later went so far as to say that Welles "never wrote a word".

During March, April and early May 1940, Mankiewicz dictated the screenplay, titled American. Welles re-wrote and revised an incomplete first draft given to him, dated April 16, and sent it back to Victorville. Forty-four revision pages dated April 28 were given to Welles. Mankiewicz and Houseman delivered the second draft, bearing a handwritten date of May 9, to Welles after finishing their work in Victorville. Mankiewicz immediately went to work on another project for MGM, and Houseman left for New York four days later.

"Despite Houseman's description of himself and Herman paring every excess out of American, it was 325 pages long and outrageously overwritten, even for a first draft," wrote Meryman. "Houseman blandly ignores this fact. He implies that American, with only the conventional amount of polishing, was what was filmed."

Welles had been editing and rewriting the script pages in Beverly Hills. With the Victorville script now in hand he cut it by some 75 pages, and added or revised more than 170 pages.

"By far the most serious dramatic problem in American is its treatment of Kane," wrote Carringer. The RKO legal department warned Welles that it was too close a portrait of Hearst and that if the script was not changed a suit for libel or invasion of privacy was almost certain.

"There is a quality in the film — much more than a vague perfume — that was Mank and that I treasured," Welles said. "It was a kind of controlled, cheerful virulence … I personally liked Kane, but I went with that. And that probably gave the picture a certain tension, the fact that one of the authors hated Kane and one loved him. But in his hatred of Hearst, or whoever Kane was, Mank didn't have a clear enough image of who the man was. Mank saw him simply as an egomaniac monster with all these people around him."

Mankiewicz had made a study of Hearst over many years, and he had firsthand knowledge as one of his frequent guests at San Simeon; but he also drew on published accounts about Hearst for the script. "He always denied it," wrote Carringer, "but coincidences between American and Ferdinand Lundberg's Imperial Hearst are hard to explain." Welles removed a great deal of Mankiewicz's Hearst material, but Lundberg would eventually file suit nevertheless.

The fourth draft dated June 18 was the first to be titled Citizen Kane. The title was contributed by RKO studio chief George Schaefer, who was concerned that calling the film American would seem cynical and identify too closely with Hearst, whose newspapers included the American Weekly and the New York Journal-American. Mankiewicz and Houseman were put back on the Mercury payroll June 18–July 27, and continued to help revise the script.

Dated July 16, 1940, the final shooting script was 156 pages. "After seven complete revisions, Welles finally had what he wanted," wrote Brady. Carringer summarized:

Mankiewicz (with assistance from Houseman and with input from Welles) wrote the first two drafts. His principal contributions were the story frame, a cast of characters, various individual scenes, and a good share of the dialogue. … Welles added the narrative brilliance — the visual and verbal wit, the stylistic fluidity, and such stunningly original strokes as the newspaper montages and the breakfast table sequence. He also transformed Kane from a cardboard fictionalization of Hearst into a figure of mystery and epic magnificence. Citizen Kane is the only major Welles film on which the writing credit is shared. Not coincidentally, it is also the Welles film that has the strongest story, the most fully realized characters, and the most carefully sculpted dialogue. Mankiewicz made the difference.

Welles called Mankiewicz's contribution to the script "enormous". He summarized the screenwriting process: "The initial ideas for this film and its basic structure were the result of direct collaboration between us; after this we separated and there were two screenplays: one written by Mr. Mankiewicz, in Victorville, and the other, in Beverly Hills, by myself. … The final version of the screenplay … was drawn from both sources."

In 1969, when he was interviewed for the official magazine of the Directors Guild of America, Houseman concurred with Welles's description of the scripting process: "He [Welles] added a great deal of material himself, and later he and Herman had a dreadful row over the screen credit. As far as I could judge, the co-billing was correct. The Citizen Kane script was the product of both of them."

But at the same time, Houseman was stirring controversy, lunching with film critic Pauline Kael and giving Mankiewicz total credit for the creation of the script for Citizen Kane. Carringer wrote that "in his lengthy account of the Victorville interlude, Houseman gives the impression that Mankiewicz started out with a clean slate, and that virtually everything in the Victorville drafts is Mankiewicz's original invention." Houseman would openly say that Mankiewicz deserved sole credit for writing the film for many years — right up until his death — without explaining the contradictions present even in his own personal papers.

Authorship

One of the long-standing controversies about Citizen Kane has been the authorship of the screenplay. Mankiewicz was enraged when an August 1940 column by Louella Parsons quoted Welles as saying, " … and so I wrote Citizen Kane." When RKO released the film in May 1941, the souvenir program included a double-page spread depicting Welles as "the four-most personality of motion pictures … author, producer, director, star." Mankiewicz wrote his father, "I'm particularly furious at the incredibly insolent description of how Orson wrote his masterpiece. The fact is that there isn't one single line in the picture that wasn't in writing – writing from and by me – before ever a camera turned."

Mankiewicz had seen rushes of the film shortly before this and said he was unhappy with the footage. However, Mankiewicz's assessment of the footage was full of contradictions. He told Welles that there were "not enough standard movie conventions being observed" and that he didn’t like the theatricality and lack of close-ups in the film. But Mankiewicz also called the footage “magnificent” and said he like it "from an ascetical point of view." He also said that he thought the audience would not understand the film.

Mankiewicz began threatening Welles to get credit for the film. This included threatening to post full-page ads in trade papers and getting his friend Ben Hecht to write an exposé about their collaboration in the Saturday Evening Post. Mankiewicz also threatened to go to the Screen Writers Guild and claim full credit for writing the entire script by himself. Welles biographer Barbara Leaming believes that Mankiewicz reacted this way out of fear of getting no credit at all.

After lodging a protest with the Screen Writers Guild, Mankiewicz withdrew it, then vacillated. The question was resolved in January 1941 when RKO awarded Mankiewicz credit. The guild credit form listed Welles first, Mankiewicz second. Welles's assistant Richard Wilson said that the person who circled Mankiewicz's name in pencil, then drew an arrow that put it in first place, was Welles. The official credit reads, "Screenplay by Herman J. Mankiewicz and Orson Welles".

Mankiewicz's rancor toward Welles grew over the remaining 12 years of his life. Welles's irritation with Mankiewicz passed quickly, and he spoke of him with fondness.

"One of the things that bound his friends to him was his extraordinary vulnerability," Welles told Mankiewicz's biographer. "He liked the attention he got as a great, monumental self-destructing machine. That was his role, and he played it to the hilt. He was a performer, as I think all very sucessful personalities are. He couldn’t be affectionate or loving outside his family. You never felt you were basking in the warmth of his friendship. So it was his vulnerability that brought the warmth out from the friends. And people loved him. Loved him. That terrible vulnerability. That terrible wreck."

Welles further said this to Mankiewicz's biographer: "I have only one real enemy in my life that I know about, and that is John Houseman. Everything begins and ends with that hostility behind the mandarin benevolence."

"Raising Kane"

File:Pauline Kael.jpg

Film critic Pauline Kael's 1971 articles created a controversy by claiming Mankiewicz deserved full credit for writing the screenplay.

Questions over the authorship of the Citizen Kane screenplay were revived in 1971 by influential film critic Pauline Kael, whose controversial 50,000-word essay "Raising Kane" was printed in two consecutive issues of The New Yorker and subsequently as a long introduction to the shooting script in The Citizen Kane Book. Kael's unacknowledged primary source was Houseman.

"The major focus of Kael's essay is its defense and celebration of screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz as the principal, neglected creative force behind Kane," wrote film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum. "According to Kael, the script was written almost entirely by Mankiewicz, and Welles had actively plotted to deprive him of any screen credit."

Without ever crediting him Kael used the research and interviews of Dr. Howard Suber, an assistant professor at UCLA, where she was a guest lecturer. She approached him in mid-1969 and offered him the chance to write a separate essay that would appear with hers in The Citizen Kane Book, and split the money. Suber extricated himself from an agreement to co-author an almost identical book with two fellow academics, and gave Kael his research. She sent him a check for something more than $375, half of the advance she was to be paid by Bantam Books, and he sent his essay to her. Kael dismissed Suber's repeated requests that she formalize their agreement and in time she stopped communicating with him. Suber was astonished to discover "Raising Kane" in The New Yorker in February 1971; he received no credit or further payment.

"Significantly, no transcripts of Pauline's purported conversations with John Houseman, George Shaefer, or Rita Alexander have survived — perhaps because she took no notes," wrote Kael's biographer Brian Kellow. "The only research materials in her personal archive, housed at Indiana University's Lilly Library, are copies of Howard Suber's interviews." His interview with Sara Mankiewicz particularly confirmed Kael's thesis. Kael specifically did not interview Welles: "I already know what happened," she told Suber, "I don't have to talk to him."

Kael credulously reported what she was told by Mankiewicz's secretary: "Mrs. Alexander, who took the dictation from Mankiewicz, from the first paragraph to the last, and then, when the first draft was completed and they all went back to Los Angeles, did the secretarial work at Mankiewicz’s house on the rewriting and the cuts, and who then handled the script at the studio until after the film was shot, says that Welles didn’t write (or dictate) one line of the shooting script of Citizen Kane." Kael did not interview Katherine Trosper, who worked as Welles's secretary from the script's rough draft through the completion of the film. When Bogdanovich repeated Kael's assertion that Mankiewicz was the sole author of the script, Trosper replied, "Then I'd like to know, what was all that stuff I was always typing for Mr. Welles?" Kael likewise did not interview associate producer Richard Baer, who stated that he himself was "in the room and saw" Welles writing important parts of the script.

Kael wrote that the idea to use Hearst as the basis for Kane was Mankiewicz's idea, a claim supported by Houseman. She reported that a former babysitter for the Mankiewicz family said that in 1925 she had typed portions of a screenplay Mankiewicz dictated to her that involved Hearst, organized in flashbacks. Welles claimed it was his idea, which was supported by Baer in sworn testimony taken at the time Citizen Kane was released.

Kael reported that Mankiewicz "probably didn’t get more than eight or nine thousand dollars for the whole job; according to the cost sheets for the movie, the screenplay cost was $34,195.24, which wasn’t much, even for that day, and the figure probably includes the salary and expenses of John Houseman and the others at Victorville." Mankiewicz was paid $22,833.35 for his work.

Kael wrote that Mankiewicz "had ample proof of his authorship, and he took his evidence to the Screen Writers Guild and raised so much hell that Welles was forced to split the credit and take second place in the listing." Lederer, a source for Kael's essay, insisted that the credit never came to the Writers Guild for arbitration.

Kael reported that before the film was finished, without Welles's knowledge, Mankiewicz gave the script to Lederer. "But Lederer, apparently, was deeply upset and took the script to his aunt and Hearst. It went from them to Hearst's lawyers … It was probably as a result of Mankiewicz's idiotic indiscretion that the various forces were set in motion that resulted in the cancellation of the premiere at the Radio City Music Hall [and] the commercial failure of Citizen Kane." Lederer said that Kael never bothered to check with him about the facts, that he did not give Davies the script Mankiewicz loaned him: "I gave it back to him. He asked me if I thought Marion would be offended and I said I didn't think so."

Kael wrote that the production could not afford the fee to perform the opera called for in the script, Jules Massenet's Thaïs — a work written for Sibyl Sanderson, one of Hearst's mistresses — so composer Bernard Herrmann had to write something instead. "But Miss Kael never wrote or approached me to ask about the music," Herrmann said. "We could easily have afforded the fee. The point is that its lovely little strings would not have served the emotional purpose of the film." Herrmann disagreed with Kael's entire premise: "She tries to pretend that Welles is nothing and that a mediocre writer by the name of Mankiewicz was a hidden Voltaire. I'm not saying that Mankiewicz made no contribution … but he could not have created Citizen Kane."

Kael also related a damaging anecdote from Nunnally Johnson, who said that during the filming of Citizen Kane Mankiewicz told him that Welles offered him, through a third party, a $10,000 bribe to relinquish screen credit. Mankiewicz, ever in need of money, was tempted by the offer. Mankiewicz reportedly said that Ben Hecht advised him to take the money and double-cross Welles. "I like to believe he did," Johnson replied when Kael asked if he believed the story. Kael left it at that: "It's not unlikely", she wrote. The unresearched rumor became part of the record.

Attorney Arnold Weissberger advised Welles not to file suit for libel. Proving malice would be difficult; Welles was a public figure, and Kael's ideas were theories and matters of opinion. A complicating factor was that Welles was receiving a portion of the royalties of The Citizen Kane Book, which contained the script as well as Kael's essay. "As it turned out, much to his sorrow, the book sold extremely well and has been reprinted many times", wrote Brady.

The mainstream press accepted Kael's flamboyant but unsubstantiated essay — an extension of her dispute with Andrew Sarris and the auteur theory — based on her credibility as one of the country's top film critics. New York Times reviewer Mordecai Richler praised Kael for "cutting Orson Welles down to size, denying his needlessly grandiose claim to having been solely responsible for everything that went into Kane, including the script and photography."

"Raising Kane" angered many critics, most notably Bogdanovich, a close friend of Welles who rebutted Kael's claims in "The Kane Mutiny", an October 1972 article for Esquire. Other rebuttals included articles by Sarris, Joseph McBride and Rosenbaum, interviews with George Coulouris and Herrmann that appeared in Sight & Sound, a definitive study of the scripts by Carringer and remarks in Welles biographies by Leaming and Brady. Rosenbaum also reviewed the controversy in his editor's notes to This is Orson Welles (1992). Film historian Richard B. Jewell concluded that Welles deserves credit as the film's co-writer and that Kael's arguments are "one-sided and unsupported by the facts."

"Orson was vigorously defended," wrote biographer Barton Whaley, "but in less prominently placed articles; so, again, the damage was immense and permanent."

