Newly-revealed stories about Citizen Kane
“If you could have found out about what Rosebud meant,
I bet that would’ve explained everything.”
(Reporter at Xanadu)
Citizen Kane: A Filmmaker’s Journey features never-before-published documents from the Hearst and Welles archives, the University of Michigan, and the Museum of Modern Art (New York), to examine six new topics about the film:
- Welles’ role in writing the screenplay, which was larger than formerly understood
- Previously-unreleased information provided by Welles’ assistant Kathryn (Trosper) Popper, which describes Welles’ struggles with creating the film
- The impact on the production of a previously-unexplored script that Welles created after the studio approved a final draft
- Eyewitness accounts of last-second writing by Welles
- New scenes written during production to fix flaws in the story
- Newly-released information about the plans by the Hearst organization to suppress or destroy Citizen Kane and discredit Welles.
Here are 10 of the never-before-told stories that are featured in Citizen Kane: a Filmmaker’s Journey:
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Revelations from Welles’ assistant Kathryn Trosper
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Herman Mankiewicz’s shopping list
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The boy genius has problems as a director
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Welles’ drunken hospital adventure
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The “lost” script
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The endless writing
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The beginnings of a new scene
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Last-second panic
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The plot to stop Welles and Citizen Kane
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Communist witch hunts
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Revelations from Welles’ assistant Kathryn Trosper
Several new stories in Citizen Kane: A Filmmaker’s Journey were possible thanks to Joe and Laura Popper, the son and daughter of Kathryn Trosper, Welles’ assistant during production.
Among the treasures provided to Lebo was a previously-unreleased document that Kathryn prepared after a May 23, 1940 meeting between Welles, Mankiewicz, and John Houseman (Welles’ former creative partner who managed Mankiewicz and edited the early script drafts).
While Trosper described the atmosphere at the meeting as “friendly,” she also noted many disagreements. For instance, when describing the dialogue for the scene at the beginning of Kane’s control of the Inquirer, and giving orders to investigate the disappearance of a “Mrs. Silverstone,” the writers’ views about the scene were crystal clear:
SILVERSTONE SEQUENCE
Houseman: Too long.
Welles: Loves it.
Mank: It stinks!
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Herman Mankiewicz’s shopping list
While creating the first draft of Citizen Kane, hard-drinking writer Herman Mankiewicz tried to make light of the alcohol-free policy imposed on him. He wrote a “shopping list” across the first page of an early script draft, requesting:
12 bottles of good scotch
4 b. seltzer water
1 box legal pads
Rem Std. 12 [a heavy-duty typewriter]
and a sexy steno
Manky
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The boy genius has problems as a director
On the set of Citizen Kane, it quickly became clear that Welles’ lack of practical filmmaking knowledge was hindering his progress. In spite of his boy genius stature, Welles’ transition from stage to film was not always a graceful one.
The problem was Welles’ lack of familiarity with the fundamentals of Hollywood filmmaking—those standard on-set working methods that traditionally-trained directors learn over months or years as they advance through the production ranks.
For example, Welles was stymied by how to add visual interest to the confrontation in Susan’s second apartment, where “Boss” Jim Gettys threatens to destroy Kane’s political career by publicly exposing his relationship to Susan.
“I had no idea what to do,” Welles said. “That was just a scene in a room, and it seemed to me so boring. I just went away.”
Welles tried to work out his problem by sketching the scene on paper. In material from Welles’ personal files, Lebo discovered a drawing in a shooting script: never seen before publicly, on the back side of the sheet before the confrontation scene begins is a diagram created by Welles’ that shows a rough diamond-shaped plan as viewed from above for staging the scene, with marks for characters.
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Welles’ drunken hospital adventure
During his work on Citizen Kane, Welles injured himself severely once: on August 10, less than two weeks into production, Welles, in full costume and make-up, was rehearsing Kane’s confrontation with “Boss” Jim Gettys—the shot in which Kane screams, “I’m going to send you to Sing Sing!” While running down a staircase, Welles fell heavily on his left ankle, chipping the bone.
It was a painful injury; Welles’ assistant Kathryn Trosper, recalled Welles “was in a heap at the bottom of the stairs, howling with pain.”
Trosper accompanied Welles to the hospital in his limousine. The day began to descend into drunken hijinks when Welles started to self-medicate with liberal doses of alcohol.
At the hospital, a sozzled Welles was shuttled into a wheelchair and rolled to a room. Still in costume and makeup as a middle-aged Kane, Welles was a sight; drunk, perspiring, and in pain, his finely crafted makeup appliances began to peel off his face, “hanging down in strips,” said Trosper. “He was truly frightful looking.”
Trosper left Welles’ room to sign the medical paperwork. When she returned, Welles was gone.
Welles had wheeled himself away on a rolling binge. “With a whoop he went lickety-split down the hallway in his wheelchair, scaring the hell out of people,” Trosper said. “He crashed into a couple of patient rooms, yelled ‘surprise!’ and scared them half to death.
“Orson was pretty wild-eyed when I caught up with him,” said Trosper. “I finally got him back in his room, and he was very happy.”
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The “Lost” Script
No study of Citizen Kane identified any script draft that was produced after the “final” script that was approved by the studio in mid-July 1940—until now.
Lebo discovered that two copies of Welles’ final version of a script for Citizen Kane do exist: at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and at the University of Michigan are the only known copies of the document that may be the final draft of a shooting script of Citizen Kane.
