The Big Picture - ‘Mank' Week: The Importance of ‘Citizen Kane’ and Orson Welles

Episode Date: December 1, 2020

This week marks the arrival of David Fincher’s long-awaited 'Mank,' which chronicles the screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz’s life and work on the script for 'Citizen Kane.' Sean and Amanda are joined by Chris Ryan and Adam Nayman for an expansive chat on all things 'Kane,' Orson Welles, the fight over the film's authorship, and classic Hollywood. Hosts: Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins Guests: Chris Ryan and Adam Nayman Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I'm Sean Fennessy. I'm Amanda Dobbins. And this is The Big Picture, a conversation show about Orson Welles. This week marks the arrival of David Fincher's long-awaited Mank, which chronicles the screenwriter Herman Mankowitz's life and work on the script for Citizen Kane. So today we will be talking all things Kane, Welles, and classic Hollywood with Adam Naiman and Chris Ryan. It's all coming up on The Big Picture. Chris Ryan, Adam Neyman, welcome to the show. I'm very glad that you guys are here to celebrate

Mank Week. This is a very big week here on The Big Picture, and there's so much to discuss. This is a conversation that I think can span far and wide. But before we begin and dive deeply into Citizen Kane, its making, its history, its importance, I just want to know, and I'll start with you, Chris, what does Citizen Kane mean to you? What do you make of the Citizen Kane of the world? What do I make of the Citizen Kane of the world? What do I make of the Citizen Kane of the world? Man, so this is an interesting question. I guess if you're asking what I love about the movie,

it's how full of ideas it is. I was watching a couple of YouTube videos of just different directors talking about Citizen Kane, and the one that I liked the most was Sidney Pollack. And he said, in every single scene, in every single shot, Citizen Kane has an idea. And I think that's what I took from the movie the first time I

watched it. And that's what I take from the movie when I watched it this week. I think when I watched it, I was a teenager. And you could just tell immediately that someone was telling you not only to watch the film or to follow a story, but to think about how that story was being told and why. And I don't think I'd, even at 16 or 17, whenever my dad had me watch it, I don't think I'd thought about movies in that exact way. And so in that way, Citizen Kane is sort of this incredible textbook for what you can do with a movie. Adam, what about you? In addition to being a critic, you're a scholar, you know the history of Wells quite well. What does this movie mean to you right now? I'm going to give you a really serious scholarly answer, which is that it's the first time I can remember that a movie was parodied before I saw it for the first time.

I remember what parodied it, which was Tiny Toons. There's an episode of Tiny Toons where the villainous Montana Max is kind of running for some kind of political office in the Tiny Toons world. This, by the way, is a show with animated rabbits here on the Citizen Kane podcast. And there's something about him speaking in front of a big picture of himself, which is one of the iconic images in Citizen Kane, right? Which is Kane orating in front of the big poster of himself to this crowd. One of the great examples Chris just gave of a scene that is about an idea. It's not just a political rally. It's like about the idea of political rallies and demagoguery and ego. But I think I must have watched Tiny Toons when I was eight or nine. And then I probably watched Citizen Kane when I was 10 or 11 or 12. And truly, it was one of the first times I remembered thinking, I've seen this before. I've seen this in a childish, parodic context,

and it doesn't matter. I mean, did I really see it before I saw like a Jaws joke or a 2001 joke on The Simpsons? I mean, that's splitting hairs. But it was the first time I remember watching an old, serious movie to me that transcended the joke or the parody or the imitation that had been done of it, because Citizen Kane is on the short list, among other things, of the most referenced, parodied, homaged movies ever. You could make a list of canonical movies that are based in some way or copying in some way Citizen Kane. That's a short list of

movies, and it's near the top of that. This isn't even about its greatness. This is about its copyability. That scene of wells walking in front of the mirrors and there's a thousand canes that's film history since 1941 he didn't know that when he did it but that's what i think of it is this movie that's just been copied copied parodied stolen from so many times and it transcends those things and when you re-watch it like i did the other night you're like wow it's not just that it holds up it's that nothing can take anything away from it Amanda you were raised with an appreciation for old Hollywood and an understanding of the canon to some respect what what does Kane mean to you and when did you first see it well not until much later I and I it's true you were right I grew

up on screwball comedies and watching a lot of old Hollywood, but Citizen Kane was not something I saw until I want to say my 20s and my late 20s. And it's funny. I did not see it at the age of 10. And I don't think I've ever seen this episode of Tiny Toons, but my answer is pretty close to Adam's and that my relationship to Citizen Kane was at film as phenomenon before it was Film as Film and the outsized influence that it has on cinema. And I had the same thing of seeing it after I'd seen a lot of the tricks that had been copied and copied and copied, which is kind of a recurring theme with me and how I see movies, but that's okay. But also Citizen Kane as a reference, Citizen Kane as a joke, Citizen Kane as a pop idea more than a popular

movie. It's probably the most popular movie that not everyone has seen. I mean, I think that's anecdotal, but I think because of the way it lives on, and it obviously is referenced in movies, but it's also lived on in scholarship and academia, which we're going to talk about some more, as opposed to movies like Singing in the Rain or Casablanca, which live on in other pop culture that you can consume. I think Citizen Kane has a very particular space in the popular imagination as like capital C cinema and the serious person's movie. And to me, the real accomplishment of it is that it both lives up to that reputation and that idea and is also immensely watchable and is great as an experience as much as it is

this high church of cinema. But it is definitely the high church of at least a certain type of American cinema and scholarship. Yeah, there's so many interesting ways to approach this. I probably had a very similar experience to the one that you, Adam, and you had, Chris. I wasn't lucky to grow up with a film critic who sat me down at 16 and said, you should watch this movie. But I think the first time that I really engaged with the idea of it was watching something that I've referenced a number of times here, which is the AFI 100 Years 100 Movies CBS special, which aired, I think, when I was 15 years old. And by then, I had a pretty decent knowledge of the sense of movie history. But in that special, they just showed clips from the movies,

and then they had great actors and filmmakers talk about why those movies were important. And this special, the conclusion, I think, of a three-hour special where they counted down 100 movies over a certain number of nights, they spoiled Citizen Kane. They just showed the burning sled in the final frame of the special. And then the special ended. They were like, Citizen Kane is number one. Here's some people talking about it. Here's what Rosebud is. And in a way, that was the best thing that could have possibly happened to me because it completely dispelled the notion that that is necessarily the reason to watch this movie and you can appreciate it. And you should think about before you even watch it as narrative, qua narrative, watch it as a movie making feat and think about what it means to the craft and

also think about what it means to the enjoyment for the rest of the movie. Because I think when you're raised, you're raised to watch movies and just like, wait for the ending, wait to see what the resolution is going to be. Chris, you seem to agree with that. Yeah. I mean, the whole movie's in the newsreel. They get to the end of the newsreel and they say, okay, we put this guy's entire life in this, but I read the papers. I know all that. I know how he died. We need an angle. The angle is, yeah, it's the mystery, but it's how you tell that story. It's the ways in which camera work and lighting and music and performance can shape the audience's idea of who this person is at these different stages of his life and depending on who is telling the story and who is watching him at

those various stages. And I remember I had never thought about the point of view i don't think before i'd really seen this movie you know i mean i think you have like these understandings and part of it i think is because sean like this is the movie that i don't think anyone encounters without knowing it's supposed to be the greatest movie ever made you know what i mean like i don't think anybody goes into watching citizen kane blind because why would you why would you know why would you just be like oh cool movie about a newspaper publisher you would you would go into it knowing many people think this is the crowning achievement of the art form and so you're watching it with that in mind and in some ways its greatest accomplishment is that it never really seems to sag under the weight of that mantle. You know what I mean? It never seems to break from that

reputation. Can I say something about that canonization? I don't know if this is something Sean was going to get to later, but all your points, what Amanda was saying about not coming to it blind and what Chris is saying, it's such a landmark in the history of canonization because that canonization before the AFI, right, it's the sight and sound pull, right? And the idea that this international coterie of critics at a moment that film criticism is itself becoming more visible and has more of an obvious methodology to it where it's not just, you know, the story of the movie was good or commenting on the performances. I mean, it's really this idea of like film critical practice changing and being more about the director and more interpretive and maybe less beholden to the industry as promotion. I mean, that's the legacy of Cahiers and other film

critical movements. And that Citizen Kane insight and sound coming up at the top and staying there, that even as film history is kind of changing, you have all these new waves in the 60s and the new Hollywood of the 70s and the blockbuster inc new waves in the 60s and the new Hollywood of the 70s and the blockbuster incursions of the 80s and the emergence in world cinema. But that for 30, 40 years of that period, Kane is just this institution, which kind of in some ways you would think

would make people dislike it and want to take shots at it because when films become monolithic, there's a tendency to push back against it and be like, well, that's not so great. And it wasn't until 2012 that another movie passed it. And that's a whole interesting subplot about Vertigo winning that poll and what a 2022 poll is going to look at as the median ages of film critics get even younger. But I think Citizen Kane's the younger man's movie than Vertigo, and not just because Wells was 24 or 25 when he made it. I mean, it's exuberant and exciting,