"'The Kane Mutiny' … did surprisingly little damage to Pauline's reputation", wrote Kellow. "It did, however, represent a serious breakdown of The New Yorker's fact-checking process."

Decades after the controversy over the essay, Woody Allen told Bogdanovich that he had been with Kael immediately after she finished reading "The Kane Mutiny" in Esquire. Kael was shocked at the case made against her — including the revelation that she had taken credit for the work of Suber, something Bogdanovich learned through his own connections at UCLA. Kael asked Allen, "How am I going to answer this?"

"She never responded," Bogdanovich wrote. He noted that Kael had included "Raising Kane" in a recent collection of her essays — "untouched, as though these other people's testimony didn't count or exist, as though Welles's feelings or reputation didn't matter."

By the time of Kael's death 30 years after its publication, "Raising Kane" was discredited. Reviewing Kellow's biography for The New York Times, critic Frank Rich remarked on the fortuitous omission of the essay from the 2011 anthology, The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael. "'Raising Kane' was omitted from the Library of America volume for reasons of space … but Kellow's account suggests it should have been eliminated in any event for its improprieties."

"The Scripts of Citizen Kane"

An essential article on the subject of authorship is Carringer's "The Scripts of Citizen Kane", first published in 1978. Rosenbaum observed that Carringer included only some of its facts in his subsequent book, The Making of Citizen Kane, and that the earlier essay is "the definitive and conclusive word on the issue of the script's authorship".

Carringer likewise rebutted Kael's conclusions and refers to early script drafts with Welles's incorporated handwritten contributions, and mentions the issues raised by Kael rested on the evidence of an early draft which was mostly written by Mankiewicz. However Carringer points out that subsequent drafts clarified Welles's contribution to the script:

Fortunately enough evidence to settle the matter has survived. A virtually complete set of script records for Citizen Kane has been preserved in the archives of RKO General Pictures in Hollywood, and these provide almost a day-to-day record of the history of the scripting ... The full evidence reveals that Welles's contribution to the Citizen Kane script was not only substantial but definitive.

Carringer notes that Mankiewicz' principal contribution was on the first two drafts of the screenplay, which he characterizes as being more like "rough gatherings" than actual drafts. The early drafts established "... the plot logic and laid down the overall story contours, established the main characters, and provided numerous scenes and lines that would eventually appear in one form or another in the film." However he also noted that Kane in the early draft remained a caricature of Hearst rather than the fully developed character of the final film. The main quality missing in the early drafts but present in the final film is "... the stylistic wit and fluidity that is the most engaging trait of the film itself."

Carringer cites that Mankiewicz's main contribution was providing Welles with "… what any good first writer ought to be able to provide in such a case: a solid, durable story structure on which to build." Carringer considered that at least three scenes were solely Welles's work. After weighing both sides of the argument, he concluded, "We will probably never know for sure, but in any case Welles had at last found a subject with the right combination of monumentality, timeliness, and audacity." Author Harlan Lebo agrees: "The years have fogged the precise origins of the original idea for Citizen Kane. … However, of far greater relevance is reaffirming the importance of the efforts that both men contributed to the creation of Hollywood's greatest motion picture."

Sources

Charles Foster Kane

Main article: Charles Foster Kane

Welles never confirmed a principal source for the character of Charles Foster Kane. Houseman wrote that Kane is a synthesis of different personalities, with Hearst's life used as the main source. "The truth is simple: for the basic concept of Charles Foster Kane and for the main lines and significant events of his public life, Mankiewicz used as his model the figure of William Randolph Hearst. To this were added incidents and details invented or derived from other sources." Houseman adds that they "grafted anecdotes from other giants of journalism, including Pulitzer, Northcliffe and Mank's first boss, Herbert Bayard Swope."

Welles said, "Mr. Hearst was quite a bit like Kane, although Kane isn't really founded on Hearst in particular, many people sat for it so to speak". He specifically acknowledged that aspects of Kane were drawn from the lives of two business tycoons familiar from his youth in Chicago — Samuel Insull and Harold Fowler McCormick.

William Randolph Hearst

Although various sources were used as a model for Kane, William Randolph Hearst was the primary inspiration.

William Randolph Hearst was born rich. He was the pampered son of an adoring mother. That is the decisive fact about him. Charles Foster Kane was born poor and was raised by a bank.

— Orson Welles

The film is commonly regarded as a fictionalized, unrelentingly hostile parody of William Randolph Hearst, in spite of Welles's statement that "Citizen Kane is the story of a wholly fictitious character." Film historian Don Kilbourne has pointed out that much of the film's story is derived from aspects of Hearst's life that had already been published and that "some of Kane's speeches are almost verbatim copies of Hearst's. When Welles denied that the film was about the still-influential publisher, he did not convince many people." One of the most famous incidents from Hearst's life used in the film occurred in 1898 when artist and Hearst illustrator Frederic Remington was sent to Havana after the sinking of the battleship Maine in Havana harbor. After telegraphing that he was leaving because there was no story, Hearst replied back “Please remain. You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.” Hearst’s papers were a leading cause of swaying public opinion in favor of the Spanish American War.

Hearst biographer David Nasaw described Kane as "a cartoon-like caricature of a man who is hollowed out on the inside, forlorn, defeated, solitary because he cannot command the total obedience, loyalty, devotion, and love of those around him. Hearst, to the contrary, never regarded himself as a failure, never recognized defeat, never stopped loving Marion [Davies] or his wife. He did not, at the end of his life, run away from the world to entomb himself in a vast, gloomy art-choked hermitage."

Arguing for the release of Citizen Kane before the RKO board, Welles pointed out the irony that it was Hearst himself who had brought so much attention to the film being about him, and that Hearst columnist Parsons was doing the most to publicize Kane's identification with Hearst. Public denials aside, Welles held the view that Hearst was a public figure and that the facts of a public figure's life were available for writers to reshape and restructure into works of fiction. Welles's legal advisor, Arnold Weissberger, put the issue in the form of a rhetorical question: "Will a man be allowed in effect to copyright the story of his life?"

Welles said that he had excised one scene from Mankiewicz's first draft that had certainly been based on Hearst. "In the original script we had a scene based on a notorious thing Hearst had done, which I still cannot repeat for publication. And I cut it out because I thought it hurt the film and wasn't in keeping with Kane's character. If I'd kept it in, I would have had no trouble with Hearst. He wouldn't have dared admit it was him.

Kael wrote that a vestige of this abandoned subplot survives in a remark made by Susan Alexander Kane to the reporter interviewing her: "Look, if you're smart, you'll get in touch with Raymond. He's the butler. You'll learn a lot from him. He knows where all the bodies are buried." Kael observed, "It's an odd, cryptic speech. In the first draft, Raymond literally knew where the bodies were buried: Mankiewicz had dished up a nasty version of the scandal sometimes referred to as the Strange Death of Thomas Ince." Referring to the suspicious 1924 death of the American film mogul after being a guest on Hearst's yacht, and noting that Kael's principal source was Houseman, Rosenbaum wrote that "it seems safe to conclude, even without her prodding, that some version of the story must have cropped up in Mankiewicz's first draft of the script, which Welles subsequently edited and added to."

One particular aspect of the character, Kane's profligate collecting of possessions, was directly taken from Hearst. "And it's very curious – a man who spends his entire life paying cash for objects he never looked at," Welles said. "He just acquired things, most of which were never opened, remained in boxes. It's really a quite accurate picture of Hearst to that extent." But Welles himself insisted that there were marked differences between his fictional creation and Hearst. Xanadu was modeled after Hearst’s large mansion Hearst Castle in San Simeon, California, which also had a private zoo and a large collection of art.

Samuel Insull

Chicago utilities magnate Samuel Insull built a fortune and lost it, and built the Chicago Opera House.

Welles gave Maurice Seiderman a photograph of Chicago industrialist Samuel Insull, with mustache, to use as a model for the makeup design of the old Charles Foster Kane.

A protégé of Thomas Edison, Insull was a man of humble origins who became the most powerful figure in the utilities field. He was married to a Broadway ingenue nearly 20 years his junior, spent a fortune trying to re-launch her career, and built the Chicago Civic Opera House.

In 1925, after a 26-year absence, Gladys Wallis Insull returned to the stage in a charity revival of The School for Scandal that ran two weeks in Chicago. When the performance was repeated on Broadway in October 1925, Herman Mankiewicz — then the third-string theater critic for The New York Times — was assigned to review the production. In an incident that became infamous, Mankiewicz returned to the press room drunk and wrote only the first sentence of a negative review before passing out on his typewriter. Mankiewicz resurrected the experience in writing the screenplay for Citizen Kane, incorporating it into the narrative of Jedediah Leland.

In 1926 Insull took a six-year lease on Chicago's Studebaker Theatre and financed a repertory company in which his wife starred. Gladys Insull's nerves broke when her company failed to find success, and the lease expired at the same time Insull's $4 billion financial empire collapsed in the Depression. Insull died in July 1938, bankrupt and disgraced.

Insull’s life was also well known to Welles. Insull’s publicity director John Clayton was a friend of Roger Hill.

Harold McCormick

Like Kane, Harold McCormick was divorced by his aristocratic first wife, Edith Rockefeller, and lavishly promoted the opera career of his only modestly talented second wife, Ganna Walska. In 1920 McCormick arranged for her to play the lead in a production of Zaza at the Chicago Opera. She fled the country after her Italian vocal instructor told her that she was unprepared to perform the night before the sold-out premiere.

Other sources

According to composer David Raksin, Herrmann used to say that much of Kane's story was based on McCormick, but that there was also a good deal of Welles in the flamboyant character.

Welles cited financier Basil Zaharoff as another inspiration for Kane. "I got the idea for the hidden-camera sequence in the Kane 'news digest' from a scene I did on March of Time in which Zaharoff, this great munitions-maker, was being moved around in his rose garden, just talking about the roses, in the last days before he died," Welles said. Carringer reviewed the December 3, 1936, script of the radio obituary in which Welles played Zaharoff, and found other similarities. In the opening scene, Zaharoff's secretaries are burning masses of secret papers in the enormous fireplace of his castle. A succession of witnesses testify about the tycoon's ruthless practices. "Finally, Zaharoff himself appears — an old man nearing death, alone except for his servants in the gigantic palace in Monte Carlo that he had acquired for his longtime mistress. His dying wish is to be wheeled out 'in the sun by that rosebush.'"

The last name of Welles's family friend Whitford Kane was borrowed for Charles Foster Kane.

Jedediah Leland

In 1940, Welles invited longtime friend and Mercury Theatre colleague Joseph Cotten to join a small group for an initial read-through at Mankiewicz's house. Cotten wrote:

"I think I'll just listen," Welles said. "The title of this movie is Citizen Kane, and I play guess who." He turned to me. "Why don't you think of yourself as Jedediah Leland? His name, by the way, is a combination of Jed Harris and your agent, Leland Hayward." "There all resemblance ceases," Herman reassured me. These afternoon garden readings continued, and as the Mercury actors began arriving, the story started to breathe.

"I regard Leland with enormous affection," Welles told Bogdanovich, adding that the character of Jed Leland was based on drama critic Ashton Stevens, George Stevens's uncle and his close boyhood friend. Welles said that he learned most of what he knew about the life of Hearst from Stevens and that "Ashton was really one of the great ones. The last of the dandies…very much like Jed." When Welles was a child Stevens used to tell him stories about Hearst, much like Leland tells Thompson about Kane in the film.

Regarded as the dean of American drama critics, Ashton Stevens began his journalism career in 1894 in San Francisco and started working for the Hearst newspapers three years later. In 1910 he moved to Chicago, where he covered the theater for 40 years and became a close friend of Dr. Maurice Bernstein, Welles's guardian.

Mankiewicz incorporated an incident from his own early career as a theater critic into Leland. Mankiewicz was assigned to review the October 1925 opening of Gladys Wallis' production of The School for Scandal. After her opening-night performance in the role of Lady Teazle, Mankiewicz returned to the press room "... full of fury and too many drinks ...," wrote biographer Richard Meryman:

He was outraged by the spectacle of a 56-year-old millionairess playing a gleeful 18-year-old, the whole production bought for her like a trinket by a man Herman knew to be an unscrupulous manipulator. Herman began to write: "Miss Gladys Wallis, an aging, hopelessly incompetent amateur, opened last night in ..." Then Herman passed out, slumped over the top of his typewriter.

The unconscious Mankiewicz was discovered by his boss, George S. Kaufman, who composed a terse announcement that the Times review would appear the following day.

Mankiewicz resurrected the incident for Citizen Kane. After Kane's second wife makes her opera debut, critic Jed Leland returns to the press room drunk. He passes out over the top of his typewriter after writing the first sentence of his review: "Miss Susan Alexander, a pretty but hopelessly incompetent amateur …"

Susan Alexander Kane

Hearst was disturbed by the film's supposed depiction of Marion Davies, but Welles always denied that Susan Alexander Kane was based on Davies.

It was a real man who built an opera house for the soprano of his choice, and much in the movie was borrowed from that story, but the man was not Hearst. Susan, Kane's second wife, is not even based on the real-life soprano. Like most fictional characters, Susan's resemblance to other fictional characters is quite startling. To Marion Davies she bears no resemblance at all.

— Orson Welles

The assumption that the character of Susan Alexander Kane was based on Marion Davies was a major reason Hearst tried to destroy Citizen Kane.

In his foreword to Davies's posthmously published autobiography, Welles drew a sharp distinction between his fictional creation and Davies: "That Susan was Kane's wife and Marion was Hearst's mistress is a difference more important than might be guessed in today's changed climate of opinion. The wife was a puppet and a prisoner; the mistress was never less than a princess. … The mistress was never one of Hearst's possessions: he was always her suitor, and she was the precious treasure of his heart for more than 30 years, until his last breath of life. Theirs is truly a love story. Love is not the subject of Citizen Kane."

