WHAT WENT WRONG - Citizen Kane

Episode Date: November 17, 2020

The greatest film ever made... that nearly never saw the light of day. Learn how Orson Welles and RKO fought off a megalomaniacal millionaire, lethal gossip columnists and a backstabbing co-writer in bringing Citizen Kane to life.*CORRECTIONS:*Chris refers to Kane as an orphan - this is technically wrong as Kane's mother voluntarily placed Kane under the guardianship of Walter Parks Thatcher when he was a young boy.JOIN OUR PATREON FOR 'WWW' BONUS CONTENT! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Chris, I got to tell you, the movie that you selected for us to watch this week, listen, it's great, it's fine. But it has nothing on the Real Housewives of Salt Lake City. I just watched the pilot. It's made me happier than I've felt in months. If any of you listeners out there need a little pick me up, watch Real Housewives of Salt Lake City and watch a woman talk about how she had all of her odor glands removed. And that's why she has a phobia of hospitals.

to a woman whose aunt just got a double leg amputation. It's the best thing I've ever seen. Anyway, let's talk about Citizen Kane. That's why we're here. Hello, and welcome to another episode of What Went Wrong. Lizzie, that just sounds awful. No, I'm not kidding. It's genuinely amazing.

It's like the best reality television I've ever seen. You're wrong if you don't like it. And if you say it's stupid, I hate you. So today we're talking about the greatest film of all time. Citizen Kane, not the Citizen Kane of reality TV. But before we get into Citizen Kane, we need to discuss a very big development, a little housekeeping, and that is audience. We have received our first scathing one-star review on Apple Podcasts.

One star from Bunny Cub on November 3, 2020. He or she writes, this podcast is being wrecked by the condescending pseudo-intellectualism of the hosts who are substituting rank identity politics for actual thought and research. The idea that no one would ever read Bonfire of the Vanities because it is 700 pages is a pretty sad statement when it comes to American intellectual culture. A film podcast where only one person out of four talking knows anything about Brian De Palma, you're out of your depth. Well, you know, we're sorry that we have let you down, Bunny Cub. We appreciate you listening to the podcast. And we have one request. Please.

Tell your friends about how bad our podcast is. And in fact, it's so bad that they need to listen to see for themselves just how bad it is. Give it a listen to hear more of the rank identity politics. Is that what he or she said? It is. But I'm just saying, just let other people determine it on their own. Hate listen is fine. Absolutely.

So one other thing is B. Shafto gave us a great review on November 5th. And they pointed out some things that we missed in the Shining episode, that Steadicam operator, Garrett Brown, was also the inventor of the Steadicam. And Kubrick shot in the UK because he did not want to travel to the U.S. and that he had lived out the last of his days in the UK. Those were both true apologies for glossing over those. Thank you for pointing those out. Anywho, we are talking about Citizen Kane today,

widely considered to be the greatest film of all time. And I'm sure, as I was wondering when we went into watching this film, what could have possibly gone wrong with it. And the answer lies largely in its release and then re-evaluation in later years. But before we get into that, a few details. Citizen Kane is a 1941 drama film, co-written, directed, produced, and starring, Orson Wells. Citizen Kane was his first movie. It's insane. That he ever wrote or directed. He won an Oscar for Best Writing, now Best Original Screenplay, along with Herman J. Mankowitz, who is credited as the other writer on the Project. Citizen Kane, as I mentioned, is widely considered to be the greatest film of all time.

Orson Wells was 26 years old when it was released. However, despite its critical success, the film was a box office failure and didn't achieve its current esteem until nearly 15 years after its release. The film follows a young reporter, Jerry Thompson, as he struggles to determine the significance of the final word, Rosebud, of the recently deceased newspaper tycoon Charles Foster Kane. Through interviews with those Kane was closest to, we learned. of his rise from orphan to idealistic captain of industry and subsequent fall to a jaded hermit. Lizzie, I believe you just saw Citizen Kane for the first time. Yeah, got to say, Bunny Cub, you're going to love this. I had never seen Citizen Kane, which I have always been

aware is one of the greatest movies of all time, mostly because my mom always told me it was boring, which I usually trust her judgment. She has very good taste in movies. I disagree with her on this one. I loved it. Yeah, it was really amazing to watch, particularly amazing to watch, again, Bunny Cub will love this in the current political climate. You got to let that review go. I can't, Chris. I want it etched into my tombstone. No, I'm kidding.

