Citizen Kane

• 1. Introduction

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  Citizen Kane opens on a dying man in a vast Florida mansion called Xanadu, clutching a snow globe as he whispers one word: "Rosebud." That single utterance launches a film-long investigation into the life of Charles Foster Kane, and the audience never stops wondering what it means until the very last frame. The 1941 film was directed, produced, co-written, and starred in by Orson Welles, making his feature film debut at a moment when Hollywood had never seen anything quite like him. How did a theater director with no film experience walk into a Hollywood studio and emerge with what would later be called the greatest film ever made? And who, exactly, was Charles Foster Kane?

• 2. The Unprecedented Contract

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  Hollywood had been circling Orson Welles since 1936. He turned down Warner Bros., declined an offer from David O. Selznick to run a story department, and passed on a supporting role William Wyler wanted him to take in Wuthering Heights. Biographer Frank Brady wrote that despite the possibility of large sums in Hollywood, Welles was "totally, hopelessly, insanely in love with the theater." What finally changed his mind was the aftermath of his 1938 radio broadcast of "The War of the Worlds" on The Mercury Theatre on the Air, which convinced RKO Pictures studio head George J. Schaefer that Welles had a rare gift for commanding mass attention.

  Welles arrived on the RKO lot on the 20th of July, 1939, and promptly called the movie studio "the greatest electric train set a boy ever had." He signed his contract on the 21st of August, 1939. The terms were extraordinary: Welles would act in, direct, produce, and write two films; Mercury would receive $100,000 for the first and $125,000 for the second, plus a share of profits. RKO executives were barred from viewing any footage until Welles chose to show it to them, and no cuts could be made without his approval. This final-cut privilege was unprecedented in Hollywood, and the film industry's reaction was immediate resentment. The Hollywood press mocked both RKO and Welles relentlessly.

  Welles spent five months trying to launch his first project. A first-person camera adaptation of Heart of Darkness collapsed when he could not trim $50,000 from its budget. A political thriller called The Smiler with a Knife, from a Cecil Day-Lewis novel, stalled in December 1939. It was then that Welles began brainstorming with screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, who had been writing radio scripts for the Mercury. Biographer Richard Meryman wrote that these two "powerful, headstrong, dazzlingly articulate personalities thrashed toward Kane."

• 3. Writing Rosebud

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  Mankiewicz based the original story outline on William Randolph Hearst, whom he knew socially and had come to despise after being exiled from Hearst's circle. In February 1940, Welles gave Mankiewicz 300 pages of notes and sent him off under contract to write a first draft, supervised by John Houseman, Welles's former Mercury Theatre partner. Meanwhile, Welles stayed in Hollywood and wrote his own version in parallel. He later condensed both drafts drastically, rearranged scenes, and added material of his own.

  The question of who truly wrote Citizen Kane became one of the most contested disputes in film history. The original contract stated that Mankiewicz would receive no on-screen credit. As the film neared release, Mankiewicz threatened to take out full-page trade paper advertisements and have his friend Ben Hecht write an expose for The Saturday Evening Post. He also threatened the Screen Writers Guild with a claim of sole authorship. The dispute was resolved in January 1941 when RKO awarded Mankiewicz a credit. According to Welles's assistant Richard Wilson, it was Welles himself who penciled a circle around Mankiewicz's name and drew an arrow moving it to first position on the credit form. The official credit reads: "Screenplay by Herman J. Mankiewicz and Orson Welles."

  In 1971, film critic Pauline Kael revived the debate with a 50,000-word essay called "Raising Kane," commissioned as an introduction to the shooting script and first published in two consecutive issues of The New Yorker in February of that year. Film scholar Robert L. Carringer countered in his 1978 essay "The Scripts of Citizen Kane," after reviewing all seven drafts in RKO's own records, and concluded that "the full evidence reveals that Welles's contribution to the Citizen Kane script was not only substantial but definitive."

  As for "Rosebud" itself, Welles credited the word to Mankiewicz. Biographer Richard Meryman suggested the symbol traced to a treasured bicycle Mankiewicz had as a child, stolen while he visited a public library and never replaced by his family as punishment. Patrick McGilligan's 2015 Welles biography reported that Mankiewicz himself said the word came from a famous racehorse named Old Rosebud. Mankiewicz had bet on the horse in the 1914 Kentucky Derby and won, and the horse represented for him a lost youth.

• 4. Learning Cinema in Secret

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  Production advisor Miriam Geiger compiled a handmade film textbook for Welles so he could teach himself the craft. He matched its visual vocabulary against John Ford's Stagecoach, which he watched 40 times, often with different department heads present so he could question them about specific techniques. "How was this done? Why was this done?" he would ask. "It was like going to school," he said.

  Cinematographer Gregg Toland came to Welles uninvited. Welles described Toland as "just then, the number-one cameraman in the world," and was astonished when Toland appeared at his office and said, "I want you to use me on your picture." Toland later explained that he sought out a first-time director precisely because Welles's inexperience and reputation for audacious theater work would allow him to try camera techniques that established Hollywood directors would never have permitted. RKO hired Toland on loan from Samuel Goldwyn Productions in the first week of June 1940.

  On the 29th of June, 1940, a Saturday morning chosen to minimize curious studio executives, Welles began filming without informing RKO that the picture was underway. The early footage was logged on all paperwork as "Orson Welles Tests." The first scene filmed was the News on the March projection room sequence, shot economically in an actual studio projection room, with actors hidden in darkness. Barton Whaley noted that at $809 this single scene ran well beyond its $528 test budget. Subsequent scenes, including the El Rancho nightclub and Susan's suicide attempt, were filmed on sets built for other productions.

