Lecture Nine:
Seven Historical Perspectives on Citizen Kane
10/18/2005

Perspective #1:  The Current Film Industry

Citizen Kane repeatedly earns top honors on lists of the best films ever made. In 1998, the American Film Institute ranked it as #1 in its list of the top 100 American films of the twentieth century.

Perspective #2:  The film industry of the 1940s

Citizen Kane was nominated for nine awards altogether. Welles was nominated for three: Best Actor, Director, and Writer. At the Academy Awards ceremony in 1942, Citizen Kane received only one Oscar: Best Screenplay.

The reasons for this are long and complex but they stem from the threats made by William Randolph Hearst that if studios showed the film in their theatres, his papers would run a smear campaign against Hollywood.

Consequently, screenings of Citizen Kane were delayed.  By the time audiences had a chance to see the film, Citizen Kane had acquired a dubious reputation. All the delays of its screening, and the nervous atmosphere it had generated,  had made the picture seem unpopular.  And so it became unpopular.

Critical reviews of the film, however, were extremely favorable.

Perspective #3: William Randolph Hearst

In a press conference on March 11, 1941, Orson Welles publicly stated that “Citizen Kane was not intended to have nor has it any reference to Mr. Hearst nor to any other living person. No statement to the contrary has ever been authorized by me. Citizen Kane is the story of a wholly fictitious character.”

But the parallels between the cinematic newspaper tycoon and the actual one are numerous.

• Like Kane, Hearst was 24 when he took over his first newspaper.
• In the next three decades, Hearst gradually built an empire of 30 newspapers and fifteen magazines
• Like Kane, Hearst also entered journalism at a time when there was no tradition of ethical responsibility.
• Hearst also ran for governor in 1906 and lost, primarily because his rival played up the fact that Hearst’s wife was a former chorus girl
• Hearst also had a mistress, film actress Marion Davies, whose career he carefully controlled
• Kane’s Zanadu, with its enormous fireplace and its jumbled mix of classical styles, is meant to suggest Hearst’s famous mansion in California called San Simeon

One remarkable aspect of Citizen Kane’s treatment of William Randolph Hearst is that it treats its subject with many of the same methods of yellow journalism employed by its subject

Perspective #4: Orson Welles

After Citizen Kane, Welles went on to make a number of films, many of them now highly acclaimed. But none compared to his first film.

Many critics have observed that Herman Mankiewicz, the screenwriter, wrote Citizen Kane as a film not only about Hearst but about Orson Welles.

Perspective #5: Mankiewicz

Hermann Mankiewicz was an experienced Hollywood writer. In the 1930s, he wrote the screenplays for dozens of Hollywood’s most successful comedies and newspaper films. Because of his drinking problem, however, Mankiewicz was fired from virtually every studio he worked for.

Citizen Kane was his chance at a comeback, so when his contract stipulated that he not be given film credit for the screenplay, he agreed. (Welles had been signed up to do a four-way contract as producer, director, writer, and actor.)

Once Mankiewicz finished the manuscript, however, he knew how good a story he had written. He fought to get credit, and finally wound up sharing it with Welles. But Welles went around saying until his death that he wrote most of the screenplay

Perspective #6: Gregg Toland and Robert Wise

Welles knew relatively little about camera work when he got to Hollywood. But rather than hindering him as a first-time director, his ignorance proved extremely valuable.  First, Welles's inexperience was instrumental in attracting Gregg Toland to the production team.

The chance to work with a director who knew little of and cared even less for studio convention prompted Toland to offer his services to Welles.

Toland took advantage of the increased depth-of-field afforded by wide-anglelenses to create a deep-focus camera style. Deep-focus cinematography allows the entire frame, foreground and background, to be in focus at once.

Robert Wise was the film’s 25 year-old editor. As such, he was primarily responsible for the film’s infamous montage sequences.

Perspective #7: Bernard Hermann and the sound designers

In Citizen Kane, sound design reaches its apex: in all aspects  Citizen Kane represents and expands upon what was possible in sound before World War II.

The lack of cinematographic knowledge Welles brought to Hollywood was more than compensated for by his aptitude for sound design. A career in radio had granted him an appreciation, unparalleled in the film industry, for the use of sound to manipulate the audience's perception of space and time.