Welles called Davies "an extraordinary woman – nothing like the character Dorothy Comingore played in the movie."

He cited Insull's building of the Chicago Opera House, and McCormick's lavish promotion of the opera career of his second wife, Ganna Walska, as direct influences on the screenplay. Contemporaries said Walska had a terrible voice; The New York Times headlines of the day read, "Ganna Walska Fails as Butterfly: Voice Deserts Her Again When She Essays Role of Puccini's Heroine" and "Mme. Walska Clings to Ambition to Sing".

"According to her 1943 memoirs, Always Room at the Top, Walska had tried every sort of fashionable mumbo jumbo to conquer her nerves and salvage her voice," reported The New York Times in 1996. "Nothing worked. During a performance of Giordano's Fedora in Havana she veered so persistently off key that the audience pelted her with rotten vegetables. It was an event that Orson Welles remembered when he began concocting the character of the newspaper publisher's second wife for Citizen Kane."

Lederer said that the script he read "didn't have any flavor of Marion and Hearst. Robert McCormick was the man it was about." Although there were things based on Davies – jigsaw puzzles and drinking – Lederer noted that they were exaggerated in the film to help define the characterization of Susan Alexander.

Film tycoon Jules Brulatour's second and third wives, Dorothy Gibson and Hope Hampton, both fleeting stars of the silent screen who later had marginal careers in opera, are also believed to have provided inspiration for the Susan Alexander Kane character. The interview with Mrs. Kane in the Atlantic City nightclub was based on a contemporary interview with Evelyn Nesbit Thaw in the run-down club where she was performing.

Susan Alexander's last name was taken from Mankiewicz's secretary, Rita Alexander.

Jim W. Gettys

Charles F. Murphy caricatured in Hearst's New York Journal (November 10, 1905).

The character of political boss Jim W. Gettys is based on Charles F. Murphy, a leader in New York City's infamous Tammany Hall political machine. Hearst and Murphy were political allies in 1902, when Hearst was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, but became enemies in 1905 when Hearst ran for mayor of New York. Hearst turned his muckraking newspapers on Tammany Hall in the person of Murphy, who was called "... the most hungry, selfish and extortionate boss Tammany has ever known." Murphy ordered that under no condition was Hearst to be elected. Hearst ballots were dumped into the East River, and new ballots were printed favoring his opponent. Hearst was defeated by some 3,000 votes and his newspapers bellowed against the election fraud. A historic cartoon of Murphy in convict stripes appeared November 10, 1905, three days after the vote. The caption read, "Look out, Murphy! It's a Short Lockstep from Delmonico's to Sing Sing ... Every honest voter in New York wants to see you in this costume."

In the film, "Boss" Jim W. Gettys (named "Edward Rogers" in the shooting script) admonishes Kane for printing a cartoon showing him in prison stripes: "If I owned a newspaper and if I didn't like the way somebody else was doing things – some politician, say – I'd fight them with everything I had. Only I wouldn't show him in a convict suit with stripes — so his children could see the picture in the paper. Or his mother." As he pursues Gettys down the stairs, Kane threatens to send him to Sing Sing.

As an inside joke, Welles named Gettys after the father-in-law of Roger Hill, his headmaster at the Todd School and a lifelong friend.

"Rosebud"

Welles credited the "Rosebud" device to Mankiewicz. "Rosebud remained, because it was the only way we could find to get off, as they used to say in vaudeville," Welles said. "It manages to work, but I'm still not too keen about it, and I don't think that he was, either." Welles said that they attempted to diminish the importance of the word's meaning and "take the mickey out of it."

As he began his first draft of the screenplay in early 1940, Mankiewicz mentioned "Rosebud" to his secretary. When she asked, "Who is rosebud?" he replied, "It isn't a who, it's an it." The symbol of Mankiewicz's own damaged childhood was a treasured bicycle, stolen while he visited the public library and not replaced by his family as punishment. "He mourned that all his life," wrote Kael, who believed Mankiewicz put the emotion of that boyhood loss into the loss that haunted Kane.

Hearst biographer Louis Pizzitola reports one historian's statement that "Rosebud" was a nickname given to Hearst's mother by portrait and landscape painter Orrin Peck, whose family were friends with the Hearsts. Another theory of the origin of "Rosebud" is the similarity with the dying wish of Zaharoff to be wheeled "by the rosebush".

In 1989 author Gore Vidal stated that "Rosebud" was a nickname which Hearst had used for the clitoris of Davies. Vidal said that Davies had told this intimate detail to Lederer, who had mentioned it to him years later. Film critic Roger Ebert said, "Some people have fallen in love with the story that Herman Mankiewicz…happened to know that 'Rosebud' was William Randolph Hearst's pet name for an intimate part of Marion Davies' anatomy." Welles biographer Frank Brady traced the story back to newspaper articles in the late 1970s, and wrote, "How Orson (or Mankiewicz) could have ever discovered this most private utterance is unexplained and why it took over 35 years for such a suggestive rationale to emerge…[is] unknown. If this highly unlikely story is even partially true…Hearst may have become upset at the implied connotation, although any such connection seems to have been innocent on Welles's part." Houseman denied this rumor about "Rosebud"'s origins, claiming that he would have heard about something "so provocative" and that Welles could never "have kept such a secret for over 40 years."

In 1991 journalist Edward Castle contended that Welles may have borrowed the name of Native American folklorist, educator and author Rosebud Yellow Robe for "Rosebud". Castle claimed to have found both of their signatures on the same sign-in sheets at CBS Radio studios in New York, where they both worked on different shows in the late 1930s. However, the word "Rosebud" appears in the first draft script written by Mankiewicz, not Welles.

News on the March

"Although Citizen Kane was widely seen as an attack on William Randolph Hearst, it was also aimed at Henry R. Luce and his concept of faceless group journalism, as then practiced at his Time magazine and March of Time newsreels," wrote Roger Ebert.

The News on the March sequence that begins the film satirizes The March of Time, the news documentary and dramatization series presented in movie theaters by Time Inc. from 1935 to 1951. At its peak The March of Time was seen by 25 million U.S. moviegoers a month. Usually called a newsreel series, it was actually a monthly series of short feature films twice the length of standard newsreels. The films were didactic, with a subjective point of view. The editors of Time described it as "pictorial journalism". The March of Time's relationship to the newsreel was compared to the weekly interpretive news magazine's relationship to the daily newspaper.

"The March of Time style was characterized by dynamic editing, gutsy investigative reporting, and hard-punching, almost arrogant, narration," wrote film historian Ephraim Katz — who added that it "was beautifully parodied by Orson Welles in Citizen Kane."

From 1935 to 1938 Welles was a member of the prestigious and uncredited company of actors that presented the radio version of The March of Time, which preceded the film version. He was well versed in what came to be called "Time-speak", described by March of Time chronicler Raymond Fielding as "a preposterous kind of sentence structure in which subjects, predicates, adjectives, and other components of the English language all ended up in unpredictable and grammatically unauthorized positions." In News on the March, William Alland impersonated narrator Westbrook Van Voorhis: "Great imitation," Welles later said, "but he's pretty easy to imitate: 'This week, as it must to all men, death came to Charles Foster Kane.' We used to do that every day — five days a week!"

Welles screened the film for Luce: "He was one of the first people to see the movie," Welles said. "He and Clare Luce loved it and roared with laughter at the digest. They saw it as a parody and enjoyed it very much as such — I have to hand it to them." Welles had met Luce through Archibald MacLeish, and financial support from the Luces helped open the Mercury Theatre in November 1937.

Callow called the News on the March sequence "the single most impressive, most spoken-of element in the movie". Remarkably, critic Arthur Knight reported in 1969 that the sequence was excised from most prints presented on American television.

Others

Houseman claimed that Walter P. Thatcher was loosely based on J. P. Morgan, but only in the general sense of Morgan being an old-fashioned 19th century capitalist with ties to Wall Street finances and railroad companies.

When Welles was 15 he became the ward of Dr. Maurice Bernstein. Bernstein is the last name of the only major character in Citizen Kane who receives a generally positive portrayal. Although Dr. Bernstein was nothing like the character in the film (possibly based on Solomon S. Carvalho, Hearst's business manager), Welles said, the use of his surname was a family joke: "I used to call people 'Bernstein' on the radio, all the time, too – just to make him laugh." Composer David Raksin described Sloane's portrayal of Bernstein as "a compendium of the mannerisms of Bernard Herrmann: he looks like Benny, acts like him, and even talks like him."

Herbert Carter, editor of The Inquirer, was named for actor Jack Carter.

Production

Casting

The Mercury Theatre was an independent repertory theatre company founded by Orson Welles and John Houseman in 1937. The company produced theatrical presentations, radio programs, films, promptbooks and phonographic recordings.

Citizen Kane was a rare film in that its principal roles were played by actors new to motion pictures. Ten were billed as Mercury Actors, members of the skilled repertory company assembled by Welles for the stage and radio performances of the Mercury Theatre, an independent theater company he founded with Houseman in 1937. "He loved to use the Mercury players," wrote biographer Charles Higham, "and consequently he launched several of them on movie careers."

The film represents the feature film debuts of William Alland, Ray Collins, Joseph Cotten, Agnes Moorehead, Erskine Sanford, Everett Sloane, Paul Stewart and Welles himself. Despite never having appeared in feature films, some of the cast members were already well known to the public. Cotten had recently become a Broadway star in the hit play The Philadelphia Story with Katharine Hepburn and Sloane was well known for his role on the radio show The Goldbergs. Mercury actor George Coulouris was a star of the stage in New York and London.

Not all of the cast came from the Mercury Players. Welles cast Dorothy Comingore as Susan Alexander Kane. Comingore had never appeared in a film and was a discovery of Charlie Chaplin. Chaplin recommended Comingore to Welles, who then met Comingore at a party in Los Angeles and immediately cast her.

Welles had met stage actress Ruth Warrick while visiting New York on a break from Hollywood and remembered her as a good fit for Emily Norton Kane, later saying that she looked the part. Warrick told Carringer that she was struck by the extraordinary resemblance between herself and Welles's mother when she saw a photograph of Beatrice Ives Welles. She characterized her own personal relationship with Welles as motherly.

"He trained us for films at the same time that he was training himself," recalled Agnes Moorehead. "Orson believed in good acting, and he realized that rehearsals were needed to get the most from his actors. That was something new in Hollywood: nobody seemed interested in bringing in a group to rehearse before scenes were shot. But Orson knew it was necessary, and we rehearsed every sequence before it was shot."

When The March of Time narrator Westbrook Van Voorhis asked for $25,000 to narrate the News on the March sequence, Alland demonstrated his ability to imitate Van Voorhis and Welles cast him.

Welles later said that casting character actor Gino Corrado in the small part of the waiter at the El Rancho broke his heart. Corrado had appeared in many Hollywood films, often as a waiter, and Welles wanted all of the actors to be new to films.

Other uncredited roles went to Thomas A. Curran as Teddy Roosevelt in the faux newsreel; Richard Baer as Hillman, a man at Madison Square Garden, and a man in the News on the March screening room; and Alan Ladd, Arthur O'Connell and Louise Currie as reporters at Xanadu. When Currie died September 8, 2013, at age 100, she was believed to have been the film's last surviving cast member. Warrick was the last surviving member of the principal cast at the time of her death in 2005. Sonny Bupp, who played Kane's young son, was the last surviving credited cast member of Citizen Kane when he died in 2007.

Filming

Sound stage entrance from the Citizen Kane trailer

Production advisor Miriam Geiger quickly compiled a handmade film textbook for Welles, a practical reference book of film techniques that he studied carefully. He then taught himself filmmaking by matching its visual vocabulary to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, which he ordered from the Museum of Modern Art, and films by Frank Capra, René Clair, Fritz Lang, King Vidor and Jean Renoir. The one film he genuinely studied was John Ford's Stagecoach, which he watched 40 times. "As it turned out, the first day I ever walked onto a set was my first day as a director," Welles said. "I'd learned whatever I knew in the projection room — from Ford. After dinner every night for about a month, I'd run Stagecoach, often with some different technician or department head from the studio, and ask questions. 'How was this done?' 'Why was this done?' It was like going to school."

Welles's cinematographer for the film was Gregg Toland, described by Welles as "just then, the number-one cameraman in the world." To Welles's astonishment, Toland visited him at his office and said, "I want you to use me on your picture." He told Welles he had seen some of the Mercury stage productions and wanted to work with someone who had never made a movie. RKO hired Toland on loan from Samuel Goldwyn Productions in the first week of June 1940.

"And he never tried to impress us that he was doing any miracles," Welles recalled. "I was calling for things only a beginner would have been ignorant enough to think anybody could ever do, and there he was, doing them." Toland later explained that he wanted to work with Welles because he anticipated the first time director's inexperience and reputation for audacious experimentation in the theater would allow the cinematographer to try new and innovative camera techniques that typical Hollywood films would never allowed him to do. Unaware of filmmaking protocol, Welles adjusted the lights on set as he was accustomed to doing in the theater; Toland quietly re-balanced them, and was angry when one of the crew informed Welles that he was infringing on Toland's responsibilities. During the first few weeks of June Welles had lengthy discussions about the film with Toland and art director Perry Ferguson in the morning, and in the afternoon and evening he worked with actors and revised the script.

Cinematographer Gregg Toland wanted to work with Welles for the opportunity of trying experimental camera techniques that other films did not allow.

