Steve the Owl's Blog

This blog post will conclude my five-part series on Citizen Kane, the greatest movie ever made, with a look at the man behind the movie, and what led him to such greatness: both the positives and the negatives. (A lot of the information from this blog comes from the documentary The Battle Over Citizen Kane.)

Early Success

Orson Welles was born in 1915 in Wisconsin. His family life was filled with turmoil, with his mother dying when he was nine, and his often-absent father dying six years later. Young Orson would respond to this grief by throwing himself into the world of art. Later in life, he described himself at this point as “Spoiled in a different way. When I would play, people said they never heard such playing. When I would paint, they said they never saw such painting. When I would write, they said that they never read such writing.” There is no question that Orson Welles was extremely talented in many fields, including, but not limited to, acting, writing, directing, magic, oratory, voiceover work, political activism, and public relations. He was a man of large appetite in nearly every sense of the word, and he put a lot of that energy into his art.

A Visionary on the Stage

These skills came together for Orson Welles in 1936. As part of the Works Progress Administration, a Depression-era jobs program, Welles was hired by the Federal Theatre Project, which was designed to find work for unemployed actors. Welles went to New York, and he hired actors to perform the works of Shakespeare radically re-imagined. His first effort was to move Macbeth to Haiti, in a play that became known as Voodoo Macbeth. This is where his penchant for risk-taking appears. While most directors are content with showing Shakespeare in its classical setting, others try to make the play work in different surroundings to make the play more relevant. Sometimes, this works better than others, but when it works, it can be an amazing sight to see.

Not only was Welles taking a risk by moving his play to Haiti, but he was also taking a risk by his choices in actors. One of the actors acknowledged that the literacy of most of the actors (himself included) made performing Macbeth very difficult to learn, regardless of the setting. However, the anticipation in New York could not have been greater, and all of the movers and shakers and opinion-makers made the trip to Harlem to witness this play and the vision of its 20-year-old director, and it was met with wild acclaim.

Then, in 1937, Welles turned to his next project, a re-imagining of Julius Caesar, this time set in Nazi Germany with lights as the only set decoration. Welles furiously wrote and re-wrote the version of the script that would appear on the stage. However, the first night, everyone was shocked to learn that there was absolutely no curtain call. Worried that this play would fail, Welles then re-inserted a scene with the murder of a minor character. When the play was performed with this scene, the scene would always get a standing ovation of about three minutes. In the words of the man who played the assassinated character, “Everyone surrounded me in this menacing way, and then the lights died, and the organ hit all of the bass notes, signifying that my character was dead, and it stopped the show. To use an old showbiz expression, it literally stopped the show.” This performance of Julius Caesar is often mentioned as the most important staging of Shakespeare in the history of the American stage.

A New Medium

Welles’ relationship with the Federal Theatre Project ended after Julius Ceasar, and Orson Welles formed the Mercury Theater. However, in order to fund his plays, Orson began to work in radio, often performing at both CBS and NBC. His schedule was so frantic that he found a loophole in city law, and hired ambulances to rush him from one studio to the next. (New York has since made a law that only sick people can hire ambulances.) By the fall of 1938, he landed a series with CBS, The Mercury Playhouse. Similar to his work on the stage, he arranged classical works of literature and drama.

His most famous radio effort came October 30, 1938. His show ran Sunday evenings against the much more popular Edgar Bergen/Charlie McCarthy Hour. He decided to stage War of the Worlds, based on the H.G. Wells novel written at the turn of the century. However, he decided to do so through his understanding of the medium: Rather than re-enact the story as a straight drama, Welles knew that Edgar Bergen often took his first commercial break at 12 minutes past the hour. People were known to flip the dial (thus demonstrating that channel surfing predates TV), and this was when the first news bulletin interrupted the music being played at CBS. The news bulletins told the story of a Martian invasion, which led to widespread panic. Welles, despite warnings from CBS top brass, refused to interrupt the show and tell people that it was fake.