and it is not cynical. It's about cynicism. There's a tremendous amount of cynicism in the story as practiced by certain characters, but it's not a fatalistic or a cynical movie at all. It's extremely exuberant and optimistic and humane in a lot of places, especially in its craft. It's kind of amazing that it has been held up

as that kind of movie. Like Amanda was kind of getting at this, but you know those jokes where it's like, well, it's not Shakespeare. You know, and people use that to sort of be like, that's why, Mike, this dumb movie is good. With Citizen Kane, the joke that people are making, people even made about Mank,

were like, well, it's no Citizen Kane. And what I like is the subtext of that joke is, well, that's not something to hold against something. Because what is? And very little ever could be again because of how out of nowhere that movie came. I'm glad you raised the sight and sound poll aspect of this. I was going to bring it up later. And I just wanted to point out that I wouldn't underestimate the levels of horniness among Gen X and Gen Y voters as they grow older and what vertigo will mean for them too. I'm not sure that Vertigo will necessarily be displaced. There may be something behind it. Vertigo, Triple Frontier, and then Croods. Christian Petzold

might vote for Dennis Thieves. On his ballot. That would be fabulous news. Let me provide some context for people who are listening who maybe don't know very much about Kane or have only seen it once or want to just have a little bit of deeper understanding of how this movie was made. And then I think we should talk about how it was made because I think that's a big part of understanding why it matters so much. So obviously,

as you mentioned, Adam Orson Welles was incredibly young when he made this movie. He was only 24 years old. He had just signed a three picture deal with RKO in which he was granted essentially complete autonomy to make whatever he wanted so long as he co-wrote, directed, produced, and starred in the films, which is a fascinating idea in general. And the movie he was originally going to make was an adaptation of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, which would have been an amazing movie and maybe itself could be a fascinating podcast about the way he was going to make that movie, which was he was going to play both Marlo and Kurtz and the film would be entirely shot from the perspective of Marlo. So even at this really young age with no film experience, you could see Orson Welles was the kind of person who had just had incredible sense of daring and creativity in approaching everything that he was doing.

Obviously, he was a star in the Mercury Theater, which he helped co-found. He was a radio star at this time. And Hollywood, he was an outsider to the space, and he brought with him his Mercury Theater troupe to act in this movie. Obviously, the performances are amazing, none more so than Wells. But I think we should just talk directly immediately about why this movie is considered such a landmark in terms of the way that it was made. I think a big part of that is due to the people who helped him make it. Adam, maybe you can start us off with just a little bit of what it is that Greg Tolan brought to this movie, The Cinematographer.

Well, yeah, I mean, first of all, that idea of bringing your own repertory, you know, and I'm not diminishing it by saying that all those stories about SNL hosts who bring their own writers or, you know, Oscar hosts who bring their own group. I'm not equating the two things. I'm just saying that what Wells was doing was really. Are you saying Greg Tolan was Bruce Valanche? Yeah, Bruce. Yeah, Greg Tolan was Bruce Valanche.

That that'll go over really well with all the people who don't want to hear what I have to say, but Orson Welles out there. What I just mean is he's kind of, he was bringing the artistic community to Hollywood as opposed to drawing what's already there. And that's really part of that. I mean, it's called the Mercury theater, but that's the mercurialness of Wells,

right? Which is going to do it my way. An incredible amount of confidence and a justified confidence because he just kept conquering mediums you know there's a guy who was supposedly speaking in complete sentences when he was two and who was a prodigy throughout all his life so he obviously had that kind of confidence and yeah he kind of installed that group but then he also had this group of collaborators around him who kind of weren't his repertory and tolan is a great example of that. There's a lot of debate over what Wells actually said to or about Toland or what Toland said to Wells. Did Toland say he

taught Wells what he learned about shooting? Did Wells say, I taught Greg Toland? But it was the idea of the camera not being fixed to a proscenium, I think. The idea of shooting at these incredibly low angles, to some extent faking ceilings, you know, artificial ceilings in terms of both lighting options, but also camera placement options. The incredible use of frames, mirrors, partitions, things to shoot through and around. It's not that it invented things like expressionist angles or expressionist lighting or camera movement. No one, even the biggest citizen Kane fans would claim that he and Toland invented some of these things or that the,

the, the film style was completely singular, but it was such a swift synthesis of what was happening in international cinema at the time. And it was such a synthesis of what he was already good at. There's so much primacy of like voice in this movie and narration, which derives from his radio stuff, the voice of authority,

which in more of the worlds, he just weaponized so hilariously by making people think they were listening to real alien invasion, just because it's on the news, you know? And so that's in Kane and the theatricality of his stage stuff, that idea of, of,

of performance again, you idea of performance, again, pertaining to voice, but also a kind of stylized acting. It's not that these things existed fully before. It didn't exist before or outside of Wells, but he inhabited them just kind of so fully. And then there's sort of this big question. So what is Citizen Kane? Is it actually a Hollywood movie? Whereas an example of an independent movie kind of made inside and with Hollywood resources, but philosophically

outside or in opposition to the whole idea of a system? Because among many of the ideas that Chris alludes to in this movie that are encoded in every scene, it's the most anti-establishment movie imaginable. I mean, that's what it's just pushing at all the time, that institutions and systems and establishment need to be questioned. Of course, it corrupts people when they then inhabit the same things that they've been questioning, but that's a whole other. We're going to talk a lot about Herman Mankiewicz and his claim to authorship of the film and then ultimately what Mank is about.

But Amanda and Chris, I wanted to ask you both, and maybe Amanda, you can start, what you think of the writing and the structure of this movie, which I would say is generally fairly unorthodox. Yeah, it's astonishing and electric. And I think when you watch it, even now in 2020, I think I'm struck. And then I learned from people like Adam Neiman by the technical achievement. It looks different than contemporaneous films and it is accomplished. And, you know, so many scenes have become memes at this point, you know, that you're seeing something new, but this storytelling in terms of is so sophisticated in terms of the pacing, in terms of the different perspectives, in terms of how the story is told, reflecting what the story itself is and the major themes from you

know memory to to mythology um or self-mythologizing as the case may be and it's also so propulsive i mean this is a character study um told from a lot of different people who you don't really know in pieces and in flashbacks and it is intricate it is like the puzzle that they can't quite put together at the end of the movie i mean it's a little bit on the nose at times, but I enjoy that. And it, it just, it moves and it plays and you don't, I don't always find that, um, movies from this, this time period and with this level of intricacy can hold my attention in the same way. And it is, you see something being invented that we're so familiar with now,

but it also just really does hold your attention. Chris, what about you? There's a story about how like Wells watched, to Amanda's point about movies from the era, how Wells watched Stagecoach like 40 times while making this movie. And if you watch stagecoach which is 39 i think 1939 it it just seems like a different medium you know you imagine stagecoach

being the source text or the inspiration that wells was drawing from one of them and then he goes and makes citizen kane 24 months later it's released like 24 months later, it just feels like this huge leap forward, you know? And it's a leap that I think in a lot of ways people are still trying to wrap their heads around. The thing that's just, I mean, just to go back to what I was originally saying, the first 25 minutes of this movie are like getting thrown 80 fastballs at once, you know, thrown 80 fastballs at once. You know, it's like watching, it's some sort of like, almost like a hall of mirrors or something.

You know, there's the newsreel stuff. Then there's the dreamy sort of death sequence. Then there's the kind of like screwball comedy set in a newsroom. And that's all happening within the same movie, within the same story. And I would actually love to know what it would have been like to have seen this movie in a theater back when it first came out and whether or not there were parts of it that you kind of understood

because you had seen talkie comedies from around that era that kind of had this pace and were experimenting with a lot of overlapping dialogue. And you kind of had maybe the ear and the brain to process it versus some of the stuff that you must have just been like, is this news real real? I don't understand. Did they scratch the film? Did they, how could they do this? Like there's so many moments in this movie, especially in the first hour where you're just asking yourself, I don't understand,

aren't there rules against this? And he just blows past those rules. I think maybe something else that wasn't lost on people at the time, and definitely wasn't lost on the industry at the time, because it was the source of a lot of the enmity towards the movie. It wasn't that there hadn't been directors with strong personalities artistically. I mean, you mentioned John Ford, for instance, and it's not about ranking people. But I mean, Ford's work for a lot of people holds up equally. So I mean, that's the Mount Rushmore of that era. But you hadn't had filmmakers other than comedians like Chaplin and Keaton who put themselves into the work in addition to the expressivity behind the camera. I mean, the modern idea of the writer-director-star was not invented by Orson Welles.