On June 29, 1940 — a Saturday morning when few inquisitive studio executives would be around — Welles began filming Citizen Kane. After the disappointment of having Heart of Darkness cancelled, Welles followed Ferguson's suggestion and deceived RKO into believing that he was simply shooting camera tests. "But we were shooting the picture," Welles said, "because we wanted to get started and be already into it before anybody knew about it."

At the time RKO executives were pressuring him to agree to direct a film called The Men from Mars, to capitalize on "The War of the Worlds" radio broadcast. Welles said that he would consider making the project but wanted to make a different film first. At this time he did not inform them that he had already begun filming Citizen Kane.

The early footage was called "Orson Welles Tests" on all paperwork. The first "test" shot was the News on the March projection room scene, economically filmed in a real studio projection room in darkness that masked many actors who appeared in other roles later in the film. "At $809 Orson did run substantially beyond the test budget of $528 — to create one of the most famous scenes in movie history," wrote Barton Whaley.

The next scenes were the El Rancho nightclub scenes and the scene in which Susan attempts suicide. Welles later said that the nightclub set was available after another film had wrapped and that filming took 10 to 12 days to complete. For these scenes Welles had Comingore's throat sprayed with chemicals to give her voice a harsh, raspy tone. Other scenes shot in secret included those in which Thompson interviews Leland and Bernstein, which were also shot on sets built for other films.

During production the film was referred to as RKO 281. Most of the filming took place in what is now Stage 19 on the Paramount lot in Hollywood. There was some location filming at Balboa Park in San Diego and the San Diego Zoo,

In the end of July RKO approved the film and Welles was allowed to officially begin shooting, despite having already been filming “tests” for several weeks. Welles leaked stories to newspaper reporters that the tests had been so good that there was no need to re-shoot them. The first official scene to be shot was the breakfast montage sequence between Kane and his first wife Emily. To strategically save money and appease the RKO executives who opposed him, Welles rehearsed scenes extensively before actually shooting and filmed very few takes of each shot set-up. Welles never shot master shots for any scene after Toland told him that Ford never shot them. To appease the increasingly curious press, Welles threw a cocktail party for selected reporters, promising that they could watch a scene being filmed. When the journalists arrived Welles told them they had “just finished” shooting for the day but still had the party. Welles told the press that he was ahead of schedule (without factoring in the month of "test shooting"), thus discrediting claims that after a year in Hollywood without making a film he was a failure in the film industry.

Welles usually worked 16 to 18 hours a day on the film. He often began work at 4 a.m. since the special effects make-up used to age him for certain scenes took up to four hours to apply. Welles used this time to discuss the day's shooting with Toland and other crew members. The special contact lenses used to make Welles look elderly proved very painful, and a doctor was employed to place them into Welles's eyes. Welles had difficulty seeing clearly while wearing them, which caused him to badly cut his wrist when shooting the scene in which Kane breaks up the furniture in Susan's bedroom. While shooting the scene in which Kane shouts at Gettys on the stairs of Susan Alexander's apartment building, Welles fell ten feet; an X-ray revealed two bone chips in his ankle. The injury required him to direct the film from wheelchair for two weeks. He eventually wore a steel brace to resume performing on camera; it is visible in the low-angle scene between Kane and Leland after Kane loses the election. For the final scene, a stage at the Selznick studio was equipped with a working furnace, and multiple takes were required to show the sled being put into the fire and the word "Rosebud" consumed. Paul Stewart recalled that on the ninth take the Culver City Fire Department arrived in full gear because the furnace had grown so hot the flue caught fire. "Orson was delighted with the commotion", he said.

When "Rosebud" was burned, Welles choreographed the scene while he had composer Bernard Herrmann's cue playing on the set.

Unlike Schaefer, many members of RKOs board of governors didn’t like Welles or the control that his contract gave him. However such board members as Nelson Rockefeller and NBC chief David Sarnoff were sympathetic to Welles. Throughout production Welles had problems with these executives not respecting his contract’s stipulation of non-interference and several spies arrived on set to report what they saw to the executives. When the executives would sometimes arrive on set unannounced the entire cast and crew would suddenly start playing softball until they left. Before official shooting began the executives intercepted all copies of the script and delayed their delivery to Welles. They had one copy sent to their office in New York, resulting in it being leaked to press.

Principal shooting wrapped October 24. Welles then took several weeks off of the film for a lecture tour, during which he also scouted additional locations with Toland and Ferguson. Filming resumed November 15 with some re-shoots. Toland had to leave due to a commitment to shoot Howard Hughes' The Outlaw, but Toland's camera crew continued working on the film and Toland was replaced by RKO cinematographer Harry Wild. The final day of shooting on November 30 was Kane's death scene. Welles boasted that he only went 21 days over his official shooting schedule, without factoring in the month of "camera tests." According to RKO records, the film cost $839,727. Its estimated budget had been $723,800.

Post-production

Citizen Kane was edited by Robert Wise and assistant editor Mark Robson. Both would become successful film directors. Wise was hired after Welles finished shooting the "camera tests" and began officially making the film. Wise said that Welles "had an older editor assigned to him for those tests and evidently he was not too happy and asked to have somebody else. I was roughly Orson’s age and had several good credits.” Wise and Robson began editing the film while it was still shooting and said that they “could tell certainly that we were getting something very special. It was outstanding film day in and day out.” Welles gave Wise detailed instructions and was usually not present during the film's editing. The film was very well planned out and intentionally shot for such post-production techniques as slow dissolves. The lack of coverage made editing easy since Welles and Toland edited the film "in camera" by leaving few options of how it could be put together. Wise said the breakfast table sequence took weeks to edit and get the correct "timing" and "rhythm" for the whip pans and over-lapping dialogue. The News on the March sequence was edited by RKO's newsreel division to give it authenticity. They used stock footage from Pathé News and the General Film Library.

During post-production Welles and special effects artist Linwood G. Dunn experimented with an optical printer to improve certain scenes that Welles found unsatisfactory from the footage. Whereas Welles was often immediately pleased with Wise's work, he would require Dunn and post-production audio engineer James G. Stewart to re-do their work several times until he was satisfied.

Welles hired Bernard Herrmann to compose the film's score. Where most Hollywood film scores were written quickly, in as few as two or three weeks after filming was completed, Herrmann was given 12 weeks to write the music. He had sufficient time to do his own orchestrations and conducting, and worked on the film reel by reel as it was shot and cut. He wrote complete musical pieces for some of the montages, and Welles edited many of the scenes to match their length.

Style

Film scholars and historians view Citizen Kane as Welles's attempt to create a new style of filmmaking by studying various forms of film making, and combining them all into one. However, Welles stated that his love for cinema began only when he started the work on the film. When asked where he got the confidence as a first-time director to direct a film so radically different from contemporary cinema, he responded, "Ignorance, ignorance, sheer ignorance — you know there's no confidence to equal it. It's only when you know something about a profession, I think, that you're timid or careful."

David Bordwell wrote that "The best way to understand Citizen Kane is to stop worshiping it as a triumph of technique." Bordwell argues that the film did not invent any of its famous techniques such as deep focus cinematography, shots of the ceilings, chiaroscuro lighting and temporal jump-cuts, and many of these stylistics had been used in German Expressionist films of the 1920s, such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. But Bordwell asserts that the film did put them all together for the first time and perfected the medium in one single film. In a 1948 interview D. W. Griffith said "I loved Citizen Kane and particularly loved the ideas he took from me."

Arguments against the film's cinematic innovations were made as early as 1946 when French historian Georges Sadoul wrote that "the film is an encyclopedia of old techniques." Sadoul pointed out such examples as compositions that used both the foreground and the background in the films of Auguste and Louis Lumière, special effects used in the films of Georges Méliès, shots of the ceiling in Erich von Stroheim's Greed and newsreel montages in the films of Dziga Vertov.

French film critic André Bazin defended the film and wrote that "In this respect, the accusation of plagiarism could very well be extended to the film's use of panchromatic film or its exploitation of the properties of gelatinous silver halide." Bazin disagreed with Sadoul's comparison to Lumière's cinematography since Citizen Kane used more sophisticated lenses, but acknowledged that the film had similarities to such previous works as The 49th Parallel and The Power and the Glory. Bazin stated that "even if Welles did not invent the cinematic devices employed in Citizen Kane, one should nevertheless credit him with the invention of their meaning." Bazin championed the techniques in the film for its depiction of heightened reality, but Bordwell believes that the film's use of special effects contradict some of Bazin's theories.

Storytelling techniques

Citizen Kane eschews the traditional linear, chronological narrative, and tells Kane's story entirely in flashback using different points of view, many of them from Kane's aged and forgetful associates, the cinematic equivalent of the unreliable narrator in literature. Welles also dispenses with the idea of a single storyteller and uses multiple narrators to recount Kane's life. The use of multiple narrators was unheard of in Hollywood films. Each narrator recounts a different part of Kane's life, with each story partly overlapping. The film depicts Kane as an enigma, a complicated man who, in the end, leaves viewers with more questions than answers as to his character, such as the newsreel footage where he is attacked for being both a communist and a fascist.

The technique of using flashbacks had been used in earlier films such as Wuthering Heights in 1939 and The Power and the Glory in 1933, but no film was as immersed in this technique as Citizen Kane. The use of the reporter Thompson acts as a surrogate for the audience, questioning Kane's associates and piecing together his life.

At that time movies typically had an "omniscient perspective", which Marilyn Fabe says give the audience the "illusion that we are looking with impunity into a world which is unaware of our gaze, Hollywood movies give us a feeling of power." The film begins in this fashion up until the "News on the March" sequence, after which we the audience see the film through the perspectives of others. The "News on the March" sequence gives an overview of Kane's entire life (and the film's entire story) at the beginning of the film, leaving the audience without the typical suspense of wondering how it will end. Instead the film's repetitions of events compels the audience to analyze and wonder why Kane's life happened the way that it did, under the pretext of finding out what "Rosebud" means. The film then returns to the omniscient perspective in the final scene, when only the audience discovers what "Rosebud" is.

Cinematography

A deep focus shot: everything, including the hat in the foreground and the boy (young Kane) in the distance, is in sharp focus.

The most innovative technical aspect of Citizen Kane is the extended use of deep focus. In nearly every scene in the film, the foreground, background and everything in between are all in sharp focus. Cinematographer Toland did this through his experimentation with lenses and lighting. Toland described the achievement, made possible by the sensitivity of modern speed film, in an article for Theatre Arts magazine:

New developments in the science of motion picture photography are not abundant at this advanced stage of the game but periodically one is perfected to make this a greater art. Of these I am in an excellent position to discuss what is termed “Pan-focus”, as I have been active for two years in its development and used it for the first time in Citizen Kane. Through its use, it is possible to photograph action from a range of eighteen inches from the camera lens to over two hundred feet away, with extreme foreground and background figures and action both recorded in sharp relief. Hitherto, the camera had to be focused either for a close or a distant shot, all efforts to encompass both at the same time resulting in one or the other being out of focus. This handicap necessitated the breaking up of a scene into long and short angles, with much consequent loss of realism. With pan-focus, the camera, like the human eye, sees an entire panorama at once, with everything clear and lifelike.

Both this article and a May 1941 Life magazine article with illustrated examples helped popularize deep focus cinematography and Toland's achievements on the film.

Another unorthodox method used in the film was the way low-angle shots were used to display a point of view facing upwards, thus allowing ceilings to be shown in the background of several scenes. Breaking with studio convention, every set was built with a ceiling — many constructed of fabric that ingeniously concealed microphones. Welles felt that the camera should show what the eyes see, and that it was a bad theatrical convention to pretend there was no ceiling — "a big lie in order to get all those terrible lights up there," he said. He became fascinated with the look of low angles, which made even dull interiors look interesting. One extremely low angle is used to photograph the encounter between Kane and Leland after Kane loses the election. A hole was dug for the camera, which required drilling into the concrete floor.

Welles credited Toland on the same card as himself and said "It's impossible to say how much I owe to Gregg. He was superb." He called Toland "the best director of photography that ever existed."

Sound

Citizen Kane's sound was recorded by Bailey Fesler and re-recorded in post-production by audio engineer James G. Stewart, both of whom had worked in radio. Stewart said that Hollywood films never deviated from a basic pattern of how sound could be recorded or used, but with Welles "deviation from the pattern was possible because he demanded it." Although the film is known for its complex soundtrack, much of the audio is heard as it was recorded by Fesler and without manipulation.

Welles used techniques from radio like overlapping dialogue. The scene in which characters sing "Oh, Mr. Kane" was especially complicated and required mixing several soundtracks together. He also used different "sound perspectives" to create the illusion of distances, such as in scenes at Xanadu where characters speak to each other at far distances. Welles experimented with sound in post-production, creating audio montages, and chose to create all of the sound effects for the film instead of using RKO's library of sound effects.

Welles used an aural technique from radio called the "lightning-mix". Welles used this technique to link complex montage sequences via a series of related sounds or phrases. For example, Kane grows from a child into a young man in just two shots. As Thatcher hands eight-year-old Kane a sled and wishes him a Merry Christmas, the sequence suddenly jumps to a shot of Thatcher fifteen years later, completing the sentence he began in both the previous shot and the chronological past. Other radio techniques include using a number of voices, each saying a sentence or sometimes merely a fragment of a sentence, and splicing the dialogue together in quick succession, such as the projection room scene. The film's sound cost $16,996, but was originally budgeted at $7,288.

Film critic and director François Truffaut wrote that "Before Kane, nobody in Hollywood knew how to set music properly in movies. Kane was the first, in fact the only, great film that uses radio techniques. … A lot of filmmakers know enough to follow Auguste Renoir's advice to fill the eyes with images at all costs, but only Orson Welles understood that the sound track had to be filled in the same way." Cedric Belfrage of The Clipper wrote "of all of the delectable flavours that linger on the palate after seeing Kane, the use of sound is the strongest."