Risk and Reward

There was public outcry, and people thought Welles was finished. He apologized for the scare while admitting that he was surprised that a book that had been around for 40 years would cause such a panic. However, the play was a hit, and Welles got a sponsor, and a year later, he got a contract to Hollywood, with his first movie being the greatest ever made. A movie that is so great that, on another message board when someone called American Beauty the greatest movie ever made by a first-time director, and I gently pointed out that Citizen Kane was Welles’ first movie, and he said that it was a movie that was so good that he forgot it was Welles’ first.

I am not suggesting that it is necessary to go to such great lengths, but this shows the power of taking chances. While you may not always be successful, you will learn what works and what doesn’t work, and your work will be greatly rewarded. So, what chances are you going to take today?

Welcome back to my blog. It has been a crazy week as I started my most recent semester at Temple University in my Ph.D. program. Now that I have some time off, I thought I would come back to the blog, and continue my series on Citizen Kane. As you have realized by now, I cannot find enough nice things to say about this movie. However, almost as compelling as the movie itself is the story behind the movie. If you have never seen the movie The Battle Over Citizen Kane, initially presented as a PBS documentary for American Experience, it is a fascinating tale in its own right. One of the things that makes the story so compelling is the behind the scenes battle between Orson Welles, the movie’s auteur, and William Randolph Hearst, the primary inspiration for the movie. The narrator says that “each man was a genius in his own right, and the battle would ultimately destroy them both.”

An Unwilling Subject

In 1939, 24-year-old Orson Welles was given the greatest contract ever given to someone who had never directed a movie: a two-picture deal with RKO Radio Pictures giving him complete artistic control, including what every director truly desires: absolute control over the final cut. Welles made his name as a theater and radio director in New York, and the event that probably gave him his greatest notoriety with the general public was his radio adaptation of H.G. Wells’ (no relation) classic novel The War of the Worlds.

He did not want to go to Hollywood just to make blockbusters; he wanted to make truly great art. His first idea was to make an adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s novel The Heart of Darkness, only he wanted the camera to represent one of the leading actors. However, the concept faltered, and he was left without a movie. He attempted another remake, but there were issues with the rights, and ultimately, Welles decided that he should make a movie based on an original concept that he could get behind.

Finally, he had his break: Herman Mankiewicz, a friend of Kane’s who used to visit San Simeon, Hearst’s massive estate, had a falling out, and he decided to tell Welles some of his ideas for a story based on Hearst. Originally, the idea was a sort of docu-drama, but Welles and Mankiewicz, agreed to fictionalize the story, and draw examples from several tycoons and some events from Welles’ own life.

However, Hearst ultimately found out about the movie, and he did everything in his power to kill it. Threatening to use 15 years of Hollywood gossip he suppressed at the request of the major studios, as well as playing on the anti-Semitism of the day, Hearst’s pressure ultimately led to Louis B. Mayer offering RKO $800,000 (the cost of the movie) to buy the negatives with the intent of burning them. He also tried to put pressure on Orson Welles by questioning his sexual orientation, his relationship with actress Dolores Del Rio, who was not yet divorced when the relationship began, questioning Welles’ patriotism (He failed his Army draft physical due to a heart murmur, but he was only 25 at the time, so he was vulnerable on this front.), and red-baiting, ultimately leading to an FBI file.

Welles Fights Back

However, Welles and everyone involved with the movie knew that they had something great. Welles was convinced that the audiences would love the movie if only they had a chance to see it. So, he countered with an offer of $1 million to buy the film to distribute it himself, and the threat of a lawsuit if RKO ever did sell the negatives. He then pled his case on the grounds of free speech.

Ultimately, I don’t think I need to tell you the end result. Welles won his argument and the film was released on May 1, 1941, five days before his twenty-sixth birthday. However, orders came from on high that no Hearst newspaper would ever accept advertisements for Citizen Kane, no Hearst newspaper would ever review Citizen Kane, and pressure was put on the movie theaters not to show any RKO movies because of their association with the movie. Ultimately, the movie had a decent box office run, earning $650,000 in its initial release (still the sixth-highest of the year) due in part to the problems with distribution.