I mean, Charlie Chaplin predates that. George Melies predates that. I mean, you can go 120 years back. But the modern idea of it, the idea of the writer, director, star, and the question of, is this vanity? Is this self-criticism? Is this narcissism? Is this about his own persona? Is Orson Welles making, to some extent, not just a movie about Hearst, which we can get to later, but like, is this about himself? Is this about his conception of his own promise and how he might see his life and career going? And at a time when Hollywood industry and media were super interested in personalities and off-screen and gossip and celebrity, not that that's changed, but that was really kind of coming

into its own late 20s, 30s, 40s, that's a huge part of Citizen Kane, especially because he's an outsider, not a nobody. No one who's listening to this who doesn't know the history should say when we say Orson Welles came to Hollywood, that he was like, who's this guy? I mean, he was one of the great entertainers, showmans, or I shouldn't use that word. It's apparently a bad word, showman now with Orson Welles. But he didn't come out of nowhere. He was incredibly famous. And then here he is putting himself on screen, aging 80 years on screen. It's amazing. Yeah there's there's two things about what you guys are saying that that trigger me here so one of them is that the movie

itself is a manifestation of that mirror shot that you're talking about adam where it feels like a number of different people competing to capture the reflection of the cane character and who that person is and that the way that the script character and who that person is. And that the way that the script is structured by having these series of flashbacks and these series of unreliable narrators, you get what feels like a portrait of a person. And there's really no way to know whether it's an accurate portrait of a person in the same way that all movies are just sort of, they're just perspective driven. And then the other thing is that the remembrances and the controversies and the history of this movie is a reflection of that

storytelling choice and that everyone is competing with their own agendas to tell the story properly. I think what's most amazing to me about it from both a technical and emotional perspective is it does feel like for somebody who was, while not new to this, Adam was still an outsider to Hollywood, he did manage to convene some of the very best people that would ever work in the history of the medium. I mean, this is Bernard Herrmann's first film, I believe, as a film composer, and he does the score. It's one of Robert Wise's first credits as an editor, and he goes on to be one of the most hallowed filmmakers of the 50s and 60s in Hollywood. His assistant is Mark Robson, who's also a great filmmaker. We talked about Toland.

We talked about all these actors, Joseph Cotton and Agnes Moorhead and all these incredible people who had mostly not acted in films before. And they all come together, basically unbothered, even unbothered by this gossip machine, the head of Hoppers and the Luella Parsons of the world who are attempting to put a close watch on this outsider. And undisturbed, they get to make this movie. And I think one of the reasons that it gets mythologized so much is it seems like the signal example of what happens if you just let creative people cook. And I don't know if that's true. I think that there's a significant amount of luck and timing involved here too. But it is fascinating, and you pointed this out, Adam, that independent filmmakers idealize and idolize Wells because he seems to be what you can get if you are left to your own devices.

Well, but the other thing to idealize and mythologize, and it doesn't contradict what you said, but it's another layer on top of it. Like there's so many wonderful metaphors with Kane, like the Hall of Mirrors and the computing viewpoints, but it's also such a layered movie it's so stratified because yes left to their own devices they make the film unbothered sort of but when you make a movie in a way that's unbothered you bother people with the finished product and that's the other part of the story of citizen kane which is not just like what did audiences think like chris's question is such a good one

we can't imaginatively project back into 1941 as ourselves and be like wow i'm seeing this new movie that was pretty good but also you know what an incredibly contentious movie it was when it came out at a time when hollywood films have always been about ideology all movies have ideology in them but like the idea that here's a movie that literally the most powerful person in media in the history of the country to that point. I don't want people to see that. So you can't take out newspaper ads for this movie. And we're going to run this movie down.

Almost as if the movie prophesied that that's what would happen, which is what happens in the film. Right. This idea of using the media to wage battles. But yeah, left undisturbed, Wells produces Citizen Kane and then everyone gets angry. Hollywood gets angry. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences kind of blackballs or boycotts the movie.

There's all kinds of rumors that people were instructed, you know, don't vote for it. And then you have the whole Hearst thing, which could be 10 podcasts in and of itself. It's already a half dozen books and it's what Mank is about and lots of other stuff, which is a big part of that story too, which is like poking the bear and challenging power through filmmaking.

Yeah. Chris, given that the story of Wells' arrival in Hollywood so closely mirrors you launching The Watch a number of years ago, I thought maybe you could reflect on kind of like basically help us understand what this movie is really about. Like what does it what does it appear to be based on? What are the structures? You know, Adam mentioned Hearst and then kind of how did people receive it? Yeah, well, I mean, it's I think it's more based on an amalgam of different larger than life media characters.

So Hearst is obviously the biggest one, and there are a lot of similarities. And if you read Pauline Kael's essay, Raising Cain, she talks a lot about the similarities in Hearst's life and Hearst's mistress and the way in which that corresponds with Susan. But if you read other interviews with Wells, he talks a lot about like, oh yeah, this was based on this guy. This was based on a guy in Chicago who did this. This was based on somebody who was George Stevens' son and I said this. shadow biography of Hearst in the same way that The Master is not an L. Ron Hubbard biography film. But what winds up happening is that I always go back to

thinking about what Mankiewicz was originally going to call the film, which was, I believe, The American? American. Yeah, American. I mean, what else we also have to say you know that's that's what they were looking at that was the scope of this project to begin with

and it's not like Citizen Kane is much more demure in its in its in its sights but I always think about this is a movie where

like you said you know they let a creative person cook that creative person also said I'm going to take a big swing and crucially, I think, one of my favorite pieces of ephemera about the making of this movie is that they snuck in

a bunch of principal photography under the guise of them being camera tests. And that they shot a bunch of scenes claiming that they were shooting camera tests on different performers. And it's not like Apocalypse Now or some of the other great instances of filmmaker gets total creative control and completely goes over the side of the cliff. This guy, I think,

by all accounts, kind of came in under budget and on schedule, right? I mean, Citizen Kane was not a disaster production. It was much speculated about. You referenced the film columnists who kind of were always poking the bear. But I don't think that this was a particularly troubled production. And it sounds like it kind of came together, if not seamlessly, it came together largely intact. Yeah, it's an interesting thing, right?

Because George Safer, who was running RKO at the time, sought out Wells because he was trying to elevate the quality of the films that they were making at the studio and that was part of the reason why he agreed to give him this deal and wells hit his marks so to speak um he really did make the movie that he promised and delivered it on time and the reception of the movie is really interesting because there were there was one class of columnist and

critic that widely celebrated it. And they were often employed by Henry Luce, who was, of course, oppositional to William Randolph Hearst. And that's a reflection of the theme of the movie, that perspective and power of the media and who wields that power essentially does tell the story. And so if you look at the reviews of the film out of the gate and who wields that power essentially does tell the story. And so if you look at the reviews of the film out of the gate, they're incredible. John O'Hara in Time writes one of the most rapturous reviews you'll ever read in your life. And then on the other side,

you've got all these gossip columnists that are attempting to undermine Wells. You've also got the Academy, which Adam pointed out. I think very interestingly, their approach to the film is to celebrate it, but withhold um the movie gets nine oscar nominations including best picture but it only wins one oscar and that oscar is of course best screenplay which is mankiewicz and wells share and we can talk about that maybe even a little bit more amanda when you and i talk about mank later this week but um its reception is fascinating i think one of the things that i don't necessarily see in the early reviews is something that's a lot easier for us to see now, which is in the early reviews, the, the, it sees this

movie as anti-establishment as Adam says, as a, a fascinating portrait of a complicated man. It doesn't necessarily seem to reflect on like the fun of the movie. Like Amanda, I feel like this movie has five or six different kinds of movies in it. And that's part of what makes it so propulsive, as you said. Yes, including just very handsome to me, young Wells dancing with like a full cast of showgirls as a musical. I'm always struck when I watch it. I'm like, oh, I understand everything you just said about Orson Welles, you know,

being a genius and a creator getting to cook and all of that stuff. Very true. But also, I mean, that's just a star on screen. I like I think that gets like underestimated a little bit of just, oh, you want to watch this person? And then he puts on a bald cap. But yeah, it's a it's a it's a musical. It's a sometimes a friend comedy or a tragedy, I guess. It is a political film in terms of both American politics and the media. It has a lot to say about some of the news crises that we're living in right now and also some of the election crises that we had to live through recently or are perhaps living through. And it, I guess, is also about capitalism and great figures.

I mean, you can say that it's an American tragedy. It's Gatsby-esque. It's the great American story. And I do actually think that's true in some of the ways, some of the reason that it is still so resonant, though how intentional or cynical or optimistic that is, I think depends on interpretation.