Make-up

The make-up for Citizen Kane was created and applied by Maurice Seiderman (1907–1989), a junior member of the RKO make-up department. Seiderman's family came to the United States from Russia in 1920, escaping persecution. As a child Seiderman had won a drawing competition and received an apprenticeship at the Moscow Art Theatre, where his father was a wigmaker and make-up artist. In New York his uncle was a theatrical scenic painter, and he helped Seiderman get into the union. He worked on Max Reinhardt's 1924 production of The Miracle and with the Yiddish Art Theatre, and he studied the human figure at the Art Students League of New York. After he moved to Los Angeles he was hired first by Max Factor and then by RKO. Seiderman had not been accepted into the union, which recognized him as only an apprentice, but RKO nevertheless used him to make up principal actors.

"Apprentices were not supposed to make up any principals, only extras, and an apprentice could not be on a set without a journeyman present," wrote make-up artist Dick Smith, who became friends with Seiderman in 1979. "During his years at RKO I suspect these rules were probably overlooked often." By 1940 Seiderman's uncredited film work included Winterset, Gunga Din, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Swiss Family Robinson and Abe Lincoln in Illinois. "Seiderman had gained a reputation as one of the most inventive and creatively precise up-and-coming makeup men in Hollywood," wrote biographer Frank Brady.

On an early tour of RKO, Welles met Seiderman in the small make-up lab he created for himself in an unused dressing room. "Welles fastened on to him at once," wrote biographer Charles Higham. "With his great knowledge of makeup — indeed, his obsession with it, for he hated his flat nose — Welles was fascinated … Seiderman had an intimate knowledge of anatomy and the process of aging and was acquainted with every line, wrinkle and accretion of fat in aging men and women. Impatient with most makeup methods of his era, he used casts of his subjects in order to develop makeup methods that ensured complete naturalness of expression — a naturalness unrivaled in Hollywood."

"When Kane came out in script form, Orson told all of us about the picture and said that the most important aspect was the makeup," Seiderman recalled. "I felt that I was being given an assignment that was unique — so I worked accordingly. And there was a lot of work to do. Straight makeups were done in the makeup department by staff, but all the trick stuff and the principal characters were my personal work; nobody else ever touched them. They could not have handled it."

Seiderman developed a thorough plan for aging the principal characters, first making a plaster cast of the face of each of the actors who aged, except Joseph Cotten who was unavailable at that time. He made a plaster mold of Welles's body down to the hips.

"My sculptural techniques for the characters' aging were handled by adding pieces of white modeling clay, which matched the plaster, onto the surface of each bust," Seiderman told visual arts historian Norman Gambill. When Seiderman achieved the desired effect he cast the clay pieces in a soft plastic material that he formulated himself. These appliances were then placed onto the plaster bust and a four-piece mold was made for each phase of aging. The castings were then fully painted and paired with the appropriate wig for evaluation.

Before the actors went before the cameras each day, the pliable pieces were applied directly to their faces to recreate Seiderman's sculptural image. Welles was allergic to Max Factor's gum, so Seiderman invented an alternative that also photographed more realistically. The facial surface was underpainted in a flexible red plastic compound; Cotten recalled being instructed to puff out his cheeks during this process. Later, seeing the results in the mirror, Cotten told Seiderman, "I am acting the part of a nice old gentleman, not a relief map of the Rocky Mountains." Seiderman replied, "You'd be surprised at what the camera doesn't see unless we place it within its view. How about some more coffee?"

The red ground resulted in a warmth of tone that was picked up by the sensitive panchromatic film. Over that was applied liquid greasepaint, and then finally a colorless translucent talcum. Seiderman created the effect of skin pores on Kane's face by stippling the surface with a negative cast he made from an orange peel.

Welles was just as heavily made up as young Kane as he was for old Kane, and he often arrived on the set at 2:30 a.m. Application of the sculptural make-up for the oldest incarnation of the character took three-and-a-half hours. The make-up included appliances to age Welles's shoulders, breast and stomach. "In the film and production photographs, you can see that Kane had a belly that overhung," Seiderman said. "That was not a costume, it was the rubber sculpture that created the image. You could see how Kane's silk shirt clung wetly to the character's body. It could not have been done any other way."

Seiderman worked with Charles Wright on the wigs. These went over a flexible skull cover that Seiderman created and sewed into place with elastic thread. When he found the wigs too full he untied one hair at a time to alter their shape. Kane's mustache was inserted into the makeup surface a few hairs at a time, to realistically vary the color and texture.

Seiderman made scleral lenses for Welles, Dorothy Comingore, George Coulouris and Everett Sloane, to dull the brightness of their young eyes. The lenses took a long time to fit properly, and Seiderman began work on them before devising any of the other makeup. "I painted them to age in phases, ending with the blood vessels and the Aurora Senilis of old age."

"Cotten was the only principal for whom I had not made any sculptural casts, wigs or lenses," Seiderman said. When Cotten's old-age scenes needed to be shot out of sequence due to Welles's injured ankle, Seiderman improvised with appliances made for Kane's make-up. A sun visor was chosen to conceal Cotten's low hairline and the lenses he wore — hastily supplied by a Beverly Hills ophthalmologist — were uncomfortable.

Seiderman's tour de force, the breakfast montage, was shot all in one day. "Twelve years, two years shot at each scene," he said. "Please realize, by the way, that a two-year jump in age is a bit harder to accomplish visually than one of twenty years."

As they did with art direction, the major studios gave screen credit for make-up to only the department head. When RKO make-up department head Mel Burns refused to share credit with Seiderman, who was only an apprentice, Welles told Burns that there would be no make-up credit. Welles signed a large advertisement in the Los Angeles newspaper:

THANKS TO EVERYBODY WHO GETS SCREEN CREDIT FOR "CITIZEN KANE"
AND THANKS TO THOSE WHO DON'T
TO ALL THE ACTORS, THE CREW, THE OFFICE, THE MUSICIANS, EVERYBODY
AND PARTICULARLY TO MAURICE SEIDERMAN, THE BEST MAKE-UP MAN IN THE WORLD

"To put this event in context, remember that I was a very low man," Seiderman recalled. "I wasn't even called a make-up man. I had started their laboratory and developed their plastic appliances for make-up. But my salary was $25 a week. And I had no union card."

Seiderman told Gambill that after Citizen Kane was released, Welles was invited to a White House dinner where Frances Perkins was among the guests. Welles told her about the Russian immigrant who did the make-up for his film but could not join the union. Seiderman said the head of the union received a call from the Labor Department the next day, and in November 1941 he was a full union member.

Sets

Although credited as an assistant, the film's art direction was done by Perry Ferguson. Welles and Ferguson got along during their collaboration. In the weeks before production began Welles, Toland and Ferguson met regularly to discuss the film and plan every shot, set design and prop. Ferguson would take notes during these discussions and create rough designs of the sets and story boards for individual shots. After Welles approved the rough sketches, Ferguson made miniature models for Welles and Toland to experiment on with a periscope in order to rehearse and perfect each shot. Ferguson then had detailed drawings made for the set design, including the film's lighting design. The set design was an integral part of the film's overall look and Toland's cinematography.

In the original script the Great Hall at Xanadu was modeled after the Great Hall in Hearst Castle and its design included a mixture of Renaissance and Gothic styles. "The Hearstian element is brought out in the almost perverse juxtaposition of incongruous architectural styles and motifs," wrote Carringer. Before RKO cut the film's budget, Ferguson's designs were more elaborate and resembled the production designs of early Cecil B. DeMille films and Intolerance. The budget cuts reduced Ferguson's budget by 33 percent and his work cost $58,775 total, which was below average at that time. To save costs Ferguson and Welles re-wrote scenes in Xanadu's living room and transported them to the Great Hall. A large staircase from another film was found and used at no additional cost. When asked about the limited budget, Ferguson said "Very often — as in that much-discussed “Xanadu” set in Citizen Kane — we can make a foreground piece, a background piece, and imaginative lighting suggest a great deal more on the screen than actually exists on the stage." The according to the film's official budget there were 81 sets built, but Ferguson said there were between 106 and 116.

Still photographs of Oheka Castle in Huntington, New York, were used in the opening montage, representing Kane's Xanadu estate. Ferguson also designed statue's from Kane's collection with styles ranging from Greek to German Gothic. The sets were also built to accommodate Toland's camera movements. Walls were built to fold and furniture could quickly be moved. The film's famous ceilings were made out of muslin fabric and camera boxes were built into the floors for low angle shots. Welles later said that he was proud that the film production value looked much more expensive than the film's budget. Although neither worked with Welles again, Toland and Ferguson collaborated in several films in the 1940s.

Special effects

The film's special effects were supervised by RKO department head Vernon L. Walker. Welles pioneered several visual effects to cheaply shoot things like crowd scenes and large interior spaces. For example, the scene in which the camera in the opera house rises dramatically to the rafters, to show the workmen showing a lack of appreciation for Susan Alexander Kane's performance, was shot by a camera craning upwards over the performance scene, then a curtain wipe to a miniature of the upper regions of the house, and then another curtain wipe matching it again with the scene of the workmen. Other scenes effectively employed miniatures to make the film look much more expensive than it truly was, such as various shots of Xanadu.

Some shots included rear screen projection in the background, such as Thompson's interview of Leland and some of the ocean backgrounds at Xanadu. Bordwell claims that in the scene where Thatcher agrees to be Kane's guardian used rear screen projection to depict young Kane in the background, despite this scene being cited as a prime example of Toland's deep focus cinematography. A special effects camera crew from Walker's department was required for the extreme close-up shots such as Kane's lips when he says "Rosebud" and the shot of the typewriter typing Susan's bad review.

Optical effects artist Dunn claimed that “up to 80 percent of some reels was optically printed.” These shots were traditionally attributed to Toland for years. The optical printer improved some of the deep focus shots. One problem with the optical printer was that it sometimes created excessive graininess, such as the optical zoom out of the snow globe. Welles decided to superimpose snow falling to mask the graininess in these shots. Toland said that he disliked the results of the optical printer, but acknowledged that "RKO special effects expert Vernon Walker, ASC, and his staff handled their part of the production — a by no means inconsiderable assignment — with ability and fine understanding."

Any time deep focus was impossible – as in the scene in which Kane finishes a negative review of Susan's opera while at the same time firing the person who began writing the review – an optical printer was used to make the whole screen appear in focus, visually layering one piece of film onto another. However, some apparently deep-focus shots were the result of in-camera effects, as in the famous scene in which Kane breaks into Susan's room after her suicide attempt. In the background, Kane and another man break into the room, while simultaneously the medicine bottle and a glass with a spoon in it are in closeup in the foreground. The shot was an in-camera matte shot. The foreground was shot first, with the background dark. Then the background was lit, the foreground darkened, the film rewound, and the scene re-shot with the background action.

Music

The film's music was composed by Bernard Herrmann. Herrmann had composed for Welles for his Mercury Theatre radio broadcasts. Because it was Herrmann's first motion picture score, RKO wanted to pay him only a small fee, but Welles insisted he be paid at the same rate as Max Steiner.

The score established Herrmann as an important new composer of film soundtracks and eschewed the typical Hollywood practice of scoring a film with virtually non-stop music. Instead Herrmann used what he later described as '"radio scoring", musical cues typically 5–15 seconds in length that bridge the action or suggest a different emotional response. The breakfast montage sequence begins with a graceful waltz theme and gets darker with each variation on that theme as the passage of time leads to the hardening of Kane's personality and the breakdown of his first marriage.

Herrmann realized that musicians slated to play his music were hired for individual unique sessions; there was no need to write for existing ensembles. This meant that he was free to score for unusual combinations of instruments, even instruments that are not commonly heard. In the opening sequence, for example, the tour of Kane's estate Xanadu, Herrmann introduces a recurring leitmotiv played by low woodwinds, including a quartet of alto flutes.

For Susan Alexander Kane's operatic sequence, Welles suggested that Herrmann compose a witty parody of a Mary Garden vehicle, an aria from Salammbô. "Our problem was to create something that would give the audience the feeling of the quicksand into which this simple little girl, having a charming but small voice, is suddenly thrown," Herrmann said. Writing in the style of a 19th-century French Oriental opera, Herrmann put the aria in a key that would force the singer to strain to reach the high notes, culminating in a high D, well outside the range of Susan Alexander. Soprano Jean Forward dubbed the vocal part for Comingore. Houseman claimed to have written the libretto, based on Jean Racine’s Athalie and Phedre, although some confusion remains since Lucille Fletcher remembered preparing the lyrics. Fletcher, then Herrmann's wife, wrote the libretto for his opera Wuthering Heights.

Music enthusiasts consider the scene in which Susan Alexander Kane attempts to sing the famous cavatina "Una voce poco fa" from Il barbiere di Siviglia by Gioachino Rossini with vocal coach Signor Matiste as especially memorable for depicting the horrors of learning music through mistakes.

In 1972 Herrmann said, "I was fortunate to start my career with a film like Citizen Kane, it's been a downhill run ever since!" Welles loved Herrmann's score and told director Henry Jaglom that it was 50 percent responsible for the film's artistic success.

Some incidental music came from other sources. Welles heard the tune used for the publisher's theme, "Oh, Mr. Kane", in Mexico. Called "A Poco No", the song was written by Pepe Guízar and special lyrics were written by Herman Ruby.