However, it had won numerous critics’ awards, and the reviews were overwhelmingly positive (it is one of the few movies to earn a 100% rating from the website Rotten Tomatoes), so Welles hoped for vindication at Oscar time. The movie was nominated for nine Academy Awards (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Actor, Best Cinematography, Best Editing, Best Music, Best Sound, and Best Art Direction), and Welles was nominated for four Oscars (sharing the nomination for Best Original Screenplay with Mankiewicz). Unfortunately, there was only one win, for Best Original Screenplay. The movie was quietly retired to RKO’s vault and largely forgotten.

Greatness Cannot Be Denied

However, in 1956, several events collided to gave Citizen Kane its due place in cinematic history. That year, RKO decided to release its video vault to television, and the movie found a receptive audience. Also, European filmmakers, most notably from the French New Wave, sighted the movie as a tremendous influence. Ultimately, critics started to remember the movie, and in 1962, when the British magazine Sight & Sound made its decennial list of the greatest movies of all time, Citizen Kane was named #1, a spot that it has held in each successive listing. It has been at or near the top of virtually every list of great movies. While Welles himself never enjoyed that level of success again, in part because he never won the creative control that he needed, Citizen Kane stands for all time as a monument to great cinema.

Welcome to the third part of my series on the lessons of Citizen Kane. Today, I will talk about one of the key lessons in terms of personal development from this movie. While this is a movie that has a generally downward progression, there is still a key lesson that can be learned.

Declaration of Principles

One of the key elements of foreshadowing early in the movie comes just after Charles Foster Kane takes control of the New York Daily Inquirer. In the movie, it is a struggling daily paper that Kane’s guardian and executor of his fortune foreclosed. Kane decides that he wants to try to run the newspaper, and he brings his best friend, Jedediah Leland (Joseph Cotten), who comes with Kane to work as a dramatic critic. Early in the movie, Kane is looking for something to make his paper unique, and he finally comes up with his answer: My Declaration of Principles. In the scene, he promises to give the news accurately and fairly, and to be a champion for the working man.

Jed Leland, however, warned Kane that he shouldn’t make promises unless he intends to keep them. Kane assures him that these would be kept. Leland serves as a moral compass, and he is my favorite character in the movie. At one point, Kane has a party celebrating the Inquirer‘s ranking as the highest-circulated paper in New York and buying all of the staff of the New York Chronicle. In the middle of the party, Kane is celebrating, and Leland is clearly worried. When Mr. Bernstein asks why, Leland explains that it is because he wonders whether or not Kane is keeping his principles, and whether or not the Chronicle reporters are really dedicated to the policies of Kane, or whether they will change him without him even knowing it.

The Hard Lessons of Principles

(NOTE: This part of the post contains spoilers. If you want to avoid them, please scroll to the end of the post.)

The next major point in the relationship between Kane and Leland comes 18 years later in 1916, when Charles Foster Kane ran for governor against entrenched political boss Jim W. Gettys. Leland is the first character to give a speech for the Kane campaign, calling him “that fighting liberal” and the man to clean up after the corruption of the Gettys Administration. By the end of the campaign, Kane is the heavy favorite. However, Leland seems to hold back his enthusiasm at the beginning of the speech, only giving in to the thrill of the crowd later.

While Kane is the heavy favorite, Gettys is not licked yet. Instead, he knows that Kane has been visiting a young girl, and whether there was an inappropriate relationship or not (which is somewhat vague in the movie), it certainly looked bad, and a story is planted about them. After the election, Leland tells him that he talks about the people as if he owns them, and he says that he wants to move to Chicago because he doesn’t want to be there after the election.