I don't give a shit. No, but what I was going to say is watching it in the current political climate was very interesting. There are a lot of things that stand out as, let's say, echo our current sitting president in some capacities. And then I ended up looking it up. And he has said multiple times it's one of his favorite movies of all time, which I found very interesting.

So if you enjoy this podcast, one of the reasons we're timing this release for right now, November 17th, is that David Fincher's film Mank, which follows Gary Oldman as Herman J. Mankovitz, the embattled co-writer of Citizen Kane, is scheduled to be released on November 20th this coming Friday on Netflix. So please go watch David Fincher's new film. He was clearly influenced by Orson Wells, and now he's made a film about one of Orson Welles's greatest collaborators, but also greatest antagonists, as we'll soon learn. Yes. Now, before we get into Citizen Kane, I would like to play a brief clip that I believe a lot of people are very familiar with and they tend to associate Orson Wells with. And this is his outtakes from the Paul Mesaun wine commercial that he recorded towards the end of his life and career where he was drunk struggling to get his lines correct as he filmed this commercial for a California sparkling wine. Turn camera. Marks. One, two, take one. With overlap, action please. And to those of you listening, Orson Wals is just sitting staring not delivering his line.

Action, awesome, please. Just doing anything? No, it's a... Sorry, cut. You're rolling. 102, take two. Ah, the French champagne has always been celebrated for its excellence. There is a California.

California champagne by Paul Mason inspired by that same French excellence. It's fermented in the bottle and like the best French champagne. It's vintage dated. So Paul Mason. 102 take three. Action please. The French champagne has always been celebrated for its excellence. There is a California champagne.

by Paul Mason. Inspired by that same French excellence, it's fermented in the bottle and like the best French champagne, it's vintage, dated. So Paul Mason. So Orson Wells is fairly old at this point. He's very overweight.

He's very drunk, and he drank a lot throughout his career. And I think a lot of people, like with Marlon Brando, tend to have an image of Orson Wells from those later moments in his life. He had gotten very heavy. He was a little difficult to understand. He had a drinking problem. He seemed a little sad.

And it's easy to forget where he came from where he started and just how truly brilliant he was and how truly brilliant his career was. I do have to say very quickly, the thing that I was most impressed and surprised by in Citizen Kane was, well, two things, but only mentioned one for now. His acting is of a different,

time. And that is true across the board for many of the people in this movie. It does not feel like you are watching a movie from 1941. It's extremely natural. Yeah. So George Orson Wells was born in Kenosha, Wisconsin on May 6th, 1915. His father was Richard Head Wells. Yes, let's get the joke out, Dick Head Wells, an inventor, engineer, and businessman. He had invented a device that he called the picnic that was a collapsible picnic box. that Orson later described as utterly useless, but he convinced the military to buy it and they equipped every soldier in World War I with it.

So his father was actually very wealthy and spent a lot of his money on owning hotels and racing cars, etc. So his father kind of had money and was the fast, you know, fast and loose guy. He likes chasing after women. And he had married Beatrice Ivy Wells, who was a great beauty,

a really, really intelligent woman, who was a brilliant concert pianist. She was not professional, but she did play at that level and associated with professional musicians at that level throughout the United States and even the world. And in one odd bit of trivia, her grandparents had been neighbors and friends with Abraham Lincoln back in the day. So Wells' family was extremely financially stable,

and he came from a very talented home, but it was a very troubled home. And Wells would later claim that his paternal grandmother, mother, Mary Head Wells, was a witch and had put a curse on the marriage of his parents. In fact, the top floor of her house, which at one point in her life she had converted into a miniature golf course had later become a deep, dark sanctuary of the dark arts, complete with according to Wells, a blood-stained altar, and the bodies of dead birds strewn about. Well, it's not a home if you don't have dead bird bodies and a blood-stained altar in your attic.