The 85-page Correction Script showed that Welles had deleted many pages of discussion and unnecessary plot points that appeared in the final official script. Lebo found that Welles also trimmed dialogue and tightened many remaining scenes, eventually cutting more than 20 minutes of scenes from the final shooting script.
Yet there would still be more work to come…
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The endless writing
By mid-September, production of Citizen Kane was proceeding smoothly, but Welles was still writing. And writing. Even after the completion of the Correction Script in mid-July, Welles continued to revise, create new material, and revise again in a frantic race to keep ahead of the production schedule.
Welles’ work on the script continued everywhere and at all hours; assistant Kathryn Trosper, who was with Welles every moment he was not shooting or acting, went to the studio each morning for Welles’ makeup sessions to conduct business, sometimes arriving as early as 2 a.m., and often taking dictation for script revisions while Welles was being prepped.
Mercury assistant Richard Baer recalled a similar pace to the rewriting. “It is not possible,” Baer said, “to fix the actual number of complete redrafts by Welles, as changes were being continuously made on portions that had previously beenwritten.”
Welles would often turn to his cast and crew for participation in the rewrites. Welles was not looking for ad-libs in front of the camera, but rather an exchange between actors and their director in discussions of what worked and what didn’t.
“If a shot didn’t work, Orson changed it on the set,” Trosper said. “If an actor came up with a better line, he used it.”
Given the pressured circumstances, some—maybe all—of the final scenes that were rewritten after the Correction Script was produced may have emerged from Welles’ editing on the set, and working with the actors.
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The beginnings of a new scene
Welles may have been writing whenever he could spare the time.
In material from Welles’ personal files, Lebo discovered a previously-unknown document written on the back of a page in a shooting script: in Welles’ handwriting are notes for the scene in which Kane signs over his bankrupt financial empire to lawyer Walter Thatcher, his former guardian — a scene that was written until a few days before it was filmed.
Welles scribbled: “Well Charles—our foreclosure of your international newspaper syndicate is only business—after all you’ve been able to print your opinion for over 30 years now. Kane— Yes.”
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Last-second panic
Lebo’s research also found that when the “final” shooting script was approved only days before production began, several key scenes were not yet written, and many other key scenes needed to be condensed or cut entirely. And later, Welles shrewdly recognized late in production that he needed to add depth to Kane’s character.
To fix this, Welles created a sequence of four new scenes, three of which would become some of the most vibrant of the film, followed by another scene that would be one of the most insightful—all produced from start to finish with incredible speed.
The first three scenes link the start and finish of Thatcher’s role as Kane’s guardian, and one other shows their relationship late in their lives.
In an inspired decision, Welles decided to develop Kane’s personality by focusing on the memories of his lawer, Walter Thatcher, who at this point would seem like the least likable character in the entire film and someone who could never inspire sympathy in an audience.
Through a series of amusing vignettes, Welles shows Kane’s moral character through the banker’s growing frustration with Kane’s news coverage and by the banker looking directly to the audience for understanding.
Then Welles wrote another scene that moves ahead to Kane’s final business failure: signing back the custody of his ruined empire to Thatcher’s bank.
Creating new material during the height of production meant that the RKO production staff needed to prepare all of the elements of Welles’ new scenes—including script, set designs, construction, costumes, and casting—literally at the last minute before they were filmed.
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The plot to stop Welles and Citizen Kane
Lebo discovered that the plot against Welles, RKO, and Citizen Kane was much darker and more insidious than previously known.
As usually reported, the eruption over Citizen Kane within the Hearst organization supposedly began after a rough cut of the film was viewed in January 1941 by Hollywood columnists Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons.
However, Lebo found that the plot against Welles, RKO, and Citizen Kane began long before Hopper and Parsons saw the film.
Lebo discovered that 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 plot had its origins more than four months earlier when Hearst officials, learning bits about the film’s story from insiders, began to suspect that the Kane character was intended to be modeled on Hearst.
Lebo found letters and memos in Hearst’s personal papers that, combined with period news accounts, reveal the extent of the thoroughly-planned conspiracy to suppress the film’s release: the Hearst organization coordinated a national effort to crush Citizen Kane and discredit Orson Welles, first by colluding with other movie studios and theater owners to prevent the film’s release, 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.
Lebo describes evidence that columnist Louella Parsons, a supposedly-objective journalist, actively participated in the conspiracy by pressuring studio executives to encourage RKO to shelve the film, and threatening theater owners with boycotts of coverage in her column if they screened Citizen Kane.
In the first few weeks of 1941, the pressure applied by the Hearst organization grew to such extremes that there were moments when Citizen Kane was in grave danger of never being seen by the public and instead winding up in the incinerator, negative and all.
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Communist witch hunts
The worst of the attacks by Hearst on Welles was a Communist witch hunt that was planned and managed at the top level of the Hearst organization, with Welles as the target.
“Our friend, Welles, is a pretty bad boy and is mixed up with the Leftists,” Berlin wrote to Joseph Willicombe. “Hollywood is due for a good purging as the picture industry, I am sure, has a healthy representation from the Communist Party.”
Lebo found that Berlin sent to Hearst “a preliminary, and rather hasty” investigation of Welles in a summary that Berlin believed showed how Welles “acted as a front for the Community Party, if not an actual member.”
Berlin’s report also reinforced that the Hearst organization was in bed with the Congressional investigators who had hunted Communists in Hollywood.
“We have the complete assurance from our friends in Washington that the result of the investigation made by them over a period of a year-and-a-half of the motion picture industry is available to us,” Berlin told Willicombe. “This should be extremely valuable.”
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Chapter excerpts (here)→