Then, when Kane is with his second wife, she premieres the Chicago Opera House. The rest of the reporters for the Chicago Inquirer give her positive reviews, but Leland is passed out in the back room. Kane and Mr. Bernstein walk in, and they see that he has started to write a bad review. Kane finishes the review Leland wanted to write, and fired him.

In another flashback, we find out that Leland was given a $25,000 severance check (Keep in mind that this part of the story took place in the 1920′s, so this was a substantial amount of money.), which Leland delivers to him ripped up with the Declaration of Principles. Kane tears up the Declaration of Principles.

The Lesson

This part of the movie shows the beginning of the deterioration of Kane’s life. However, the real point to me is what that moment says about Jed Leland, and about people in real life. Leland did the right thing. He went into the newspaper business as something that is described early in the movie as somewhat of a “college boy prank.” However, Leland is really an idealist at heart with unshakeable principles.

His true loyalty to the movie isn’t to Charles Foster Kane, or to himself, but to principles. While there, he is the one who always worries when principles are at risk, and he is willing to sacrifice in order to maintain his principles when they are challenged. When he is shown later in the movie, he is someone of a genial temperament who is at piece with the decisions he made in his life. So, no matter what it is that you want to do in life, never forget your own Declaration of Principles, but remember to hold to them like Jed Leland, not Charles Foster Kane.

Welcome to the second part in my series on what I consider to be the greatest movie ever made, Citizen Kane. The first post was more of a general entry on why I think that this is the greatest movie ever made. Today, I will get into some of the specific elements that made the movie great, beginning with the innovations of this movie, both technical and storytelling.

Different from the Beginning

One of the things that a viewer of classic films will note is that, unlike most movies today, the credits are front-loaded. However, Citizen Kane lets the viewer know that it will be different by simply opening the play with two cards for the credit. Both are on a black background, with the first opening with “A Mercury Production” and the words “by Orson Welles” dissolving in, with the title occupying the entire screen for the next card. One of the things that makes it such a shocking opening is that there is no music or anything for those few seconds. Then, the movie shows a light that stays in the back right hand portion of the screen, beginning with a “No Trespassing” sign. Each shot (involving a mix of actual scenery and matte paintings) gets closer to a mansion, with the light remaining in nearly the same shot the entire time. As the shot is up on the building, the lights go out, and when the lights come back on, you are in the room. There is an old man holding a snow globe, and he says the most famous one-word line in all of movies, “Rosebud,” drops the snow globe, it breaks, and in the next shot a nurse covers him with a sheet. My description is inadequate to describe the brilliance of this scene, so I will let the movie speak for itself (NOTE: The original aspect ratio of the movie was 1.33:1, so this is not scan-and-pan. It is the shown the way Orson Welles intended, except for the notice from the censors at the beginning. SPOILER ALERT: This video links to the original YouTube video. The comments there contain spoilers.):

What is the other thing that is so interesting to me about the innovations in this movie is how commonplace some of them seem today. After all, if someone points out that it was an innovation to begin at the end of the story, and summarize the story, which is then re-told through a series of flashbacks, that would not seem to be so daring. However, only two movies before Citizen Kane involved any flashback sequences at all, and one of them, Wuthering Heights, was based on a book that relied on just that. This was the first movie to tell the story in a completely non-linear way.

The Camera Angles That Shook the World

Another surprising element to the innovation of Citizen Kane is that, at the time, ceilings were never seen in movies. This is because they were shot on sets where the camera angles were mostly a straightforward one. However, Citizen Kane changed everything by using camera angles to tell a story. Orson Welles wanted camera angles so extreme that he literally dug out part of the floors of some of the sets in order to get his desired camera angle of floor height facing up, often with low ceilings to make the characters seem even more mythic. (In the famous party scene where Charles Foster Kane is dancing with chorus girls, Orson Welles nearly hits his head on the ceiling.) If there was a character who had a diminished or weakened role, the camera would always face down (such as with Kane’s second wife, who is often sitting on the floor).