Exactly. Now, no matter the cause, Orson-Wells' parents were just not compatible. Like Richard thought Beatrice was pretentious. She thought that he liked to play it fast and loose. And they were probably both a little bit right. His parents separated in 1919 when he was only four years old. He went and lived with his mother and his father fell into alcoholism and kind of struggled to keep consistent work. So to add to the tragedy, Orson had an older brother, Dickie Wells, who was 10 years older

than him. And he was institutionalized at the age of 22, having been deemed a schizophrenic. Based on what I've read, he was very quiet. He rarely spoke. He was almost catatonic until he was that age. And it sounds like he might have been severely autistic. And that they didn't have a definition for what that was at the time. Now, it should be noted that the other huge influence besides his parents on his life was a man who seems like a very kind man named Dr. Maurice Bernstein. And if you remember the manager Bernstein from Citizen Kane. Dr. Bernstein was a bone specialist who hit it off with Beatrice. And before her separation from Richard, they began an affair. and he took a deep interest in Orson, who, by the age of two, it was clear he was different. His mother trained him how to speak at a technical level that few adults would learn how to master. And by the age of three and four, he was having debates with adults around him on intellectual levels. His enunciation was so explicit. People just couldn't believe how articulate he was before he was five years old.

He became a professional actor at the age of three, taking roles with the Chicago Opera Company. And they actually loved working with him, but he was a little bit of a big boy. And so he got too heavy. And the sopranos didn't like holding him anymore, so they fired him. And then he fell in love with magic when he was five years old. His father bought him a magic set, and he was able to meet Houdini at the age of five. And Houdini was so impressed by this little five-year-old in the way that he could talk about the technical aspects of magic that Houdini taught him a handkerchief trick.

And Orson Welles attempted immediately to perform it back to him. Houdini stopped him and said, you never perform a trick until you've practiced it a thousand times. And I think that Orson internalized that idea of repetition is what breeds excellence, and it's what allowed him to be so good at so many things later in his career. Now, it should also be noted that Orson Wells was already drinking by this point. At five years old, he was taking tips of wine. Yes. At five years old, he was drinking wine. By age eight, he was drinking mixed drinks and painting lines on his face to imitate the look of his father's face.

He so desperately wanted to be an adult. He only hung out with adults. By the age of 10, he was smoking cigars. Who's giving him cigars and alcohol? Just all these adults in the 20s? Yeah, he seemed like a grownup because he was so intelligent and articulate at a young age and he didn't go to school.

He hated school. He refused to go to school. And so his mother just brought him with her everywhere she went. So he was tutored by these exceptional people, these masters of their various arts. and industries, whenever he would be in a room with him, he was hyper curious. And then on the same token, his father, meanwhile, wanted to introduce him to this Chicago inside crowd. So he met all of

these writers, journalists, sports writers, and cartoonists. And then it turns out Wells can draw, too. And at age 10, he starts cartooning and he shows real promise in cartooning, but his real passions were reading and writing. He was writing critiques of Nietzsche by the time he was eight years old. I mean, he was, he truly was a genius. He was absolutely brilliant. But, He was physically always in poor health. He had chronic asthma, sinus headaches, diphtheria. He got measles, whipping cough, and malaria. Oh, my God.

He was 21. And the bad health clearly came from his mother's side. Shortly before his eighth birthday, she was diagnosed with hepatitis. And the last time he saw her was on his eighth birthday. He was allowed to visit her in her room with a cake. And she told him, quote, that stupid birthday cake is just another stupid cake. You'll have all the cakes you want. But the candles are a fairy ring.

and you will never again in your whole life have just that number to blow out. And Orson then focused very hard and blew out all the candles, but he forgot to make a wish. And 60 years later, he would say that that was the greatest mistake he ever made, was not making a wish on the last birthday that he spent with his mother. She died four days later. And I think the theme of regret is obviously so deeply rooted in Citizen Kane and in a lot of Orson Wells' work. and it's clear to see where the seeds of that theme were planted. He studied music under his mother. A lot of people thought he was going to go into music,

but after she died, he kind of gave that up. He went and lived with wealthy friends for a while. Then he came under his father's care. They traveled the world. He went to the far east to Jamaica. Some people said that he was the one that took care of his father, even though he was only 10, 11, 12, 13. And then on December 28th, 1930, his father, Richard Wells,

died of heart and kidney failure. He was 58 years old, and Orson was only 15 years. years old. So at 15, his brother's been institutionalized, his mother has died, and his father has died. Not only that, going back into the theme of regret and guilt, Orson had not too long before this cut his father out of his life in an effort to get him to stop drinking. But he worried that it had had the opposite effect, and that as a father had effectively drank himself to death after Orson had done that. And so he had this immense amount of guilt coming off of his father's death, and he needed to select a new legal guardian, and he chose Dr. Maurice Bernstein.