So it has it all and it moves quite quickly through a lot of it, which is another thing that I, a modern viewer, appreciate. Yeah, you know what I was going to ask you guys is what's the part of the movie that you wish they would stop and spend more time on? really there's really never a moment where

this movie slows down i guess sort of when he's building the opera house and she's taking the singing lessons it feels like it it down shifts a little bit but it certainly doesn't lose its propulsiveness but is that i mean for me it's it's obviously the early days of the inquirer uh just because i love the patter and i love, the verve with which those scenes go by. But is there any part that you wish that there was more of in citizen Kane? I think there should have been just a three hours of him playing with his sled. Yeah, that's true. No, what I was going to say to, uh, to the point of all the different kinds of movies

it is, it's also a great Freudian movie, right? Here, here, cribbing a bit from Sean's notes before this, but it's also true. And that goes back to the idea of Rosebud. And it's an idea that is both completely invested, almost to the point of myth, in the idea that there is a solution to people, but which is also, I think, very skeptical about that. I do not think the point of the film is that these viewpoints add up to Rosebud. I think Rosebud is the last thing we see. And it's not just the pathos, by the way, spoiler for anyone who's listening to this and hasn't seen the movie,

it's his sled is Rosebud. But it's not just that we see Rosebud at the end, it's that Rosebud is made ephemeral by the fact that it burns. You know, I mean, you can read that a bunch of ways. It's hope, it's idealism, it's innocence, it's life burning away. But it's something we see for about two seconds. And if you're going to hinge the whole movie on that, I think the film is urging caution. One of the great, we talked about homages. One of the great homages to Citizen Kane is at the end of Repulsion. We're after this inexplicable 90 minutes of Catherine Deneuve

hanging around her apartment. The movie has nothing to do with Citizen Kane, by the way. She's just nuts and she kills people and she's very upset. You get this photo on the nightstand of her as a little girl and that's Polanski parodying Citizen Kane and being like, yeah, here's a photo of her as a little girl. Does that explain anything? He's not making fun of Citizen Kane.

He's just quoting the camera move and showing that it signifies in a different context. That's why I love Rosebud. It's like it's the answer to the movie, but if you reduce the movie to Rosebud, what's the point of that? There are characters in the film that even say that. They're sort of like, what was Rosebud?

Does it explain everything? Does it explain nothing? Like they leave open the possibility. And if you want to read it as a cynical gesture towards Freudian psychology, you can. And if you want to read it as a wholly sincere attempt to do that, you can. And that's brilliant. I mean, I'm not even sure Wells might say both. If you asked him today, what were you trying to say with that? Or Mankiewicz, as it were, it's hard to know specifically whose idea that was. I think that the part of the movie that I

probably wouldn't want to spend more time on is a lot of the stuff that was cut out of the movie, which is another reason that this movie is so good is it knows what it shouldn't be. You know, there's a whole, apparently a whole subplot about Susan Alexander's boy toy, you know, that she was cheating on the Kane character with. That wouldn't have worked in this movie, you know, like the way that they tell the Susan Alexander story and the way that she tells her story over this, this long night of testimony to a reporter is perfectly done. And the same way that the early days of the newspaper story are perfectly done and the same way that there's gratefully

not too much Union Forever screaming young Charles Foster Kane, like childhood remembrances, you know, like too much of that would have been so saccharine and so obnoxious. And that little bit that you get does everything that you need. So I think there's so much of what isn't there that makes it make what is there work so well. Let's talk about this movie's legacy because it's complicated. I think it's obviously

understood to be one of the greatest movies ever made. It didn't win best picture of the year that it was made. Speaking of John Ford, his How Green Was My Valley was the winner of that. And that's an interesting film to have won for John Ford as well, I think relative to what he is best remembered for as a filmmaker. But also in that year, you've got Sergeant York, The Maltese Falcon, Ball of Fire, The Little Foxes, Night Train to Munich, The Lady Eve, Suspicion. You've got an incredible collection of movies. This is really high time for 40s cinema. It's just kind of kicking off here. And it's also a pre-war movie, which I think is, or at least from the US perspective, a pre-war movie, which I think is really notable here. And you can see how the war infects the films that Wells makes shortly

after this, which is pretty significantly. And it feels like, I don't know about a last gasp of a certain kind of optimistic cynicism, but it does feel, it feels like it could only happen in this time period, in this small frame of history. You agree with that, Adam? Yeah.

Well, if you believe Pauline Kael, which you shouldn't, it kind of culminates the newspaper comedy era, right? That a lot of those films, which she is even kind of dubious about saying it's better than them. She's like, it's of a piece with them, right?

You know, these other fast talking, these were comedies about driven reporters and, you know, personal agendas versus reporting the news. I mean, she sees it among other things as a culmination of that. But I think that the war is kind of a good pivot point here because it's also a pivot point between genres in American film. A lot of the genres that come in the 1940s, including the war film, which existed before but is necessitated by the interest which people have about war. You're starting to get not musicals disappearing, but they start to reach a kind of decadence and obsolescence by the middle of the 50s and then in the 50s and 60s, teen films, horror films. I mean, it's all these kind of

migrations and cycles. And to Amanda's point that Citizen Kane is like five or six or seven different kinds of movie in one. That's why I think it maybe endured through those shifts. You can't put it away in the early 40s is what I'm trying to say. All the legacy of it is like how he made something like that when he did and who he made it with and who it was about. But there's a modernity to it and a forward thinkingness to it and a versatility to it in terms of the genres that it occupies, that that kind of helps. That helps it get the kick forward and carry it through the 40s and 50s with not just reputation intact, but elevating. And by the way,

not winning Best Picture is probably the best thing that ever happened to it, because it allows it to be anti-establishment in another way, which is to suggest that the Oscars has a barometer of quality. And I don't know if I'm allowed to say this on the big picture or if someone's going to shoot me through my window now, but the Oscars just don't matter. How Green is My Valley is absolutely great, and you could actually have an amazing conversation about quality in those two movies. But Citizen Kane not winning Best Picture feels right to some

strain of cinephilia, which is the strain of cinephilia that argues that the official winners are not really the winners, and that a history written by the winners, meaning a history written by the Oscars, is a pretty incomplete history. How can you tell the history of cinema without dead of thieves that didn't win best you know i mean it's just it's it's good for citizen kane i would i would argue that that is

ultimately part of the point of the oscars that the controversy in and of itself is sort of what drives the history and keeps these kinds of conversations alive. But your point is well taken. Chris, you suggested in the outline here, like a couple of prompts. And I'm interested in your answer to some of these prompts. You asked, do you give Citizen Kane a greater benefit of the doubt than other movies, even other classics, because of all of this information, all of this anxiety that it carries with it? Yeah, well, I was just curious whether people ever are bored during Citizen Kane or if there's any part of Citizen Kane

that folks don't like. I think we're allowed to say that without sounding like we're 24 years old and we were just assigned like, I watched Citizen Kane for the first time and it had no drip, my column. I think I'm just curious because I watched it the other

the other day and and i felt myself like breathless for the first hour and probably like i did i look at my phone in the second hour i did i'm a big enough man to admit it yeah the susan alexander stuff in the last 30 minutes it's tough and it's supposed to be tough i understand that and i understand that the pitch of her voice and the way that she yells is not supposed to speak for all women and is supposed to indicate that this is not perhaps not a relationship worth investing in long term and you're not getting uh what you might hope to get out of it but i i don't know i was like let's let's keep this moving okay like i don't want to listen to this anymore moraine brocco's second half of goodfellas voice for like her entire turn in the movie she's like charles't want to listen to this anymore lorraine bracco second half of goodfellow's voice

for like her entire turn in the movie she's like charles i want to see my friends that was a stellar lorraine bracco impression thank you i closed my eyes and i just saw her that was everything we had charles oh my god oh my god I think the thing is it depends on what you're looking for in the movie you know if you're looking for if you're trying to observe technique there's a lot to look at in every frame there's a lot to understand about what the

choices that they're making if you're looking at it as an entertainment it's not always the best entertainment most movies that are that aspire to be this important are not always necessarily the best entertainments and frankly that aspire to be this important are not always necessarily the best entertainments. And frankly, they're didactic. I think there is a little bit of didacticism in this. Orson Welles certainly felt like he had a pretty clear view of the world, even at a young age. And he was famously fond of hearing his own voice. But it never feels

academic to me. And the melodrama, I think, works. I mean, I think you kind of need that Susan Alexander stuff to understand the complete meltdown that he has in her room when she leaves. You need to understand that this is a person that has a hard time having any feelings or facing his feelings in a meaningful way, and that she represented some keyhole-sized entry to his feelings when he famously like first encounters her and sits down and listens to her singing at the piano, that's such an important little, frankly, Freudian droplet of information. And then his whole world spirals out because he

had one genuine, honest human moment. And that's really, it's really powerful the way that he does that. And maybe he makes you endure a little bit more susan alexander than you want to but it does feel like it's part of a essentially a series of interlinking chains so i don't i don't know that i get bored necessarily i i don't think citizen kane's the kind of movie you should watch five times a year either though i don't know adam what do you think i think that it's these are these questions all dance around interesting stuff that i know will come into flower at the end of the podcast which also just has to do with like do people do do people give wells enough reverence not just credit but reverence and is it possible for a movie that's considered the best movie of all time to still kind of be underappreciated and the question of

wells's own arguably or sort of purportedly cane-like trajectory of peaking early, which is not me saying this about him. It's just an argument that's often made about him. And so also the question, you know, like, are you allowed to not like Citizen Kane? And if you don't, whether it's because, you know, you're like a 22-year-old writing a BuzzFeed article or because you're just a person who doesn't love it as much as you love something else, like, are you allowed to do that? And the answer should always be yes. yes you know you bully yourself into liking something you're not you don't win you know you don't have to do that but i think that of all the claims about wells and what he's good at i'm not saying people don't say he's a good dramatist but citizen

kane is just evidence of what a wonderful dramatist he is. Not just a stylist and a polemicist and a showman and a juggler, as someone just said about him and that stuff. You know, like, he's a great dramatist, and you are constantly understanding what these people want. You're understanding what Kane wants through other people's impressions of him,

but the other characters in the film, and what Sean was saying about Susan was really well said, but it's true about Jedediah, it's true about everyone else. They're dramatically cogent characters. I think when you watch a lot of contemporary American movies, even good ones, those verities are kind of lost. Where it's about mood, or a vibe, or big ideas that are kind of being filtered through characters. And not so much the verities of drama, which Wells was brilliant at on the stage. I didn't see his theater shows because I would not be born for 45 more years.

