Citizen Kane

The contract

In 1939 RKO signed the twenty-four-year-old Orson Welles — famous for panicking radio audiences and reinventing Broadway — to a deal no first-time director had ever gotten and few have gotten since: his own production, his own cast, and final cut. He and screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz chose as their subject the rise and hollowing of a newspaper titan named Charles Foster Kane.

Kane vs. Hearst

Mankiewicz had been a guest at San Simeon until his drinking got him quietly uninvited, and he wrote what he had seen: the private mountain, the zoo, the shy blonde mistress, the great man’s terror of being unloved. Kane is not Hearst — the film’s Kane dies alone, and Hearst never did — but the address was unmistakable.

Hearst’s response was total. His papers refused all mention of the film and all RKO advertising; his columnists threatened studios with what else might get printed. MGM’s Louis B. Mayer, on behalf of the industry, offered RKO more than $800,000 — the film’s full cost — to destroy the negative. RKO declined, barely. Theater chains declined the film instead.

Reception

Reviews were extraordinary; box office was not. The film limped through a suppressed release, took nine Academy Award nominations, was booed at the ceremony, and won only Original Screenplay — the one Oscar Welles shared with Mankiewicz. RKO put the negative in the vault and moved on.

Resurrection

Postwar French critics, 1950s television and a 1956 re-release dug it back up, and by 1962 Sight & Sound’s once-a-decade poll of critics named Citizen Kane the greatest film ever made. It held that seat for fifty years — five consecutive polls — until Vertigo unseated it in 2012. The deep-focus photography, the ceilings, the overlapping sound, the narrative told in contradictory testimonies: its inventions became the grammar. The sled became an industry. See Rosebud and Xanadu.