who had kind of played this father figure role in his life. I'm going to skip through kind of the next phase quickly because it's fascinating, but there's way too much happens when he's so young. So Orson's brilliant. He graduates high school at 16. He gets a scholarship to go to Harvard, but he doesn't want to go to Harvard. So instead he just travels. He travels all over Europe, all over the world, writing poetry, painting in the hills of Ireland,

and then eventually comes back to the United States. He gets his first job in radio in 1934, and his voice is amazing. He has learned the articulation that his mother taught him, but he has this beautiful, like, deep tenor voice that is so captivating. You can even still hear it a little bit in that champagne commercial. There is something about his voice that is just velvet. He married actress Virginia Nicholson that same year. He starts making incredible money doing radio voiceover work. He was making $2,000 a week in the 1930s.

Oh, my God. Doing radio voiceover work. So he was making $100,000 a year in the 1930s. As a point of reference, Citizen Kane would end up costing $800,000 to make. So he was making the equivalent of over a million dollars a year at this point doing voiceover work. And everything he seemed to get interested in, he was incredible at. He became a prodigy in the theater world. He was considered the greatest theater director alive.

And this is all before he's 21 years old. It kind of all comes to a head famously on October 30th, 1938, when the then 23-year-old Orson Wells performed H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds for the Mercury, theater on the air, which is a radio show produced by the Mercury Theater Production Company. We know now that as human beings visit themselves about their various concerns. I'll give you every detail as long as I can talk and as long as I can see. More state police have arrived. They're drawing up a cordon in front of the pit. We all know the stories. He did this incredible War of the World's reading as if it were a news

bulletin and listeners that missed the introduction were terrified and they thought it was real. It was real and there was really a Martian invasion. Apparently, that might be something that was overblown in retrospect. It's more myth than fact, but it definitely did blow him up on a national scale. And all of a sudden Hollywood came knocking. Yes, no, it's remarkable. He's incredible. Yeah, I mean, I could see jumping in partway into that and being genuinely concerned because it is.

I think there were instances of that. It's just the widespread nature. People act now as if the military was mobilized. No, no, no. Now, Hollywood came knocking. And they'd been trying to get to him since 1936. They were offering him multi-picture deals. They were offering him movies. He was in love with theater. That's what he wanted to do. He wasn't really interested in movies. Okay, so here's why that's interesting to me that he was so involved in theater is because Citizen Kane is one of the first old movies I think I've

personally seen that does not look like a play that they filmed. It looks like a movie. It's like he clearly is using it as a different medium. So it's so interesting to hear that he was such a successful theater director because so many of these other ones, like everything is in a wide shot. It's clear that it's one set that they're walking in and out of. Yes. This is so not that at all. Yeah. And he did some things when they were making it that were actually designed to make it feel more like a play, which actually ended up making it feel more cinematic because that became technique that was later used. So for example, they developed this idea of deep focus, which made that they were using a different type of lens and a different type of lighting to keep multiple

planes of the frame in focus, whereas before you would choose what the audience got to focus on, he wanted to give the audience the choice of what to focus on. But that resulted in a more cinematic lighting technique, less flat lighting, more dynamic lighting, that then made it look more modern. The way that he also wanted to move the camera for pacing, there's a shot early in the film where Jerry Thompson's going to visit Susan Alexander at the bar where she's drinking, and the camera pushes through a neon sign down through a... window. I mean, that's where David Fincher got everything that he did in panic room and Fight Club where he's pushing through surfaces and whatnot. Wells was doing that 70 years ago,