But when you like read reviews of his theater productions and people talking about him as a stage director, dramatist first and foremost. And that's where the power, I think, in Kane resides, not as opposed to the style or the subtext or whatever, but it, it's, it's synthesized with them. He's a narrative storyteller in that movie. And you care so much about what these characters care about. Let's talk about wells more because he is certainly one of a kind and i think understanding your relationship to him is a big part of understanding your relationship to this movie

and then ultimately to a lot of what's what everything that happened in the aftermath of this movie which is that second part of this conversation that Adam was alluding to. This is a guy from a fairly well-to-do family from the Midwest, who, as Adam pointed out, was kind of a prodigy speaking in full sentences. He took to magic at a very young age

and he was drawn to Shakespeare at a very young age. Incredible child magician vibes from coming from this guy. Honestly, yes. And I think that's one of the reasons why there is a bit of distrust around wells or a little bit of like a doubt that is cast upon him because he's so evidently a performer and he's so he's a he's a trickster in a lot of ways and i think that that makes people a little bit suspicious about his motives and maybe more specifically his sentimentality as a storyteller um i think he also he's one of the first maybe probably the first superstar director insofar as there is so there

are so many interviews with him there are so many conversations there is so much media obviously he's rivaled at some point by hitchcock but he more or less starts out as a famous person earlier than Hitchcock. And that work extends all the way into the 70s, where he's still appearing on Dick Cavett and showing up to tell old tales. And he seems simultaneously both hugely wounded and emotional, but also still very grand about what a great man he is. And so you have these like conflicting views the same way that i think you kind of have these conflicting views of kane he seems vulnerable but he's also such an asshole you know he's unfeeling but he's also touched by art and i think i i'm endlessly fascinated by wells and i feel like almost any media that attempts to convey him and there have

been a lot of movies over the years that try to replicate him, including Mank. It's like impossible to me. There are very few people that have his personal charisma. Amanda, what do you think of Wells? You pointed out that he has like true star power in Kane. Sure. Well, he's a real celebrity and he has a star power within the movie, but he also has the power to hold everyone's attention outside of the movie so that people want to argue about whether he's like a child magician or a genius or both and it and that happens at the time i mean he was like the fixation of the gossip columns and his contract was such a big deal even before uh is released. And he's a star. He's a celebrity. He is probably

taking up more airspace than most directors currently are. And I think that that has a real power. And I am always interested in other types of celebrity and what that allows people to do and people's relationship to it and how it starts to influence their own art and conception of self, which I think is certainly the case here and is why you start getting all those interviews. Definitely a very available guy, which you have to be, I think, at some point if you're going to tend to the celebrity. But it certainly goes hand in hand with Citizen Kane itself and that idea of self-mythologizing and ambition and how we see ourselves and how other people see us and how that changes over time and just fame and what people project onto fame. And I think that that certainly applies to Orson Welles and that he also participated in it for many years, really until his death. And it certainly shapes the way we understand this

movie and the rest of his career and the narrative of, you know, auteurism. Because I think you have to be as visible a figure as he is to incite so much of the argument that we're going to talk about in the last part of this podcast. Chris, as a leader, an iconoclast of the CR army, what do you tell all of your followers about Wells? Well, I guess one of the things that fascinates me about Wells is whether or not we feel like he lived up to his potential as a filmmaker um because i i think that citizen kane is considered one of the great films ever made but i don't know often that wells comes up as one of the great filmmakers ever you know partially because um the sort of trouble that followed him around especially with ambersons which is the the magnificent ambersons which is the follow-up to Citizen Kane.

But even for as much as I love Lady from Shanghai and you can get into Mank-esque arguments about what he did or didn't do on The Third Man and other works that he did, I don't know that he has a body of work like Hitchcock. I don't know that he has a body of work, even like Howard Hawks. I don't know if he has a body of work like John Ford. I don't know if he has a body of work like Kubrick. It feels a little bit more inconsistent. It feels almost, to go back to a term we used earlier,

mercurial. That there is a degree of squandered potential there, which is a shame because I think he's one of the true geniuses of the last century. I mean, just to see the way in which he was able to bring his talents to so many different mediums, and then even the medium of being a celebrity, even the medium of being a raconteur, of just being a guy who was on TV and chose to do that instead of anything else, or because that was the last sort of venue for his talents. I always kind of look back a little bit bittersweetly at him. Yeah. Part of the story of Kane, obviously, is that it was not a financial success and that he

had to rework his contract with RKO and that led to his loss of total control over Ambersons, which led to Ambersons getting mutilated, which then led to basically a career-long fight to raise the money he needed to have an experience that was again like Kane. Adam, I'll let you talk about him as a filmmaker and what his legacy is through these other films, but it is interesting that it basically feels like he's in this war to get back to this primal state that he started at and and i think for a lot of people and i include myself in that it's not squandered potential that's heroism now the question of when heroism becomes dogma and you suddenly can't literally make a two-minute scene in a movie where orson welles is not nice without inciting the wrath

of well scholars is a whole other thing yes but But that's not squandered potential to me. That's a kind of heroism. That's a byproduct, not of hubris or delusion, but of a kind of principle. And then he finds a way to angle that into art. That's what Quinlan is in touch of evil. You know,

he is diminished and the movie is great because Hank Quinlan is diminished. That's Falstaff in Chimes at Midnight he is a steadfast true loyal person and he is not rewarded for it by the time you get to F is for Fake Wells is playing games with all of this including Amanda what you were saying about him being available is very it's really smart and I agree like he talks to everyone he talked all the time and some of it was grievance and some of it was anecdotes and showmen and some of it is just bitching and some of it is incredibly moving but in f is for fake he's like i'm orson welles and i am the most reliably unreliable person you'll you'll ever meet i give off strong child magician vibes in my 60s

here's my here's my movie about that and i don't think you can get movies like that without what he went through. So it's not squandered potential to me. It's more like movies made in the image of what happened to him, which by and large for me are ingenious. So it's not about like whether he's the greatest filmmaker or on a Rushmore or whatever. But I will say what's interesting about Citizen Kane, kind of the consensus great movie ever.

Maybe listeners are tired of us citing all the lists it's on. When you read Wells scholars or when you read people who love Orson Welles, the argument is in some ways he improved or deepened or that the later films have the kind of depth that Citizen Kane is imagining because it's a 25-year-old imagining what does a lifetime of regret look like? And then you actually look at the film from the 60s and 70s or like what he was trying to do another side of the wind you're like oh it looks like that because he lived it you know i mean i hear what i mean i think chris is right in the

sense that there's something mercurial and uneven sometimes about the work and there was always kind of trouble and problems that kind of plagued them. But if you go by the logic. That Citizen Kane has. Which is like not just that absolute power corrupts. But that also you know. There's like real wounded humanity. Sometimes inside success. That's looking for a way to get out.

I think he kept that theme pretty consistent. And kind of brilliant. In a lot of the later films for me. Like I watched F is for Fake. Twice during the pandemic already just because it's so entertaining like i watch that every day i think that this dovetails nicely though with the the final piece of this conversation which is the authorship of kane and the subject of charles foster kane and william randolph hearst and what kane is about

that makes it feel even if it is not, say, technically as accomplished as, I don't know, The Stranger, why it feels like the most important thing he's ever done, like he never really lived up to it again. That's a big part of the conversation. Obviously, for those of you who are listening who have not heard of Raising Kane, this is a 1971 book-length essay written by Pauline Kael, who is a film critic at The New Yorker. This is probably the single most controversial piece of film writing in the history of both mediums. Just an incredible take by her. It's a flex. It well predates the hot take era. And it is something so much bigger than a hot take because it's an amazing piece of writing. It's a fascinating kind of provocation

and by all accounts, it is just deeply and truly wrong. And there's something so interesting about this whole experience. If you have not read Raising Cane or any of its myriad responses, I would encourage you to do so. I think it's just a cool way

to kind of get a portal into history and also writing style. Pauline Kael has an extraordinary writing style and she's so entertaining. But her mission in this piece is functionally to say that the true author, whatever the word author means, of Citizen Kane is Herman Mankiewicz, who was the co-author and who was a famed screenwriter and columnist and a member of the Algonquin Roundtable and an important figure who we'll talk about a lot more because of Mank, but she cites or sort of almost sort of refuses to cite the origins of this authorship throughout this story.