"In a Mizz", a 1939 jazz song by Charlie Barnet and Haven Johnson, bookends Thompson's second interview of Susan Alexander Kane. "I kind of based the whole scene around that song," Welles said. "The music is by Nat Cole — it's his trio." Later — beginning with the lyrics, "It can't be love" — "In a Mizz" is performed at the Everglades picnic, framing the fight in the tent between Susan and Kane. Musicians including bandleader Cee Pee Johnson (drums), Alton Redd (vocals), Raymond Tate (trumpet), Buddy Collette (alto sax) and Buddy Banks (tenor sax) are featured.

All of the music used in the newsreel came from the RKO music library, edited at Welles's request by the newsreel department to achieve what Herrmann called "their own crazy way of cutting". The News on the March theme that accompanies the newsreel titles is "Belgian March" by Anthony Collins, from the film Nurse Edith Cavell. Other examples are an excerpt from Alfred Newman's score for Gunga Din (the exploration of Xanadu), Roy Webb's theme for the film Reno (the growth of Kane's empire), and bits of Webb's score for Five Came Back (introducing Walter Parks Thatcher).

Editing

One of the editing techniques used in Citizen Kane was the use of montage to collapse time and space, using an episodic sequence on the same set while the characters changed costume and make-up between cuts so that the scene following each cut would look as if it took place in the same location, but at a time long after the previous cut. In the breakfast montage, Welles chronicles the breakdown of Kane's first marriage in five vignettes that condense 16 years of story time into two minutes of screen time. Welles said that the idea for the breakfast scene "... was stolen from The Long Christmas Dinner of Thornton Wilder ... a one-act play, which is a long Christmas dinner that takes you through something like 60 years of a family's life." The film often used long dissolves to signify the passage of time and its psychological effect of the characters, such as the scene where the abandoned sled gets covered with snow after the young Kane is sent away with Thatcher.

Welles was influenced by the editing theories of Sergei Eisenstein by using jarring cuts that caused "sudden graphic or associative contrasts", such as the cut from Kane's deathbed to the beginning of the "News on the March" sequence and a sudden shot of a shrieking bird at the beginning of Raymond's flashback. Although the film typically favors mise-en-scène over montage, the scene where Kane goes to Susan Alexander's apartment after first meeting her is the only one that is primarily cut as close-ups with shots and counter shots between Kane and Susan. Fabe says that "by using a standard Hollywood technique sparingly, [Welles] revitalizes its psychological expressiveness."

Themes

Political themes

In her 1992 monograph for the British Film Institute, critic Laura Mulvey explored the anti-fascist themes of Citizen Kane. The News on the March newsreel presents Kane keeping company with Hitler and other dictators while he smugly assures the public there will be no war. Mulvey wrote that the film reflects "the battle between intervention and isolationism" then being waged in the United States; the film was released six months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, while President Franklin D. Roosevelt was laboring to win public opinion for entering World War II. "Not only was the war in Europe the burning public issue of the time," Mulvey wrote, "it was of passionate personal importance to Orson Welles … In the rhetoric of Citizen Kane, the destiny of isolationism is realised in metaphor: in Kane's own fate, dying wealthy and lonely, surrounded by the detritus of European culture and history."

Journalist Ignacio Ramonet has cited the film as an early example of mass media manipulation of public opinion and the power that media conglomerates have on influencing the democratic process. Ramonet believes that this early example of a media mogul influencing politics is outdated and that "today Citizen Kane would be a dwarf. He owned a few papers in one country. The forces that dominate today have integrated image with text and sound and the world is their market. There are media groups with the power of a thousand Citizen Kanes." Media mogul Rupert Murdoch is sometimes labeled as a latter-day Citizen Kane.

Reception

Pre-release controversy

To ensure that Citizen Kane's influence from Hearst's life was a secret, Welles limited access to dailies and managed the film's publicity. Publicity materials in the December 1940 issue of Stage stated the film's inspiration was Faust, but made no mention of Hearst.

The film was scheduled to premiere at RKO's flagship theater Radio City Music Hall on February 14, but in early January 1941 Welles was not finished with post-production work and told RKO that it still needed its musical score. Writers for national magazines had early deadlines and so a rough cut was previewed for a select few on January 3, 1941 for such magazines as Life, Look and Redbook. Gossip columnist Hedda Hopper (and Parsons' arch rival) showed up to the screening uninvited. Most of the critics at the preview said that they liked the film and gave it good advanced reviews. Hopper wrote negatively about it, calling the film a “viscous and irresponsible attack on a great man” and criticizing its corny writing and old fashioned photography. Friday magazine ran an article drawing point-by-point comparisons between Kane and Hearst and documented how Welles had led on Parsons, Hollywood correspondent for Hearst papers. Up until this Welles had been friendly with Parsons. The magazine quoted Welles as saying that he couldn’t understand why she was so nice to him and that she should “wait until the woman finds out that the picture’s about her boss.” Welles immediately denied making the statement and the editor of Friday admitted that it may be false. Welles apologized to Parsons and assured her that he had never made that remark.

File:LouellaParsons.jpg

Film columnist and Hearst employee Louella Parsons was humiliated by Citizen Kane and began making numerous threats to prevent the film from being released.

Shortly after Friday's article Hearst sent Parsons an angry letter complaining that he had learned about Citizen Kane from Hopper and not her. The incident made a fool of Parsons and compelled her to start attacking Welles and the film. Parsons demanded a private screening of the film and personally threatened Schaffer on Hearst’s behalf, first with a lawsuit and then with a vague threat of consequences for everyone in Hollywood. On January 10 Parsons and two lawyers working for Hearst were given a private screening of the film. James G. Stewart was present at the screening and said that she walked out of the film. Soon after, Parsons called Schaefer and threatened RKO with a lawsuit if they released Kane. She also contacted the management of Radio City Music Hall and demanded that they not screen it. The next day, the front page headline in Daily Variety read, "HEARST BANS RKO FROM PAPERS." Hearst began this ban by suppressing promotion of RKO's Kitty Foyle, but in two weeks the ban was lifted for everything except Kane.

When Schaefer did not submit to Parsons she called other studio heads and made more threats on behalf of Hearst to expose the private lives of people throughout the entire film industry. Welles was threatened with an exposé about his romance with the married actress Delores del Rio, who wanted the affair kept secret until her divorce was finalized. In a statement to journalists Welles denied that the film was about Hearst. Hearst began preparing an injunction against film for libel and invasion of privacy, but Welles’s lawyer told him that he doubted Hearst would proceed due to the negative publicity and requited testimony that an injunction would bring.

The Hollywood Reporter ran a front-page story on January 13 that Hearst papers were about to run a series of editorials attacking Hollywood's practice of hiring refugees and immigrants for jobs that could be done by Americans. The goal was to put pressure on the other studios to force RKO to shelve Kane. Many of those immigrants had fled Europe from after the rise of fascism began and feared losing the safe haven of the United States. Soon afterwards, Schaefer was approached by Nicholas Schenck, head of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's parent company, with an offer on the behalf of Louis B. Mayer and other Hollywood executives made an offer to RKO Pictures of $805,000 to destroy all prints of the film and burn the negative. Once RKO's legal team reassured Schaefer, the studio announced on January 21 that Kane would be released as scheduled, and with one of the largest promotional campaigns in the studio's history. Schaefer brought Welles to New York City for a private screening of the film with the New York corporate heads of the studios and their lawyers. There was no objection to its release provided that certain changes, including the removal or softening of specific references that might offend Hearst, were made. Welles agreed and cut the running time from 122 minutes to 119 minutes. The cuts satisfied the corporate lawyers.

Hearst's response

Hearing about Citizen Kane enraged Hearst so much that he banned any advertising, reviewing, or mentioning of it in his papers, and had his journalists libel Welles. Welles used Hearst's opposition as a pretext for previewing the film in several opinion-making screenings in Los Angeles, lobbying for its artistic worth against the hostile campaign that Hearst was waging. A special press screening took place in early March. Henry Luce was in attendance and reportedly wanted to buy the film from RKO for $1 million to distribute it himself. The reviews for this screening were positive. A Hollywood Review headline read, "Mr. Genius Comes Through; 'Kane' Astonishing Picture". The Motion Picture Herald reported about the screening and Welles's intention to sue RKO. Time magazine wrote that "The objection of Mr. Hearst, who founded a publishing empire on sensationalism, is ironic. For to most of the several hundred people who have seen the film at private screenings, Citizen Kane is the most sensational product of the U.S. movie industry." A second press screening occurred in April.

When Schaefer rejected Hearst's offer to suppress the film, Hearst banned every newspaper and station in his media conglomerate from reviewing – or even mentioning – the film. He also had many movie theaters ban it, and many did not show it through fear of being socially exposed by his massive newspaper empire. The Oscar-nominated documentary The Battle Over Citizen Kane lays the blame for the film's relative failure squarely at the feet of Hearst. The film did decent business at the box office; it went on to be the sixth highest grossing film in its year of release, a modest success its backers found acceptable. Nevertheless, the film's commercial performance fell short of its creators' expectations. Hearst's biographer David Nasaw points out that Hearst's actions were not the only reason Kane failed, however: the innovations Welles made with narrative, as well as the dark message at the heart of the film (that the pursuit of success is ultimately futile) meant that a popular audience could not appreciate its merits.

Hearst's attacks against Welles went beyond attempting to suppress the film. Welles said that while he was on his post-filming lecture tour a police detective approached him at a restaurant and advised him not to go back to his hotel. A 14-year-old girl had reportedly been hidden in the closet of his room, and two photographers were waiting for him to walk in. Knowing he would be jailed after the resulting publicity, Welles did not return to the hotel but waited until the train left town the following morning. "But that wasn't Hearst," Welles said, "that was a hatchet man from the local Hearst paper who thought he would advance himself by doing it."

In March 1941 Welles directed a Broadway version of Richard Wright's Native Son (and, for luck, used a "Rosebud" sled as a prop). Native Son received positive reviews, but Hearst-owned papers used the opportunity to attack Welles as a communist. The Hearst papers vociferously attacked Welles after his April 1941 radio play, "His Honor, the Mayor", produced for The Free Company radio series on CBS.

Welles described his chance encounter with Hearst in an elevator at the Fairmont Hotel on the night Citizen Kane opened in San Francisco. Hearst and Welles's father were acquaintances, so Welles introduced himself and asked Hearst if he would like to come to the opening. Hearst did not respond. "As he was getting off at his floor, I said, 'Charles Foster Kane would have accepted.' No reply", recalled Welles. "And Kane would have you know. That was his style — just as he finished Jed Leland's bad review of Susan as an opera singer."

In 1945 Hearst journalist Robert Shaw wrote that the film got "a full tide of insensate fury" from Hearst papers, "then it ebbed suddenly. With one brain cell working, the chief realized that such hysterical barking by the trained seals would attract too much attention to the picture. But to this day the name of Orson Welles is on the official son-of-a-bitch list of every Hearst newspaper."

Despite Hearst's attempts to destroy the film, since 1941 references to his life and career have usually included a reference to Citizen Kane, such as the headline 'Son of Citizen Kane Dies' for the obituary of Hearst's son. In 2012 the Hearst estate agreed to screen the film at Hearst Castle in San Simeon, breaking Hearst's ban on the film.

Release

Radio City Music Hall's management refused to screen Citizen Kane for its premiere. A possible factor was Parsons's threat that The American Weekly would run a defamatory story on the grandfather of major RKO stockholder Nelson Rockefeller. Other exhibitors feared being sued for libel by Hearst and refused to show the film. In March Welles threatened the RKO board of governors with a lawsuit if they did not release the film. Schaefer stood by Welles and opposed the board of governors. When RKO still delayed the film's release Welles offered to buy the film for $1 million and the studio finally agreed to release the film on May 1.

Schaefer managed to book a few theaters willing to show the film. Hearst papers refused to accept advertising in its papers. RKO's publicity advertisements for the film erroneously promoted it as a love story.

Kane opened at the RKO Palace Theatre on Broadway in New York on May 1, 1941, in Chicago on May 6, and in Los Angeles on May 8. Welles said that at the Chicago premiere that he attended the theater was almost empty. It did well in cities and larger towns but fared poorly in more remote areas. RKO still had problems getting exhibitors to show the film. For example, one chain controlling more than 500 theaters got Welles's film as part of a package but refused to play it, reportedly out of fear of Hearst. Hearst's disruption of the film's release damaged its box office performance and, as a result, it lost $160,000 during its initial run. The film earned $23,878 during its first week in New York. By the ninth week it only made $7,279. Overall it lost money in New York, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Washington, D.C., but made a profit in Seattle.

Contemporary responses

Citizen Kane received good reviews from several critics. New York Daily News critic Kate Cameron called it "one of the most interesting and technically superior films that has ever come out of a Hollywood studio". New York World-Telegram critic William Boehnel said that the film was "staggering and belongs at once among the greatest screen achievements". Time magazine said wrote that "it has found important new techniques in picture-making and story-telling." Life magazine's review said that "few movies have ever come from Hollywood with such powerful narrative, such original technique, such exciting photography." John C. Mosher of The New Yorker called the film's style "like fresh air" and raved "Something new has come to the movie world at last." Anthony Bower of The Nation called it "brilliant" and praised the cinematography and performances by Welles, Comingore and Cotten. John O'Hara's Newsweek review called it the best picture he'd ever seen and said Welles was "the best actor in the history of acting." Welles called O'Hara's review "the greatest review that anybody ever had."

The day following the premiere of Citizen Kane, The New York Times critic Bosley Crowther wrote that "... it comes close to being the most sensational film ever made in Hollywood."

Count on Mr. Welles: he doesn't do things by halves. ... Upon the screen he discovered an area large enough for his expansive whims to have free play. And the consequence is that he has made a picture of tremendous and overpowering scope, not in physical extent so much as in its rapid and graphic rotation of thoughts. Mr. Welles has put upon the screen a motion picture that really moves.