and it's remarkable. Whip Pan's overlapping dialogue, when he was working with his first editor at RKO, he was cutting it like such a traditional old Hollywood film. Wells actually had to fire him and they brought in a new young guy because Wells wanted to do overlapping dialogue, which nobody did at the time. He was like, that's how people talk. That's how the pacing of this movie's going to work. It's amazing. It really is amazing. he's so ahead of his time. And so, of course, because it's Orson Wells and he's brilliant, he's going to come to Hollywood in the biggest terms possible. In 1939, he's just had two plays fail. So he's in a bit of a financial hole. And so RKO Pictures comes to him, which would

eventually become universal later. And the president, George Schaefer, presents him with what is considered still to be the greatest contract at that time ever presented to a filmmaker, which is we're going to give you a two-picture deal to write, produce, direct, and star in two movies of your choosing, and we're going to give you final cut. Oh my gosh. For a guy that's never made a movie before. That's insane. He had made one short film, I believe, at this point.

Every other Hollywood studio was so pissed. They hated this contract because it terrified them. What if all of a sudden we have to give all these talented young people final cut? This was the era when the studios had vertical integration. They controlled everything. And so they literally paid to have articles written in the trades that disparaged the move as financially stupid and called RKO, you know, idiots for hiring this kid who'd never made anything. So Orson Welles moves to Los Angeles in 1939. The Mercury Theater Company becomes the Mercury Production Company.

And of course, he ended up pulling all those actors in for the film. Okay. I didn't know what that meant when it said that it was the Mercury production. That's so cool. Yes, yeah, that's all his actors from his theater company, Joseph Cotton, being kind of the main example. This is where we start getting into some of the contentious elements of maybe what went wrong with Citizen Kane. There's a lot of speculation as to where the idea for Citizen Kane came from. What we do know is that Wells proposed two different films to RKO that were rejected to make as his first film, one of which he actually spent a few months on and we've talked about on this podcast before. And that was Heart of Darkness.

He shot a bunch of tests for it. They spent, I think, over $50,000 on it. But because he couldn't bring the budget down to what they wanted to make it at and he refused to compromise, they eventually Schaefer pulled the plug on it and said, you've got to give us something else. So Citizen Kane was the third project that he proposed to RKO. In 1969, in an interview with Peter Bogdanovich, Orson Wells said that he'd wanted to tell the story of a man using a framing device like his life being recounted by people he'd known, which hadn't been done before, but would later be done a lot with.

like Rasha Man and other films. And so he initially thought about centering it around Howard Hughes, but it seemed too obvious. So then he moved on to the concept of a quote, press lord. That, of course, is going to be the big issue that we get into, which is it's very obvious that he modeled this character around the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hurst. Yeah, for sure. Right down to the Hurst Castle stuff with Zanadu. Exactly, with Zanadu.

And it's more obvious because William Randolph Hurst was, actually a friend of Richard Wells Orson's father. Orson had not met him, but he clearly knew of him very well. William Randolph-Hurst was the son of George Hurst. George Hurst was an incredibly wealthy senator and gold miner. You can see some of his shenanigans in the show Deadwood. William Randolph-Hurst inherited the San Francisco Examiner. He then built it into Hearst Communications, the largest media company in the nation. He loved yellow journalism. He was a vocal proponent of the Spanish-American War. He ran unsuccessfully for public office. And of course, he built the famed Hurst Castle in San Simeon, California, a direct inspiration for Kane's Zanadu. Yeah, that's really hitting all the

plot points of Citizen Kane. So to be clear, Wells, he's 25 at this point, 24, 25, and he's, he's very confident. Here's a quote for him on why he had to play a man like Kane. Quote, as an actor, I always play a certain type of role. Kings, great men, etc. This is not because I think them to be the only persons in the world who are worth the trouble. My physical aspect does not allow me to play other roles. No one would believe a defenseless, humble person played by me, but they take this to be a projection of my own personality. So he's right, though.

He's a powerful imposing force on the screen. Sure. And he's very confident young man. And he's an attractive man, however, he's weird looking. Listen, Orson. He's an odd fellow. There was a market for you to play some stranger characters. Like Orson Well's playing Richard the Third, I would have watched that.