And there is a series of reactions to this story that ran, I guess, across two issues and then was ultimately published in a book about Kane that also featured the shooting script of the movie. She essentially notes that Mankiewicz's relationship to Hearst and his understanding of that world, and frankly, it seems like her access to John Hausman, who was a partner of Wells' at a time, and then eventually they split apart, informs this big theory about who really made Kane. I kind of don't know how to talk about this from here because we run the risk of kind of getting into the weeds of a bunch of people fighting even before the internet. But this kind of feels like an internet fight to me

in many ways as I look back on it. I think she was paid $300 for this piece and clearly worth every penny. It's worth exactly 300 US. The best thing is that they were like, can you write the intro to the script here but she's like yeah i got you i don't know what that's worth inflation wise but it's like it's so funny because in talking about how pauline kale judges orson welles it becomes a referendum on kale who's also a major figure she's not as important as orson welles to film history but she helped write a lot of film history or the

opinionated part of film history because she was one of those people who's like movies are something a critic movies are something you feel there's something you understand it's subjective it's passionate and then when she went to write a work of scholarship she just shit the bed right and then because she was the same kind of critic who would never watch a movie a second time famously she like went and republished it even after she was criticized from not just orson wells his friends like from serious scholars like this is not correct she just didn't care and there's an obstinance there that's as much a rosetta stone or a rosebud to pauline kale as the sled is to uh kane or or kane is to is to wells

but what she was doing that internet fight thing that Sean referred to, and it's not that it's not worth talking about what she got wrong, but even before you talk about what she got wrong, she's just litigating the auteur argument that she was having with Andrew Sarris, where she was like, you know what's bad is totalizing narratives about creative control. So you know what I'm going to do? Here is a totalizing narrative about creative control. Don't do that unless you're me, right? And in doing that, she was taking shots at the big gun auteur of all time

at that point in the 1970s. It wasn't just about Wells. It was about the entire auteurist critical establishment. She couldn't win the fight the first time. So she's sort of trying to win it the second time through the writing of this and trying to diminish, not just Wells, but you read her on cane she's like this is a shallow masterpiece and you're like this is not a deep observation you know it's very very petty it's brilliantly written at times because she's one of the greatest pro stylists of any critic ever but it's not a great piece. I'm saying as an understatement.

Chris, what do you, you're a, you're a Lord of, of, of internet takery. You know, you've got a lot of, a lot of background here. What do you, when you look back and you reread all of this stuff, as I asked all of you guys to do essentially before we did this, um, what do you make of this, this fight and what it brought out of people? I just that she's just she's just like i like these kinds of movies that's the premise it's so great it's what it's what we're doing here anyway you know what i mean like there's no difference between i mean she's obviously like just a in a completely different like league from from me and everybody i know in terms of being a thinker and a writer she's she's just true original. Are you saying Pauline Kael come on the big picture? Yes.

But so much of that essay is like, these are the kinds of movies I like. And that means that they are important. And I applaud that. I think obviously there's a lot of, it's not clickbait, but she's using the most sacred of all cows to get her point across. And clearly,

she has some flaws in her reporting, or at least some alleged flaws in her reporting. But the thing I always respond to- She didn't talk to Orson Welles. That was kind of an issue. Yeah, well, there is, you know.

Everybody else did. It's fine. The guy's on record. She was like, I knew what he's going to say. But all the stuff about the kinds of comedies that she likes and the kinds of movies that she responds to and her obvious affection for that algonquin expatriate like new york intellectual comic thing and she's like that's those are the best kind of movies and And I love that about her. Amanda, what about you?

It's a defensive writing to a large extent. I mean, and that's what all the Algonquin stuff is about and how you say things matters, which having read this and then reading the Peter Bogdanovich response, yes, how you say things does matter. That shit was so boring. The greatest case for Raising C gain is that his defense peter

bogdanovich who's claimed to written movies is unreadable and so boring anyway so i yeah go ahead i just this is it's not like sean you wrote in the outline it's bad journalism and i mean it is like irresponsible journalism and also some of the arguments where she suddenly starts like hypothesizing probably it happened like this and you just want to reach in and be like ma'am no that's really that's just not how we do things but as just as an experience and as a defense of the things that she loves in movies and in words itself I I love it I it's It's amazing that she did this. I think it's unfair to call it internet takes now because the internet does not live up to this stuff. I want to know what got bumped from the New Yorker

so that they could run this across two issues. Like, what were they going to like, looking at other pieces? It's like, well, we got this cartoon of this zany cat. That's really funny. We can hold that for two weeks. But let's get Pauline's part two in here. So we're gonna have to get this on the ground reported piece about Chile out.

This is, I mean, Sean and I, I think over the times when I've been allowed to be on this podcast, we've talked about Kale a bit. And she has these tics as a writer, and I know them well, and it's not out of disrespect. it's because I grew up reading it and you have to test yourself against people in the field you go into and you know these one of the things she liked to do is she has to denigrate the opinions of others in order to frame her own like leave aside that she always talks about asides that she has to friends whether these friends are real or not you know my friend said this on the way out of the movie and it's like well that's a fake humble way to get your own one-liner in there or whatever else. She has these tics and

writing in the second person sometimes, which is so hectoring and bullying. She's like, you feel this way. And I'm like, I do. It's like not the I, it's the you. But it's that idea that in order to say what she likes, there has to be a fall guy who represents what she doesn't. And the bravery in a way, and the perversity of making Orson Welles the fall guy for kind of what's wrong with Citizen Kane is kind of amazing. I mean, I don't want to use the language of takery or clickbait or whatever, but it's just so brazen. And as an opinionator, she's a great film critic. And that's why I can still remember what she thinks of movies now. If you were what does pauline kale think of under fire i'm like i can tell you you know i remember her opinion but that's not scholarship you know and that's also not artistic license like a movie

like mank not that i want to jump on mank like there's also a difference between scholarship and artistic license and even a movie made in thrall to bad scholarship, because Jack Fincher based Mank a lot on Kale's essay, artistic license is different than saying, this is factually what happened, and this was all actually recorded on location. You don't know what you're talking about. In a review, that's one thing. In a 50,000 word or 100,000 word, this is how it happened. It's just kind of unforgivable. And it's why people need to defend Wells, even though he doesn't need to be defended because he is Orson Welles. The work holds up. Yeah. I thought Fincher had an interesting reflection of this when he was asked about it by Mark Harris a few weeks ago, which was essentially that Pauline Kael was an absolute genius at watching movies, but did not know very much about making movies. And there is some complexity when if your goal is to convey, to be a kind of an avatar, an advocate, somebody who sits down and watches something before the rest of the world does and says what they think of it. And that opinion matters. I think she's fascinating.

I don't always agree with her. I feel honestly, if, if I see myself in that critical lineage, like almost certainly directly right in between Andrew Saris and Pauline Kael of like, sometimes I like where Saris leads the world. And sometimes I like where Kael leads the world.

Sometimes I want to have an emotional reaction. Sometimes I want to follow theory a little bit more closely but got him in well I was gonna say that's the point right I mean she's being an iconoclast too in the exact same way she's throwing stones and I I really admire it and you know Adam to your point about feeling like she always has to denigrate someone I mean number one same I, same, I relate. But number two, it was really interesting reading all the responses to Raising Cain. And I understand that this was the style of the time in all publications,

but just the dismissive Miss Kales, and it's M-I-S-S Kale, is the way that she's referred to, and it feels infantilizing. And I think Pauline Kael was fine. But everyone is putting on their outrage hat. And I guess it is like the internet, except it just feels maybe not safer, but more, we're just going to have an ideological argument here for an extended period of time. But that's what she was trying to do I mean she was taking on Sarah she was taking on everything and it's obviously not

she's not right and neither is everyone else it was it the thing is is that the real answer this was a collaboration like we all did this together it's a little bit of everything is like completely unsexy and it's completely not in the spirit of the film that we're talking about or any of the arguments or art itself, which is why we're all kind of in between a little bit. So you have to be, it's art in its own way to take a ridiculous stand like that. Factually inaccurate, yes, but also just really fun. Her iconoclasm is so interesting because it's very much centered on being a female critic in a male-dominated

profession. So not just being a kind of unusual thinker and very anti-establishment in her way to and anti-hip and anti-cool and anti-chic like a lot of the movies she pushed against. And what you're saying about the responses to Kale, they are venomously sexist, a lot of them. And they carry the whiff of the incredible boys club thing that I think in Circles and Squares she was kind of pushing against, often using kind of coded homophobic language, but that's a whole other thing. That's not a great part of Kale's legacy. Not great, Pauline. But, you know, she's pushing back against that boys club thing. And I think she saw Ootourism, she has a line somewhere in Circles and Squares where it's like, when you talk about

filmmaking this way, it's like, who would win a pitched battle at the top of Mount Doom between a couple of directors? That's a line from Circles and Squares. She's not wrong about that. And it hasn't dissipated or disappeared from film culture 40 years later. It's just, it's very hard to be someone who reads and basically memorized a lot of kale and not about agreeing with her, but it's just then when it's confronted with scholarship and it's like, well, you know,

it's kind of iconoclastic to misreport what happened, but you're also going on the record and it's not great. And I think the film's reputation 50 years later, in some ways was solidified by the very defenses that that piece inspired, which doesn't make it a great piece, but the history of film criticism is unthinkable without it. Like any curriculum on film criticism has to include what Cale wrote about Citizen Kane for better and worse.