In the UK C. A. Lejeune of The Observer called it "The most exciting film that has come out of Hollywood in twenty-five years" and Dilys Powell of The Sunday Times said the film's style was made "with the ease and boldness and resource of one who controls and is not controlled by his medium." Edward Tangye Lean of Horizon praised the film’s technical style, calling it "perhaps a decade ahead of its contemporaries."

A few reviews were mixed. Otis Ferguson of The New Republic said it was "the boldest free-hand stroke in major screen production since Griffith and Bitzer were running wild to unshackle the camera", but also criticized its style, calling it a "retrogression in film technique" and stating that "it holds no great place" in film history. In a rare film review, filmmaker Erich von Stroheim criticized the film's story and non-linear structure, but praised the technical style and performances, and wrote "Whatever the truth may be about it, "Citizen Kane" is a great picture and will go down in screen history. More power to Welles!"

Some prominent critics wrote negative reviews. In his 1941 review for Sur, Jorge Luis Borges famously called the film "a labyrinth with no center" and predicted that its legacy would be a film "whose historical value is undeniable but which no one cares to see again." The Argus Weekend Magazine critic Erle Cox called the film "amazing" but thought that Welles's break with Hollywood traditions was "overdone." Tatler's James Agate called it "the well-intentioned, muddled, amateurish thing one expects from high-brows" and "a quite good film which tries to run the psychological essay in harness with your detective thriller, and doesn't quite succeed." Other people that didn't like the film were W. H. Auden and James Agee.

Awards

At the 14th Academy Awards Citizen Kane was nominated for:

• Outstanding Motion Picture – RKO Radio Pictures (Orson Welles, Producer)
• Best Director – Orson Welles
• Best Actor – Orson Welles
• Best Writing (Original Screenplay) – Herman J. Mankiewicz and Orson Welles
• Best Art Direction-Interior Decoration (Black-and-White) – Perry Ferguson, Van Nest Polglase, A. Roland Fields, Darrell Silvera
• Best Film Editing – Robert Wise
• Best Cinematography (Black-and-White) – Gregg Toland
• Best Music (Score of a Dramatic Picture) – Bernard Herrmann
• Best Sound Recording – John O. Aalberg

It was widely believed the film would win most of its nominations, but it was only awarded the Best Writing (Original Screenplay) Oscar. Wise recalled each time Citizen Kane's name was called out as a nominee, the crowd booed. According to Variety, bloc voting against Welles by screen extras denied him Best Picture and Actor awards. British film critic Barry Norman attributed this to Hearst's wrath. During the ceremony Welles was in Brazil shooting It's All True and did not attend.

The film was more successful at film critics awards. The National Board of Review named it Best Picture of the Year and gave Best Acting awards to Welles and George Coulouris. The Film Daily and The New York Times named it one of the Ten Best Films of the year, and it won the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Picture.

Legacy

Citizen Kane marked a decline in Welles's success. Author Joseph McBride said the problems in making the film caused damage to his career. This started in 1942 when RKO violated its contract with Welles by re-editing The Magnificent Ambersons against his will. That June Schaefer resigned from RKO and Welles's contract was promptly terminated.

Welles himself has been retroactively compared to Charles Foster Kane. Wise believed that Kane resembled Welles's life story more than Hearst's and said "Orson was doing an autobiographical film and didn't realize it, because it's rather much the same, you know. You start here, and you have a big rise and tremendous prominence and fame and success and whatnot, and then tail off and tail off and tail off. And at least the arc of the two lives were very much the same." Bogdanovich disagreed with this and said that Kane "had none of the qualities of an artist, Orson had all the qualities of an artist." Bogdanovich also noted that Welles was never bitter "about all the bad things that happened to him" and enjoyed life in his final years.

The 1999 HBO film RKO 281 depicted the making of the film and Hearst's attempts to prevent its release. It was based on the documentary The Battle over Citizen Kane, but differed from its source by "downplaying [Mankiewicz's] role in bringing the idea of a Hearst-based movie" and inventing such historically inaccurate incidents as Welles visiting Hearst Castle and meeting Hearst before writing the film's script.

Release in Europe

During World War II Citizen Kane was not seen in most European countries. It was shown in France for the first time on July 10, 1946 at the Marbeuf theatre in Paris. Initially most French film critics were influenced by the negative reviews of Jean-Paul Sartre in 1945 and Georges Sadoul in 1946. At that time many French intellectuals and filmmakers shared Sartre's negative opinion that Hollywood filmmakers were uncultured. Sartre criticized the film's flashbacks for its nostalgic and romantic preoccupation with the past instead of the realities of the present and said that "the whole film is based on a misconception of what cinema is all about. The film is in the past tense, whereas we all know that cinema has got to be in the present tense."

Film theorist André Bazin (author of Qu'est-ce que le cinéma?) based many of his theories around the film and has been called the most influential person to enhance its reputation.

André Bazin, a little known film critic working for Sartre's Les Temps modernes, was asked to give an impromptu speech about the film after a screening at the Colisée Theatre in the autumn of 1946 and changed the opinion of much of the audience. This speech led to Bazin's 1947 article "The Technique of Citizen Kane", which directly influenced public opinion about the film. Carringer wrote that Bazin was "the one who did the most to enhance the film’s reputation." Both Bazin's critique of the film and his theories about cinema itself centered around his strong belief in mise en scène. These theories were diametrically opposed to both the popular Soviet montage theory and the politically Marxist and anti-Hollywood beliefs of most French film critics at that time. Bazin believed that a film should depict reality without the filmmaker imposing their "will" on the spectator, which the Soviet theory supported. Bazin wrote that Citizen Kane's mise en scène created a "new conception of filmmaking" and that the freedom given to the audience from the deep focus shots was innovative by changing the entire concept of the cinematic image. Bazin wrote extensively about the mise en scène in the scene where Susan Alexander attempts suicide, which was one long take while other films would have used four or five shots in the scene. Bazin wrote that the film's mise en scène "forces the spectator to participate in the meaning of the film" and creates "a psychological realism which brings the spectator back to the real conditions of perception."

In his 1950 essay "The Evolution of the Language of Cinema", Bazin placed Citizen Kane center stage as a work which ushered in a new period in cinema. One of the first critics to defend motion pictures as being on the same artistic level as literature or painting, Bazin often used the film as an example of cinema as an art form and wrote that "Welles has given the cinema a theoretical restoration. He has enriched his filmic repertory with new or forgotten effects that, in today’s artistic context, take on a significance we didn’t know they could have." Bazin also compared the film to Roberto Rossellini's Paisà for having "the same aesthetic concept of realism" and to the films of William Wyler shot by Toland (such as The Little Foxes and The Best Years of Our Lives), all of which used deep focus cinematography that Bazin called "a dialectical step forward in film language."

Bazin's praise of the film went beyond film theory and reflected his own philosophy towards life itself. His metaphysical interpretations about the film reflected human kind’s place in the universe. Bazin believed that the film examined one persons identity and search for meaning. It portrayed the world as ambiguous and full of contradictions, whereas films up until then simply portrayed people’s actions and motivations. Bazin's biographer Dudley Andrew wrote that:

The world of Citizen Kane, that mysterious, dark, and infinitely deep world of space and memory where voices trail off into distant echoes and where meaning dissolves into interpretation, seemed to Bazin to mark the starting point from which all of us try to construct provisionally the sense of our lives.

Bazin went on to co-found Cahiers du cinéma, whose contributors (including future film directors François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard) also praised the film. The popularity of Truffaut's auteur theory helped the film's and Welles's reputation.

Re-evaluation

By 1942 Citizen Kane had run its course theatrically and, apart from a few showings at big city arthouse cinemas, it largely vanished and both the film's and Welles's reputation fell among American critics. In 1949 critic Richard Griffith in his overview of cinema, The Film Till Now, dismissed Citizen Kane as "... tinpot if not crackpot Freud."

Citizen Kane was re-released in 1952 after gaining popularity on TV. A journalist from the London Evening News wrote that after seeing the film for the first time he “came away marveling.”

In the United States, it was neglected and forgotten until its revival on television in the mid-1950s. Three key events in 1956 led to its re-evaluation in the United States: first, RKO was one of the first studios to sell its library to television, and early that year Citizen Kane started to appear on television; second, the film was re-released theatrically to coincide with Welles's return to the New York stage, where he played King Lear; and third, American film critic Andrew Sarris wrote "Citizen Kane: The American Baroque" for Film Culture, and described it as "the great American film" and "the work that influenced the cinema more profoundly than any American film since Birth of a Nation." Carringer considers Sarris's essay as the most important influence on the film's reputation in the US.

During Expo 58, a poll of over 100 film historians named Kane one of the top ten greatest films ever made (the group gave first-place honors to The Battleship Potemkin). When a group of young film directors announced their vote for the top six, they were booed for not including the film.

In the decades since, its critical status as the greatest film ever made has grown, with numerous essays and books on it including Peter Cowie's The Cinema of Orson Welles, Ronald Gottesman's Focus on Citizen Kane, a collection of significant reviews and background pieces, and most notably Kael's essay, "Raising Kane", which promoted the value of the film to a much wider audience than it had reached before. Despite its criticism of Welles, it further popularized the notion of Citizen Kane as the great American film. The rise of art house and film society circuits also aided in the film's rediscovery. David Thomson said that the film 'grows with every year as America comes to resemble it."

The British magazine Sight & Sound has produced a Top Ten list surveying film critics every decade since 1952, and is regarded as one of the most respected barometers of critical taste. Citizen Kane was a runner up to the top 10 in its 1952 poll but was voted as the greatest film ever made in its 1962 poll, retaining the top spot in every subsequent poll until 2012, when Vertigo displaced it.

The film has also ranked number one in the following film "best of" lists: Julio Castedo's The 100 Best Films of the Century, Cahiers du cinéma 100 films pour une cinémathèque idéale, Kinovedcheskie Zapiski, Time Out magazine Top 100 Films (Centenary), The Village Voice 100 Greatest Films, and The Royal Belgian Film Archive's Most Important and Misappreciated American Films.

Ebert called Citizen Kane the greatest film ever made: "But people don't always ask about the greatest film. They ask, 'What's your favorite movie?' Again, I always answer with Citizen Kane."

In 1989, the United States Library of Congress deemed the film "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry. Citizen Kane was one of first 25 films inducted into the registry.

On February 18, 1999, the United States Postal Service honored Citizen Kane by including it in its Celebrate the Century series. The film was honored again February 25, 2003, in a series of U.S. postage stamps marking the 75th anniversary of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Art director Perry Ferguson represents the behind-the-scenes craftsmen of filmmaking in the series; he is depicted completing a sketch for Citizen Kane.

Citizen Kane was ranked number one in the American Film Institute's polls of film industry artists and leaders in 1998 and 2007. "Rosebud" was chosen the 17th most memorable movie quotation in a 2005 AFI poll. The film's score was one of 250 nominees for the top 25 film scores in American cinema in another 2005 AFI poll.

The film currently has an incredibly rare 100% rating at Rotten Tomatoes, based on 66 reviews by approved critics.

Influence

Citizen Kane has been called the most influential film of all time. Richard Corliss has asserted that Jules Dassin's 1941 film The Tell-Tale Heart was the first example of its influence and the first pop culture reference to the film occurred later in 1941 when the spoof comedy Hellzapoppin' featured a "Rosebud" sled. The film's cinematography was almost immediately influential and in 1942 American Cinematographer wrote "without a doubt the most immediately noticeable trend in cinematography methods during the year was the trend toward crisper definition and increased depth of field."

The cinematography influenced John Huston's The Maltese Falcon. Cinematographer Arthur Edeson used a wider-angle lens than Toland and the film includes many long takes, low angles and shots of the ceiling, but it did not use deep focus shots on large sets to the extent that Citizen Kane did. Edeson and Toland are often credited together for revolutionizing cinematography in 1941. Toland's cinematography influenced his own work on The Best Years of Our Lives. Other films influenced include Gaslight, Mildred Pierce and Jane Eyre. Cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa said that his use of deep focus was influenced by "the camera work of Gregg Toland in Citizen Kane" and not by traditional Japanese art.

Its cinematography, lighting and flashback structure influenced such film noirs of the 1940s and 1950s as The Killers, Keeper of the Flame, Caught, The Great Man and This Gun for Hire. David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson have written that “For over a decade thereafter American films displayed exaggerated foregrounds and somber lighting, enhanced by long takes and exaggerated camera movements.” However by the 1960s filmmakers such as those from the French New Wave and Cinéma vérité movements favored "flatter, more shallow images with softer focus" and Citizen Kane's style became less fashionable. American filmmakers in the 1970s combined these two approaches by using long takes, rapid cutting, deep focus and telephoto shots all at once. Its use of long takes influences film's such as The Asphalt Jungle, and its use of deep focus cinematography influenced Gun Crazy, The Whip Hand, The Devil's General and Justice Is Done. The flashback structure in which different characters have conflicting versions of past events influenced La commare secca and Man of Marble.

The film's structure influenced the biographical films Lawrence of Arabia and Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters – which begin with the subject's death and show their life in flashbacks – as well as Welles's thriller Mr. Arkadin. Rosenbaum sees similarities in the film's plot to Mr. Arkadin, as well as the theme of nostalgia for loss of innocence throughout Welles's career, beginning with Citizen Kane and including The Magnificent Ambersons, Mr. Arkadin and Chimes at Midnight. Rosenbaum also points out how the film influenced Warren Beatty's Reds. The film depicts the life of Jack Reed through the eyes of Louise Bryant, much as Kane's life is seen through the eyes of Thompson and the people who he interviews. Rosenbaum also compared the romantic montage between Reed and Bryant with the breakfast table montage in Citizen Kane.

Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon is often compared to the film due to both having complicated plot structures told by multiple characters in the film. Welles said his initial idea for the film was "Basically, the idea Rashomon used later on," however Kurosawa had not yet seen the film before making Rashomon in 1950. Nigel Andrews has compared the film's complex plot structure to Rashomon, Last Year at Marienbad, Memento and Magnolia. Andrews also compares Charles Foster Kane to Michael Corleone in The Godfather, Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull and Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood for their portrayals of "haunted megalomaniac[s], presiding over the shards of [their] own [lives]."

The films of Paul Thomas Anderson have been compared to it. Variety compared There Will Be Blood to the film and called it "one that rivals Giant and Citizen Kane in our popular lore as origin stories about how we came to be the people we are." The Master has been called "movieland’s only spiritual sequel to Citizen Kane that doesn’t shrivel under the hefty comparison" and the film's loose depiction of L. Ron Hubbard has been compared to Citizen Kane's depiction of Hearst. The Social Network has been compared to the film for its depiction of a media mogul and by the character Erica Albright being similar to Rosebud. The controversy of the Sony hacking before the release of The Interview brought comparisons of Hearst's attempt to suppress the film. The film's plot structure and some specific shots influenced Todd Haynes's Velvet Goldmine. Abbas Kiarostami's The Traveler has been called "the Citizen Kane of the Iranian children’s cinema." The film's use of overlapping dialogue has influenced the films of Robert Altman and Carol Reed. Reed's films Odd Man Out, The Third Man and Outcast of the Islands were also influenced by the film's cinematography.

Many directors have listed it as one of the greatest films ever made, including Woody Allen, Michael Apted, Les Blank, Kenneth Branagh, Paul Greengrass, Michel Hazanavicius, Michael Mann, Sam Mendes, Jiri Menzel, Paul Schrader, Martin Scorsese, Denys Arcand, Gillian Armstrong, John Boorman, Roger Corman, Alex Cox, Milos Forman, Norman Jewison, Richard Lester, Richard Linklater, Paul Mazursky, Ronald Neame, Sydney Pollack and Stanley Kubrick. Yasujirō Ozu said it was his favorite non-Japanese film and was impressed by its techniques. François Truffaut said that the film "has inspired more vocations to cinema throughout the world than any other" and recognized its influence in The Barefoot Contessa, Les Mauvaises Rencontres, Lola Montès, and 8 1/2. Truffaut's Day for Night pays tribute to the film in a dream sequence depicting a childhood memory of the character played by Truffaut stealing publicity photos from the film. Numerous film directors have cited the film as influential on their own films, including Theo Angelopoulos Luc Besson, the Coen brothers, Francis Ford Coppola, Brian De Palma, John Frankenheimer, Stephen Frears, Sergio Leone, Michael Mann, Ridley Scott, Martin Scorsese, Bryan Singer and Steven Spielberg. Ingmar Bergman disliked the film and called it "a total bore. Above all, the performances are worthless. The amount of respect that movie has is absolutely unbelievable!"

William Friedkin said that the film influenced him and called it "a veritable quarry for filmmakers, just as Joyce's Ulysses is a quarry for writers." The film has also influenced other art forms. Carlos Fuentes's novel The Death of Artemio Cruz was partially inspired by the film and the rock band The White Stripes paid unauthorized tribute to the film in the song "The Union Forever".

Film memorabilia

In 1982, film director Steven Spielberg bought a "Rosebud" sled for $60,500; it was one of three balsa sleds used in the closing scenes and the only one that was not burned. After the Spielberg purchase, it was reported that retiree Arthur Bauer claimed to own another "Rosebud" sled. In early 1942 when Bauer was 12 he won an RKO publicity contest and selected the hardwood sled as his prize. In 1996, Bauer's estate offered the painted pine sled at auction through Christie's. Bauer's son told CBS News that his mother had once wanted to paint the sled and use it as a plant stand, but Bauer told her to "just save it and put it in the closet." The sled was sold to an anonymous bidder for $233,500.

Welles's Oscar for Best Original Screenplay was believed lost until it was rediscovered in 1994. It was withdrawn from a 2007 auction at Sotheby's when bidding failed to reach its estimate of $800,000 to $1.2 million. Owned by the charitable Dax Foundation, it was auctioned for $861,542 in 2011 to an anonymous buyer. Mankiewicz's Oscar was sold at least twice, in 1999 and again in 2012, the latest price being $588,455.

In 1989, Mankiewicz's personal copy of the Citizen Kane script was auctioned at Christie's. The leather-bound volume included the final shooting script and a carbon copy of American that bore handwritten annotations — purportedly made by Hearst's lawyers, who were said to have obtained it in the manner described by Kael in "Raising Kane". Estimated to bring $70,000 to $90,000, it sold for a record $231,000.

In 2007, Welles's personal copy of the last revised draft of Citizen Kane before the shooting script was sold at Sotheby's for $97,000. A second draft of the script titled American, marked "Mr. Welles' working copy", was auctioned by Sotheby's in 2014 for $164,692. A collection of 24 pages from a working script found in Welles's personal possessions by his daughter Beatrice Welles was auctioned in 2014 for $15,000.

In 2014 a collection of approximately 235 Citizen Kane stills and production photos that had belonged to Welles was sold at auction for $7,812.

Rights and home media

The composited camera negative of Citizen Kane was destroyed in a New Jersey film laboratory fire in the 1970s. Subsequent prints were derived from a master positive (a fine-grain preservation element) made in the 1940s and originally intended for use in overseas distribution. Modern techniques were used to produce a pristine print for a 50th Anniversary theatrical reissue in 1991 which Paramount released for then owner Turner Broadcasting System, which earned $1.6 million in North America.

In 1955, RKO sold the American television rights to its film library, including Citizen Kane, to C&C Television Corp. In 1960, television rights to the pre-1956 RKO library were acquired by United Artists. RKO kept the non-broadcast television rights to its library.

In 1976, when home video was in its infancy, entrepreneur Snuff Garrett bought cassette rights to the RKO library for what United Press International termed "a pittance." In 1978 The Nostalgia Merchant released the film through Media Home Entertainment. By 1980 the 800-title library of The Nostalgia Merchant was earning $2.3 million a year. "Nobody wanted cassettes four years ago," Garrett told UPI. "It wasn't the first time people called me crazy. It was a hobby with me which became big business." RKO Home Video released the film on VHS and Betamax in 1985.

In 1984 The Criterion Collection released the film as its first LaserDisc. It was made from a fine grain master positive provided by the UCLA Film and Television Archive. When told about the then new concept of having an audio commentary on the disc, Welles was skeptical but said "theoretically, that’s good for teaching movies, so long as they don’t talk nonsense." In 1992 Criterion released a new 50th Anniversary Edition LaserDisc. This version had an improved transfer and additional special features, including the documentary The Legacy of Citizen Kane and Welles's early short The Hearts of Age.

Turner Broadcasting System acquired broadcast television rights to the RKO library in 1986 and the full worldwide rights to the library in 1987. The RKO Home Video unit was reorganized into Turner Home Entertainment that year. In 1991 Turner released a 50th Anniversary Edition on VHS and as a collector's edition that includes the film, the documentary Reflections On Citizen Kane, Harlan Lebo's 50th anniversary album, a poster and a copy of the original script. In 1996, Time Warner acquired Turner and Warner Home Video absorbed Turner Home Entertainment. Today, Time Warner's Warner Bros. unit has distribution rights for the film.

In 2001 Warner Home Video released a 60th Anniversary Collectors Edition DVD. The two-disc DVD included feature-length commentaries by Ebert and Bogdanovich, as well as the documentary The Battle Over Citizen Kane. It was simultaneously released on VHS. The DVD was criticized for being "too bright, too clean; the dirt and grime had been cleared away, but so had a good deal of the texture, the depth, and the sense of film grain."

In 2003, Welles's daughter Beatrice Welles sued Turner Entertainment, claiming the Welles estate is the legal copyright holder of the film. She claimed that Welles's deal to terminate his contracts with RKO meant that Turner's copyright of the film was null and void. She also claimed that the estate of Orson Welles was owed 20% of the film's profits if her copyright claim was not upheld. In 2007 she was allowed to proceed with the lawsuit, overturning the 2004 decision in favor of Turner Entertainment on the issue of video rights.

In 2011 it was released on Blu-ray disc and DVD in a 70th anniversary box set. The San Francisco Chronicle called it "the Blu-ray release of the year." Supplements included everything available on the 2001 Warner Home Video release, as well as the film RKO 281 and packaging extras that include a hardcover booklet and a folio containing a reproduction of the original souvenir program, miniature lobby cards and other memorabilia. The Blu-ray DVD was scanned as 4K resolution from three different 35mm prints and rectified the quality issues of the 2001 DVD.

Colorization controversy

In the 1980s, Citizen Kane became a catalyst in the controversy over the colorization of black-and-white films. One proponent of film colorization was Ted Turner, whose Turner Entertainment Company owned the RKO library. A Turner Entertainment spokesperson initially stated that Citizen Kane would not be colorized, but in July 1988 Turner said, "Citizen Kane? I'm thinking of colorizing it." In early 1989 it was reported that two companies were producing color tests for Turner Entertainment. Criticism increased when filmmaker Henry Jaglom stated that shortly before his death Welles had implored him "don't let Ted Turner deface my movie with his crayons."

In February 1989 Turner Entertainment president Roger Mayer announced that work to colorize the film had been stopped due to provisions in Welles's 1939 contract with RKO that "could be read to prohibit colorization without permission of the Welles estate." Mayer added that Welles's contract was "quite unusual" and "other contracts we have checked out are not like this at all." Turner had only colorized the final reel of the film before abandoning the project. In 1991 one minute of the colorized test footage was included in the BBC Arena documentary The Complete Citizen Kane.

The colorization controversy was a factor in the passage of the National Film Preservation Act in 1988 which created the National Film Registry the following year. ABC News anchor Peter Jennings reported that "one major reason for doing this is to require people like the broadcaster Ted Turner, who's been adding color to some movies and re-editing others for television, to put notices on those versions saying that the movies have been altered".

See also

• Citizen Kane trailer
• List of films considered the best

Bibliography

• Bazin, André. The Technique of Citizen Kane. Paris, France: Les Temps modernes 2, number 17, 1947. pages 943-949.
• Biskind, Peter (ed.), Jaglom, Henry and Welles, Orson. My Lunches with Orson: Conversations between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2013. ISBN 978-0-8050-9725-2.
• Bogdanovich, Peter and Welles, Orson. This is Orson Welles. HarperPerennial 1992. ISBN 0-06-092439-X
• Bogdanovich, Peter and Welles, Orson (uncredited). "The Kane Mutiny", in Esquire, October 1972.
• Brady, Frank. Citizen Welles: A Biography of Orson Welles. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1989. ISBN 0-385-26759-2.
• Callow, Simon. Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu. London: Jonathan Cape, 1995. ISBN 0-224-03852-4
• Carringer, Robert L. The Making of Citizen Kane. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985. ISBN 0-520-05367-2 hardcover; 1996 revised and updated edition ISBN 0-520-20567-7 paperback
• Carringer, Robert L. "The Scripts of Citizen Kane", in Critical Inquiry No. 5, 1978.
• Cook, David A. A History of Narrative Film. W.W. Norton Company, 2004. ISBN 0-393-97868-0
• Gottesman, Ronald (ed.). Focus on Citizen Kane. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1976. ISBN 0-13-949214-3
• Gottesman, Ronald (ed.). Perspectives on Citizen Kane. New York: G. K. Hall & Co., 1996. ISBN 978-0-8161-1616-4
• Heylin, Clinton. Despite the System: Orson Welles Versus the Hollywood Studios, Chicago Review Press, 2005. ISBN 1-55652-547-8
• Howard, James. The Complete Films of Orson Welles. New York: Carol Publishing Group, 1991. ISBN 0-8065-1241-5.
• Kael, Pauline, Welles, Orson and Mankiewicz, Herman J. The Citizen Kane Book. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1971.
• Leaming, Barbara. Orson Welles, A Biography. New York: Viking Press, 1985. ISBN 978-0-618-15446-3.
• Meryman, Richard. Mank: The Wit, World and Life of Herman Mankiewicz. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1978. ISBN 978-0-688-03356-9.
• Mulvey, Laura. Citizen Kane. London: British Film Institute, 1992. ISBN 0-85170-339-9
• Naremore, James (ed.). Orson Welles's Citizen Kane: A Casebook in Criticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. ISBN 978-0-19-515892-2
• Nasaw, David. The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000. ISBN 978-0-618-15446-3
• Rippy, Marguerite H. Orson Welles and the Unfinished RKO Projects: A Postmodern Perspective. Southern Illinois University Press, Illinois, 2009. ISBN 978-0-8093-2912-0
• Rosenbaum, Jonathan. "I Missed It at the Movies: Objections to 'Raising Kane'", in Film Comment, Spring 1972.

External links

Database

• Official website
• Citizen Kane at IMDb
• Citizen Kane at the TCM Movie Database
• Citizen Kane at the American Film Institute Catalog
• Citizen Kane at Rotten Tomatoes

Other

• Citizen Kane bibliography via the UC Berkeley Media Resources Center
• The American Film Institute's "100 Greatest Movies" list
• Citizen Kane and Bernard Herrmann's film score
• PBS: Citizen Kane
• Bright Lights Film Journal Essay
• Roger Ebert: Citizen Kane
• The Unofficial Citizen Kane Page
• Time Magazine Top 100
• Greatest films
• DVD Review
• Citizen Kane at TV Tropes
• Scene-by-scene analysis at Movie Movie