So at the same time, already working in Hollywood is screenwriter Herman J. Mankowitz, who was known by his friends, coworkers, and enemies simply as Mank. And he was this guy with an incredible appetite for life and for alcohol. He had been expelled from William Randolph-Hurst's inner circle due to his habit of heavy drinking in 1936. Wow. To get kicked out of an inner circle in 1936 for drinking means you're doing it right. Well, apparently he was, quote, the kind of person everyone wanted to have as a guest for dinner, as long as he didn't take off his clothes or throw up on the dinner table between courses.

No, I still want him. Yeah. To be clear, William Randolph Hearst fancied himself this dilettante of film, and he would host these incredibly lavish parties at San Simeon inviting the elite of Hollywood up, and it was kind of like there were two tiers in Hollywood. those who were invited to San Simeon and those who weren't. And specifically, he was in an affair, long-term affair with the actress Marion Davies. And so a lot of it was built around her social circles.

She was a comic actress of some known at that point in time, but she was not a huge actress. The name is familiar, but I can't remember what she's been in. So Hurst had kicked Mank out of his circle, and then Mank was hired by Wells to work on some radio scripts while he was doing radio plays for the Mercury Theater. and just a little backs around Mank. He was a Columbia University graduate. He then became a drama critic for the New Yorker. He was a foreign correspondent writer and critic for the New York Times.

He was notoriously self-indulgent and self-destructive. Go watch Mank. I'm sure it's going to be awesome to watch Gary Oldman doing all of these things. Also, this is sounding very similar to the character that Joseph Cotton plays in Susan Kane. Who was also based on a different journalist, but yes. He came to Hollywood in 1926 to write a silent film for Lon Cheney and then planned to return to newswriting, but I think he got a taste for all things Hollywood. and he stayed for 16 years.

By 1939, he'd worked on 30 movies, although none of them were considered to be very good. 30? Yes. Now, to be clear, a lot of those were in the silent era when there was not a lot of writing to do. You were literally writing the title cards in between the action.

Richard Corliss, the critic once described Mank's reputation at the time as, quote, a happy hack whose career reveals at best a dull consistency. So it was an unusual pairing. You had Orson Welles, the boy, wonder, and Mank, who was older, and who had never really achieved much success, but they seemed to work well together

because Wells could create great stories and Mank could just write these brilliant one-off lines of dialogue. And the best example that Wells gives him credit for is the line that Bernstein has about remembering specific things from your past in Citizen Kane when he talks about the girl in white dress that he saw on the boat when he was crossing New Jersey River. One of the best moments in the whole movie,

and Welles said that was entirely Mank. He wrote that line just out of thin air. That's what he was great. was those one-off lines, but he could not sustain an entire drama. So it was an unusually successful pairing. In 1939, Mank gets fired by MGM for gambling. Mank then plans to return to New York to lick his wounds, but then he broke his leg in a car accident severely. He ends up in the hospital in L.A. He's got no money. His friends get him out of the hospital, so he goes out drinking with them. His leg's nearly re-heeled, and then he falls while he's drunk and he breaks it again. He re-breaks the leg in the same

SWAT. As I mentioned, Wells loved Mank's ability to write a brilliant line-up dialogue, and so they started talking about writing a movie together. And it's not hard to put two and two together. Wells is looking for this great man figure to write a movie about, and Mank fucking hates William Randolph-Hurst more than anyone. And he knew him from his inner circle. They found their guy that they were going to write about. At this point, Wells is discussing story ideas with Mankowitz and John Housman, who ran the Mercury Theater Company with Wells. Wells had planned on writing the script himself. However, Mank said he would like to write some of the scenes himself and Wells felt ethically bound to allow Mank to work on it since a lot of the ideas

that they generated together were from Mankowitz himself. Wells, though, didn't want to open himself up to legal action from RKO because he worried that if it said co-written by someone else, RKO could say that he was in breach of contract because he was supposed to be the sole writer on the films that he had been contracted to make and that they could then sue him. The studio also didn't want someone else on it because they wanted this movie to be entirely the product of their boy genius that they had under contract. So, Wells goes to Mank, kind of hat in hand, and says, listen, like, would you be willing to do this for no credit? And also, are you willing to not drink while you're doing it? Because everyone was terrified that if he was drunk, he wouldn't be able to

