Xanadu
The castle Citizen Kane built out of matte paintings, fog, and one real hill in California.
The pleasure dome
Citizen Kane opens on a chain-link fence, then wrought iron, then a K-crowned gate, then — up through fog, on a black mountain — a single lit window. The newsreel that follows names the place Xanadu, after the summer palace where Coleridge’s Kubla Khan decreed his stately pleasure dome, and inventories it in the cadence of a real Hearst newsreel: the world’s largest private estate, its own mountain, and "the biggest private zoo since Noah."
Built from paintings
Almost none of Xanadu was built. RKO’s budget was tight, so the palace exists as matte paintings, miniature models, borrowed jungle sets, stock footage and shadows — a few real staircases and one cavernous fireplace stitched into grandeur by Gregg Toland’s camera. The most famous house in American film is mostly air, which suits it.
San Simeon in a funhouse mirror
Every particular is San Simeon exaggerated: the private mountain, the crated statuary arriving faster than it can be uncrated, the zoo, the guests processed through in herds, the picnic convoys. What the mirror inverts is the light. The real hilltop was sunlit and loud with comedians; Marion Davies’ parties were famously fun. Xanadu is a mausoleum with a doorbell — the film needed the house to be what the man was afraid of, not what he built.