  Physical costs mounted on Welles himself. He fell ten feet while shooting a confrontation scene on a staircase, and an X-ray revealed two bone chips in his ankle. He directed the film from a wheelchair for two weeks afterward and eventually wore a steel brace to resume acting on camera. The contact lenses that made his eyes look aged were so painful a doctor had to place them in daily, and the sculptural aging make-up required Welles to arrive on set at 2:30 in the morning, since its application took three and a half hours. Principal photography officially wrapped on the 24th of October, 1940, with the very last scene filmed on the 30th of November: Kane's death.

• 5. The Craft Beneath the Image

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  Toland's most celebrated contribution was the extended use of deep focus, which kept subjects in sharp relief from eighteen inches to over two hundred feet from the lens simultaneously. Toland described this technique, which he called "pan-focus," in an article for Theatre Arts magazine. He had spent two years developing it before using it for the first time in Citizen Kane. Prior to this, cameras had to choose between close and distant focus, and the limitation forced directors to break scenes into multiple angles.

  Every set was built with a ceiling, which broke studio convention. Welles felt it was a theatrical lie to pretend ceilings did not exist, calling the standard practice "a big lie in order to get all those terrible lights up there." Many ceilings were made of muslin fabric that concealed microphones. Camera boxes were cut into the floors for extreme low-angle shots. For one scene between Kane and Leland after an election loss, a hole was drilled directly into concrete to position the camera.

  Make-up artist Maurice Seiderman, technically only an apprentice in the RKO make-up department, created the aging effects for the principal cast. He made plaster casts of each actor's face and a full plaster mold of Welles's body down to the hips, then sculpted the aging in white modeling clay before casting the pieces in a soft plastic compound of his own formulation. The skin pores on Kane's face were created by stippling the surface with a negative cast made from an orange peel. When the make-up department head refused to share his screen credit with Seiderman, Welles eliminated the make-up credit entirely and instead placed a signed advertisement in the Los Angeles newspaper publicly thanking Seiderman by name as "the best make-up man in the world."

  Art director Perry Ferguson built 81 sets according to official budget records, though Ferguson himself counted between 106 and 116. His budget was cut by 33 percent before filming began, which cost him $58,775 in total. Photographs of Oheka Castle in Huntington, New York, a real estate owned by German-Jewish investment banker Otto Hermann Kahn, stood in for the fictional Xanadu in the opening montage.

• 6. Sound and Music

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  Bernard Herrmann scored Citizen Kane after composing for Welles's Mercury Theatre on the Air. Because it was Herrmann's first film score, RKO wanted to pay him a small fee, but Welles insisted Herrmann be paid at the same rate as Max Steiner. Herrmann was given 12 weeks to write the music, where most Hollywood scores were composed in as few as two or three weeks. He worked reel by reel as the film was shot and cut, writing complete musical pieces for some montages so that Welles could edit scenes to match their length.

  Hermann introduced two governing motifs. The first, a four-note brass figure, represents Kane's power and appears in the film's opening bars. The second, played solo on the vibraphone, is Rosebud's theme, first heard at the death scene. Herrmann described his approach as "radio scoring": brief cues of five to fifteen seconds that bridge action or shift emotional register, rather than the near-continuous underscore standard in Hollywood at the time. The breakfast montage sequence that charts the collapse of Kane's first marriage uses a graceful waltz theme that darkens with each variation across five vignettes.

  For Susan Alexander Kane's operatic sequence, Welles suggested that Herrmann write a parody of a Mary Garden vehicle, using an aria from Salammbô. Herrmann composed in the style of 19th-century French Oriental opera and deliberately set the aria in a key that would force the singer to strain toward a high D, well outside the range of a voice like Susan's. Soprano Jean Forward dubbed the vocal part for Dorothy Comingore. Some incidental music came from outside Herrmann's score. A song Welles heard in Mexico, "A Poco No" by Pepe Guízar, became the publisher's theme. A 1939 jazz piece by Charlie Barnet and Haven Johnson called "In a Mizz" frames Thompson's second interview of Susan. Welles told director Henry Jaglom that Herrmann's score was 50 percent responsible for the film's artistic success.

• 7. Suppression and Rediscovery

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  William Randolph Hearst recognized himself in Charles Foster Kane before the film reached theaters and moved immediately against it. He prohibited any mention of Citizen Kane in his newspapers. The film was a critical success but failed to recoup its costs at the box office. According to RKO records, the film cost $839,727 against an estimated budget of $723,800. After its release, it faded from view.

  The reversal began with French critics. Andre Bazin and others praised the film, and it was re-released in 1956. In 1958, at the World Expo in Brussels, the film was voted number nine on the Brussels 12 list. Then in 1962 it reached the top of the British Film Institute's Sight and Sound decennial poll, where it remained for five consecutive polls through 2002. The film also topped the American Film Institute's 100 Years... 100 Movies list in 1998 and again in the 2007 update. The Library of Congress inducted it into the inaugural class of 25 films selected for the United States National Film Registry in 1989, recognizing it as culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant.

  The Academy nominated Citizen Kane in nine categories. It won one, for Best Writing (Original Screenplay), shared by Mankiewicz and Welles. Herrmann said in 1972 that starting with Citizen Kane had been such a gift that it had been "a downhill run ever since." The film's final scene required multiple takes: on the ninth take, the Culver City Fire Department arrived in full gear because the furnace had grown so hot the flue caught fire. Paul Stewart, who played Raymond the butler, recalled that Welles was delighted by the commotion.