For me, it's more for worse, but it's an important piece. Isn't it also a testament to the movie itself that it can support that kind of debate? I mean, think about how many movies we go through in any given year. And after about three or four months, we're just like, I can't talk about La La Land anymore. You know what I mean? It's just like, I've said my piece, I've watched it

twice. I've compared it to three other movies. We've done six backlashes and backlashes, backlashes, and now I'm done. And maybe that's more of the way in which we, what it feels like to be alive in 2018 versus what it felt like to be alive in the 60s and 70s. But the fact that Citizen Kane can simply prop up all this kind of ideological clashes, I think is a testament to the achievement. I think the interesting thing that happened is, Amanda, you pointed out the Bogdanovich piece, which was a response in Esquire shortly after the publication, which feels almost dictated by Wells in many respects. And obviously, Peter Bogdanovich was famously in thrall to Wells' generation of filmmakers, became friends with them, sucked up to them, and in an attempt to build relationships and learn and create a career of

his own. And so the response piece, I think, is persuasive, but it is not as entertainingly written as Kale's. Orson Welles told me this was wrong. Yes. The thing to read, if you actually care about this. And also, don't question directors ever. Right. He obviously is also an unreliable narrator. I think the only reliable piece in this entire story is Robert Carringer's The Making of Citizen Kane.

It's a very short book that started out as an academic piece. It's deeply reported. It has tons of sourced materials in the book. There are sketches. There are draft components. There is a level of attention to detail to the work that goes into it. It's one of the best books about how a movie was conceived and executed that's ever been written. And you can read it in one night and it's fascinating that that book exists and is never debated because there's nothing to debate like a carringer put in the work it's a it's a much more dry read than what kale did but it feels definitive by the time you get to the end of it because he's just citing so much that you can't imagine it's anything but as close to the truth as we can get. And isn't it amazing how it makes space for both?

Exactly. Yes. Hold on. Let me read you his conclusion to the book because I think it's really, really relevant to this conversation, which I think actually explains a lot of what we're describing here. So functionally near the end of the book, he writes, in response to a question about the authorship of a specific scene, Wells said that it was written in its first and second drafts exclusively by my colleague, Mr. Mankiewicz. I worked on the third draft and participated all along in conversations concerning the structure of the scenes. To summarize, Mankiewicz, with assistance from John Hausman and input from Wells, wrote the first two drafts. His principal contributions were the story frame, a cast of characters, various individual scenes, a good share of the

dialogue. Certain parts were already in close to final form in the Victorville script, which is where he wrote it, in particular the beginning and end, the newsreel, the projection room sequence, the first visit to Susan and Colorado. Wells added the narrative brilliance, the visual and verbal wit, the stylistic fluidity, and such stunningly original strokes as the newspaper montages and the breakfast table sequence. He also transformed Kane from a cardboard fictionalization of Hearst into a figure of mystery and epic magnificence. Citizen Kane is the only major Wells film on which the writing credit is shared. Not coincidentally, it is also the Wells film that has the strongest story, the most fully realized characters, and the most carefully sculpted dialogue.

Mankiewicz made the difference. While his efforts may seem plodding next to Wells' flashy touches of genius, they are of fundamental importance nonetheless. That's basically how he ends the section about the authorship of the book, which is exactly what you're describing, Adam. He's giving credit to both guys, which is really the truth. Yeah, should be tattooed on people, parts of that book. No, it's just, it's a great, it's great. And it's wonderful because it doesn't degrade or denigrate not just individual contributions, but whole schools of thought about filmmaking. What he is describing is conducive to auteurism as properly practiced, not just the idea that if someone makes a movie and their name is this, the movie is good,

but actually the way that auteurism is actually theorized, and gives Mankiewicz his due. And the question to which Carringer's book is then copacetic with the film Mank is interesting, because they're not quite the same thing. But I don't think what Fincher's movie is doing is so far from that. And certainly not as far from it

as the people who are now writing about Mank from the position of defending Wells. Fifty years after the kinds of things that Amanda was talking about, they're now writing them again. Except instead of defending him against Pauline Kael, they're defending him against Jack and David Fincher via Pauline Kael. So now it actually is an internet argument. It literally is a blog argument again. But that's what makes the engine go like this is not a movie about a guy who writes the truth into the newspaper and is friends with everyone in his life and that's right it's just and sean everything that you read is is smart and great and how we should practice uh journalism

and is also like imminently recognizable to anyone with common sense of course that's that that seems like it from what everything we've read but it's just no fun that's it well it's no fun and part of the fun and the argument and the and the who gets what and who is right is so integral to the movie and also to why the movie has lasted and is important for as long as it did like the meta text is as important at the as the text and the thing about citizen kane is that the text like lives up to the meta text, which is so rare. So I want to do one last thing with Chris before we boot him out, before we let Adam share some thoughts

on the movie Mank, which is, Chris, you're the only person of the four of us that has not seen Mank yet. And you obviously are deeply informed about Kane. You're deeply informed about Fincher. You understand the controversy.

You've read Raising Kane recently. What do you think Mank is about? Okay. There's this guy named Mank and he does scores and he's got one last job. And then there's this lady named Pauline. She takes down guys who take down scores

and they eventually go to a diner and they chat about Citizen Kane for a while am I right? A den of canes that's it Chris you nailed it

so no I guess what I'm really curious about is you know whether or not this movie is trying to correct some sort of record because i never really think of fincher as like a particularly polemical or score settling director in that regard i mean

i'm sure somebody's going to come along and be like of course not look at this look at panic room does this but i i just don't think of fincher as being the kind of guy who's like i'm going to wade into a debate um i think he's much more of a process-oriented person and his stories are just sort of like you take from them what you will. So I'm very curious about like how much Citizen Kane is in Mank. Well, you're going to find out on December 4th

when the film comes to Netflix. Chris, thanks for joining us. I'm going to let you go now. And I'm going to give, I want to give Adam 10 minutes to talk about Mank. So Chris, farewell. It was great to see you guys. I'll going to let you go now. And I'm going to give, I want to give Adam 10 minutes to talk about Mank. So Chris, farewell. It was great to see you guys. I'll talk to you soon. Bye, Chris. You're the Pauline Kell of this podcast. Very entertaining, but full of lies. Bye, guys. If you have not seen Mank, don't listen yet, but please return to this episode when you do see it

so you can hear Adam's thoughts. Later this week, Amanda and I are going to talk in depth about Manc, if you can imagine an even longer conversation about what we've just been going through here. But Adam, I thought you wrote beautifully about the movie on The Ringer. And I wanted you to kind of expand upon that because one of the things that I liked about your piece was that you were not score settling either. And I found that the piece was not engaging in the kind of hyper emotional responsive first wave of reviews that I felt like were fairly dominant. I think that it was pretty clear

that there were people who were well-zites, who were frustrated by certain aspects of this movie. And there were also people who were fond of Fincher or who were, I don't know, just looking for something to be excited about that maybe went a little over the top about the movie too. And I found that the balance that you struck was really interesting. So what did you think of the movie? I mean, I think the review reads as positive. I am very interested in David Fincher,

both for reasons that I can and can't fully articulate at the moment. How mysterious. How mysterious. How mysterious. But, you know, been on my mind. He's on a lot of people's minds for about 15 years now because he's, in a way, a very autonomous, almost autocratic filmmaker. And yet he gratefully works within the studio system. And in some ways, very aspirationally in terms of the size of budgets that he wants to work

with and the kinds of movies he makes he very commercially inclined but he has this primal scene of alien 3 which just gave him this chipped shoulder which is like a chronic condition right when he was when talking about the social network and people were like so what do you think of mark zuckerberg he's like i know what it's like to be a 21 year old kid sitting in front of a group of adults who you're smarter than and who won't let you do what you want to do and i'm like wow you literally never got over this you know like never ever ever get over it and that's not him comparing himself to wells because he's not orson wells because he's not a writer and he's not an actor and he's spoken about this very egalitarian idea that people should do what they want to do but also i tell people what to do right and then everyone does what they do as long as

it's kind of what i want and if that's not how you do it do it my way but actor should act and writer should write and cinematographer should cinematog and you know i i direct um so all of that it just makes him making a movie about wells very interesting because he's not a wellsian director you know there's other filmmakers who are more wellsian than david fincher in even in his generation you know i mean all thomas anderson has some of that the grandeur and the humanity that fincher's movies access differently and then he's also making a movie with a screenwriter when he has not written any of his movies and this is all framed by his own incredible loyalty a loyalty that's not just like this is not p Peter Bogdanovich or Sid Wells,

where it's like, daddy, this is like literally dad, you know, something that his father wrote that Fincher himself put his dad onto. Cause he actually told his dad, you should read Raising Cain. That might be an interesting way to do this.

