On July 30, the formal start of RKO Production #281, Welles directed one of the most important sequences of the film: the scenes set in the breakfast room of Kane’s New York home that depict the nine-year decline of the publisher’s marriage to his first wife, Emily. The cast was called for nine a.m.; after extended rehearsals, cameras rolled at three p.m.

The breakfast table sequence—in which Kane and Emily age almost a decade—was shot over two days, with retakes completed on August 10, 19, and 27. Makeup artist Maurice Seiderman recalled that the sequence was filmed in reverse order, with Welles and Ruth Warrick in middle age during the first takes, long out of love and virtually ignoring each other as they eat.

(As if the mutual silence of Kane and Emily during the final shot of the breakfast room scene were not enough to illustrate their estrangement, Welles and Mankiewicz included a particularly nasty visual slap: in the final shot of the sequence, Kane reads the Inquirer, but Emily reads the Chronicle.)

As the breakfast room scenes were filmed, Seiderman removed the actors’ makeup layer by layer, with the characters becoming progressively younger. Then only the base makeup remained on Welles and Warrick when they appeared in the first scenes set in the breakfast room—innocent, beautiful, and in love. The first official day of shooting concluded at eight p.m.

On August 1, RKO hosted the only formal press gathering held during the production. The reporters saw little— only the scenes of Kane’s wedding to Emily Monroe Norton photographed for the News on the March newsreel, as filmed on the lawn at RKO in Culver City in front of a backdrop of the White House.

The scenes shot that day revealed nothing of the film’s story, and when reporters pressed Welles for details, he evaded their questions. The New York Times reported that the film “covers the last 60 years of the American scene,” while the Hollywood Reporter said Welles would be playing a “robber baron industrialist.”

However, the film industry trade paper had already moved closer to the truth when it reported three days earlier that “despite denials from the Orson Welles contingent, insiders insist Little Orson Annie’s flicker is based on the life of a well- known publisher.

“Treatment of the personality,” declared the Hollywood Reporter, “is sympathetic throughout”…