Credit Where It Is Due

Perhaps the greatest contributor to the innovations of Citizen Kane from a technical level was Gregg Toland, who had worked in Hollywood for years as a cinematographer and was experimenting with deep focus photography. The key element of deep focus photography is that it demands attention from the viewer because, unlike traditional photography, the entire frame is in focus. Scenes of Kane’s childhood have Kane’s parents and Walter P. Thatcher discussing the future of young Charlie, and the eight-year old Kane is playing in the background just as clearly, forcing the audience to see all of the things that are going on at once. Even in scenes where Toland couldn’t pull it off, he used split screens to the same effect, such as a scene involving Kane and Jed Leland (Joseph Cotten) that had issues due to lighting, but the timing of the two actors was such that this special effect is completely invisible.

Willingness to Experiment

The reason Gregg Toland wanted to work on Citizen Kane was because he knew of Orson Welles’ penchant for daring from his theater and radio days. As a first-time director, Welles was open to suggestion, and he wanted to do something like no one had ever seen before. Some of the ideas may have seemed crazy at the time, but there is a reason why this movie is celebrated. As you build your business, there may be ideas that you have had that could totally change the industry. What would happen if you tried them and they worked?

Those of you who have read my blog knows that I have watched a lot of movies, and what you may not have yet picked up on is that some of the movies that I really enjoy are the great movies that have made the canon of great cinema. One movie that seems to show up over and over again at the top of the list of the great American or English-language films is Citizen Kane. I knew of its reputation, but for the longest time, I thought that the greatest American movie ever made was Gone with the Wind. In some ways, I think that the latter may say more about America, but I believe that Citizen Kane has more than earned its reputation as the greatest movie ever made. Because of its impact and its myriad of lessons, I have decided to offer a series of blog posts on Citizen Kane.

Ahead of Its Time

The first time I saw Citizen Kane, I was 22 years old. I was a junior at West Virginia University, and as a Christmas present, my parents gave me a VCR for my apartment in Morgantown. The local grocery store had a video store adjunct, and it had a section for classical films. This being a college town, some of them were part of the canon, including works by Bergman and Fellini (although I never watched any of those). They had a copy of Citizen Kane, and I thought that I would see what the hype was about. When I saw the movie, I could not believe that it was made in 1941. The camera angles, the lighting, the method of story telling: everything about that movie screamed something that was truly great and magnificent and in a class all by itself.

A Clear Dividing Line

One of the most amazing things about any great work of art, or any great artist (such as Marlon Brando), is the way that one sees a clear dividing line between the things that happened before and the things that happened after. Some of the innovations in Citizen Kane have become so appropriated in film since that it is hard to see just how revolutionary they were at the time. For example, it was the first movie to have a non-linear narration. This is something that is so commonplace today that moviegoers are used to seeing dates in place to keep one oriented in time.

Citizen Kane uses a different tactic. The movie begins with the title character’s death in 1941 and his last word, “Rosebud.” Then, the movie shows a newsreel to give a basic summary of the events of the story of the life of Charles Foster Kane, a thinly-veiled biography of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst with some elements of other figures and elements from the life of its visionary creator Orson Welles. Then, the movie retells the story through several witnesses, sometimes jumping back and forth chronologically (such as multiple tellings of his second wife’s musical career) in order to tell the story.

The Story Itself

Even if the movie were only a collection of technical advancements, it would certainly be remembered as a great film, but the real genius of the movie would be considered Gregg Toland, the cinematographer, not its director, producer, star, and co-writer. The movie is a compelling story of someone who started off with lofty ideals, but someone who became a victim of his own success whose methods were ill-suited for a new age. Seeing the deterioration of the relationship between Kane and his childhood friend Jed Leland is something that was painful to anyone who knows what it is like to see people drifting apart.

This is a movie that shows what happens when visionaries have a dream, have the talent, have the skill, and have the drive to make something that is truly great. Come back for more of the specific lessons from the greatest movie ever made.