The rumor mill spins endlessly in Hollywood. In 1940, as now, the movie business conceals few secrets, and late in the year many of the insider whisperings involved the filming on Orson Welles’ closed set.

The gossip started shortly after filming commenced. Welles had not hidden that his picture portrayed the life of a fictional newspaper publisher, but as production progressed, the word began to spread that the film was a near factual exposé of one of the most powerful men in America: William Randolph Hearst, a media giant whose corporate web at its height included 26 newspapers, 16 magazines, 11 radio stations, and five news services.

As usually recalled, the story of the conspiracy against Citizen Kane, because of its supposed parallels to Hearst, began with Welles caught in the festering power struggle between movie columnists Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons, two ruthless competitors in the Hollywood gossip factory.

As the story goes, Hopper, after seeing a rough cut during the first week of January, alerted the Hearst organization to the “dangers” of Citizen Kane, and Parsons then saw the film and took up the Hearst cause with an unprecedented pressure campaign by a journalist against the film industry.

Although Parsons (who wrote for Hearst) and Hopper (a syndicated columnist at the Los Angeles Times and Parsons’ main competitor) had been the most vocal of Welles’ supporters when he arrived in Hollywood, they would later exercise their considerable influence within the film industry to try to ruin his film.

But the plot against Welles, RKO, and Citizen Kane was much darker and more insidious than the results of a feud between two gossip columnists. Before Hopper and Parsons seemingly started the war against Citizen Kane, the Hearst organization—working under the direction of the corporation’s senior leadership and with the knowledge of Hearst himself—was already planning to disrupt the film.

The Hearst organization coordinated a national effort to crush Citizen Kane and discredit Orson Welles, first by trying to prevent the film’s release and then by blackmailing Hollywood’s leadership, Red-baiting Welles and his associates, publishing a blitz of distorted articles about the director, and ultimately scheming to force RKO to destroy the film.

The full story of Citizen Kane and Hearst remains a black cloud over this period in American journalism: a newspaper organization that described itself as standing for “Genuine Democracy,” with words like Character, Quality, and An American Paper for the American People featured prominently at the top of most editions, considered itself so menaced that it tore up the First Amendment and ignored the right to free expression in its efforts to destroy the film.

In the first few weeks of 1941, whether Citizen Kane actually depicted the life of William Randolph Hearst or not was irrelevant; Louella Parsons believed it, Hedda Hopper believed it, and Hearst’s legion of lawyers, editors, and in formants most certainly believed it. The pressure applied by the Hearst organization grew to such extremes that early in 1941, there were moments when Citizen Kane was in grave danger of never being seen by the public and instead winding up in the incinerator, the whole negative and all…