And then you have him making this movie from this pinnacle of a career that he's at now. And, uh, kind of like well so who's he supposed to defer to is he supposed to defer to the historical record at well scholars can you really like edit your late father's script and then what's his stake in all of this stuff too so i'm not trying to talk around the quality of the movie it's more just like there's a ton of interesting stuff going on even before you get to what happens in the dramatic space of Mank, which to me is a kind of remake of Citizen Kane

about a kind of bedridden guy, except he's looking back on his own life instead of seeing him through the prisms of others. And you have Kane once removed in the film in the form of Charles Dance as William Randolph Hearst, who is so vain he thinks the song is about him right you know he's like what you know he's he likes Mankiewicz the way Hearst supposedly did and has him in his circle right up until the point where he feels like he's going to be challenged at which point he he kind of casts him out. Fincher's super interested in people who are cast out and get revenge, and he's super interested in how revenge is isolating and lonely. I just rewatched The Social Network a couple of times for reasons, and that's kind of what it's getting at, right? You achieve what you want,

and you're kind of left alone, and maybe that's kind of all you wanted to be ever. He's interested in loneliness. I think Mank's an interesting movie about loneliness, more than it's an interesting movie about, I don't know, Orson Welles. I do not love the Orson Welles scene in Mank. I don't love it. I like that Tom Burke looks like David Fincher in it. I can ask David Fincher any question about Mank. If you have him on the podcast, I'd want to phone in and be like, you know that that's funny, right? Another film writer I like a lot mentioned that in his piece for Rolling Stone. I'm like, good, I'm not insane. Someone else saw the little goatee and haircut, which in the movie is because Wells is thinking of making Heart of Darkness still.

He's got this kind of like, you know, goatee. But he looks a lot like David Fincher. That's kind of significant to me in terms of where Fincher puts himself in the movie. One of the things that I think Amanda and I are going to talk about, and I think a response that we both had to the movie was it did, perhaps it's the dadness of it all, but it struck me as really the most sentimental movie

that Fincher has made as well. Amanda, I don't want you to spoil too many of your takes for later this week, but what drove that for you? Well, I think Adam set me up perfectly. This is a movie about David Fincher working stuff out. And as much as it is a movie about who wrote Citizen Kane, which is barely in the movie at all. And it's not that I didn't like the Orson Welles scene. It just kind of felt like a sideshow. It didn't feel essential to what was going on in this film. And that's okay, because I think there are other interesting things going on in the movie. You know, David Fincher was asked by the New York Times a bit about this film's, you know, relationship to his father and his own relationship to his father and Fincher

brushed it off, which I would expect nothing less from David Fincher. But I, you know, it's right there for the taking and not, but not just the dad of it all, but what does it mean to be a director? What does it mean to work in this system? Which is, as Adam noted, something that he has been struggling with or interrogating or trying to get revenge for his entire career. And what is creation? How will I understand myself is a little bit at the end. And how do I understand myself within this world of myth-making, which all the stuff I love. So it's fascinating, but it has really very little to do with Raising Cain, to be quite honest. It does have little to do with Raising Cain. And it also has to do with the side of Cain that Cale wouldn't even acknowledge, which is its political side. I don't want to, you know, I don't want to step on the 98 hours of make content that you guys are going to do. But it's

a really interesting political parable too. And I would actually say in this case, we're talking about credit for that. I mean, Fincher makes the movie and as he will remind you in interviews, he makes every millimeter of the movie. But Eric Roth's script is very interesting on this point because whatever Fincher, Jack Fincher, Fincher Sr. wrote in the 90s plays very differently

when it's being rewritten a bit and who knows how much it was rewritten. Somehow I don't think we're ever going to get raising bank, but I don't think anyone's, anyone's going to make a book about the making. You stole my joke. I had been plotting that joke for weeks, Adam.

Well, you know, I'm so curious about how much Roth provided as well. That's a big, big question mark. I mean, it's still your podcast, but like,

you know, but it's your joke now by joke, but it's, it's weird because the film is such a ready-made 2020 allegory about the muzzling of populist, not populist, sorry, the muzzling of socialist political movements and how big media does not like that. And it's not that Eric Roth is sitting and he's like, this is about Bernie Sanders. I mean, that's a bad movie that would do that. But the space exists in it to take a story about California in the 30s and apply some of the lessons and some of the ideas to a contemporary moment. And that stuff has nothing to do with Wells, except it has everything to do with Wells, because Wells was

politically principled, hugely so, and spoke in public forums about these things. And that's part of the subtext of Citizen Kane is it's kind of anti-fascist or an American version of fascism too. People forget the political subplot in the movie, or they don't forget. But just to say, it's not just about Kane becoming corrupted. It's that he runs against an even more corrupt figure. He runs against basically like brown shirt American fascist politics. Wells is hugely aware of this stuff. And I think Mank, the movie, is too. And that part of it I find very likable

and want to see celebrated or at least discussed outside of this whole, like, this movie is mean to Orson Welles. David Fincher can't hold Orson Welles' viewfinder. I haven't seen Mank, but it's bad. I'm just so bored with that shit. I can't tell you. Yeah, I have been saying this to Chris as he has been anticipating, and he's been, I think, absorbing a lot of takes about the movie without really

knowing what the movie is, which is an odd thing to be doing. And this movie is just not what many people think it is about, which is what's so fascinating about it. And part of the reason why I responded so deeply to it is just not what I was expecting. It's just not even close to what I was expecting. Frankly, having read Raising Cane a few times, I think I went in thinking that this was going to be some sort of photocopy or microfiche photo of an argument that we know is not true. And it's not that. Now there are reflections and inflections of it in small doses throughout the film, but that doesn't even seem like the animating principle of the movie at all. No, and also it finds space for Kane within its

form, which makes David Fincher like director 397 to do a Citizen Kane homage. He's a little closer to it because the movie is also about the making of Citizen Kane. But again, Social Network is more his Citizen Kane than Mank is necessarily his Citizen Kane. Or I think Mank is a version of Citizen Kane, but the kind of isolating power and ambition that Fincher's into. He found a way very creatively and artistically to integrate that into certain other movies, and he finds a way to put it into this one. I think the other thing that's tripping people up, and I wonder if you guys will talk about this, and I'll listen to hear if you do, it's that idea of recreating

old movie style in a way that's also kind of anachronistic and off. People are talking about the frame changes are wrong, and why is he shooting a movie about the early 40s and anamorphic widescreen and whatever else, and the wrong aspect ratio. These things are interesting to kind of talk about too for such a perfectionist. But I mean, Hail Caesar interesting, the wrong aspect ratio. These things are interesting to kind of talk about too, for such a perfectionist, but I mean, hail Caesar shot in the wrong aspect ratio too. And the way we see the movies being made in hail Caesar isn't totally

accurate. I don't think it undermines what it has to say about that system in that period. And that sense, maybe make is a bit of a writer's movie or a bit of a bit of a themes ideas movie. But I think the things that says about the Hollywood of the period are often, often some of them are very smart a lot of it's smart to me adam um before you go can you please plug your book that everyone should buy yeah so i wrote a book

called raising cane uh no uh i have a i have a new book on Paul Thomas Anderson that I cannot say how grateful I am to the Ringer for publishing an excerpt and for also a couple of pieces I'd written about Anderson that kind of got reworked and put in the book. Paul Thomas Anderson is a lot like Orson Welles in that he's a white male filmmaker, which are, you know, the ones you write books about. No, he's, he's, he's, Paul Thomas Anderson's pretty good. I think Sean thinks he's okay. You know, Sean was like, really? Paul Thomas Anderson? That film? No, I mean, the book has been out since October.

I'm proud of it. It's done well. It's called Masterworks. It has interviews with a lot of Anderson's collaborators, including my favorite thing I've ever put in a book or anything, which is a long interview with Vicky Kreeps about playing Alma in Phantom Thread. So if you are a Phantom Thread head,

and if you like Alma and want to hear what Vicky Kreeps is like, spoiler, she's wonderful. And her, her interview is really, really nice. And the book exists. It's out there.

Adam, I wanted to tell you, I went to our, my local bookstore, Romans support your local bookstore. And there, and there were two giant displays. And one was Barack Obama's memoir, and then the other was your book. And they were right next to each other. And I was so excited.

It looked great. Well, they're both apologies for American foreign policy. You know? Just side by side. I'm glad to hear that. That's very sweet. I'm going to listen for all the sweet, sweet Mank content that ensues. There's so much coming.

Thank you for that elegant segue. Adam, thanks for being on the show. Thank you, guys. Thank you to Chris Ryan. Thank you to Amanda, of course. Thank you to Bobby Wagner. Tune into The Big Picture, as Adam pointed out later this week. When Mank finally arrives, Amanda and I will review the movie, size up its Oscar chances, and get to the bottom of what all this fuss is about. We'll see you then.