write the script. Mank said yes to both conditions. And to be clear, Mank had often gotten odd billings on scripts that he'd written on. He sometimes was called the co-writer. Sometimes he got associate producer. Sometimes he was left off. So this was not that unusual. They drop a contract, and here are the four major points. Mank gets paid $1,000 per week that he's writing. Wells has the right to cancel the contract at any time. Mank was to be paid nothing if he was incapacitated by illness or any other reasons, basically if he gets too drunk that he can't write. And then four, all material composed, submitted, edited, and interpolated by Mank on the screenplay became the sole property of Mercury Productions. Basically, anything he writes is Mercury Productions. Basically, anything he writes is Mercury

and they don't have to put its name on it. Mank signs it. His lawyers make sure he understands. He says he understands. Leg and a cast contract in hand. He goes to Victorville, California, which is in the middle of the desert, 1,800 people with a German nurse, a secretary and houseman to watch over him, along with a 300-page script called John Citizen USA that Orson Welles had typed up for him saying, like, turn this into a script. And I believe that's what the movie Mank follows is a lot of his time out in the desert. And so after 12 weeks of sobriety in the desert, he returns with a script that's simply called American. What we do know is that this script is decently close to the final version of the film. It centers on Charles Foster Kane. It opens with the line Rosebud. It includes the mysterious

two-minute opening guide through Zanadu. What's unclear is like how much of this was pulled from the original 300 pages of notes that Wells had sent Mank to start with. But what's clear is they all three of them clearly worked on the script. So there was a telegram sent by Hausman to Mank in 1940 that says received your cut version and several new scenes of Orsons. Approved doll cuts. Still don't like Rome's scene and we'll try to work on it my humble self. After much careful reading, I like all of Orson's scenes, including montages and Chicago opera scenes, with the exception of Emily Kane's sequence, don't like scene on boat. So clearly Orson's writing scenes, Mank is writing scenes and Hausman is editing both of them. It's clear that everyone's involved in this project at this point.

it's unclear who's doing exactly what idea, except we do know that Mank came up with the concept of Rosebud. And what's also clear is that Mank's script was way closer to portraying Hurst exactly as he is, so much so that RKO's legal team had to step in and tell them that, like, we need to do a rework of the script to make sure we're not going to get sued by William Randolph-Hurst when this movie gets released. So they rewrite the script seven times. They finally land on what Wells want, and then actually RKO president, George Schaefer, came up with the title Citizen Kane. They'd start moving in towards production, and Wells famously, polled almost exclusively from his troop of actors in the Mercury Production Company.

This was all of the performers that he'd worked with on all of these plays and radio shows, so he knew exactly how to direct them. And he actually rewrote the roles based on which actors he cast in each role, which is so brilliant, because every character feels so perfectly cast in this movie. You mentioned Jebediah Leland, who's played by Joseph Cotton. perfect in that role. Bernstein, like, perfect in that role. Orson Welles himself, of course, is incredible as Citizen Kane. He then hired famed cameraman Greg Talland, who had shot Lemisrab, dead end, The Grapes of Rath and Withering Heights, which he just won the Oscar for. Wuthering Heights,

whethering Heights, Chris, lest we get more reviews. Yeah, sorry, I even have it written Wuthering Heights. But Toland was tired of all these run-of-the-mill movies he'd been making, and so he actually approached Orson Wells because he wanted to work with someone that wasn't experienced. Here is Orson Wells talking about the inexperience on the Dick Cavett show. When you were out there, I've always wanted to know the answer to this. You always hear that when you were 26 years old and you made Citizen Kane and they said, you can't do these things. You can't have the background in focus or whatever it was or you can't shoot a scene that way,

Mr. Wells or young Mr. Wells or Orson or whatever they call you then. And you knew that you could. and how did you know this? Because I didn't know any better, and it's very much in the line with what Jack was saying earlier in the show. It comes from just, you know, sheer dumbness.

You're sure it's got to be your good and your great chance. It's ignorance. There's no authority in the world like it. But there's got to be something more than that technically. I mean, how did you know that... You know technically

that the whole bag of movies can be learned in about a day and a half. I kid you not. Now, how does it work? How do you do it? Get a guy who knows how to... And then ask him, and that's the end of it. It isn't much harder than taking home movies. It's just about three points harder.

And all these guys who do it try to make a big mystery of it because that's their living. And I have the right to say it because I had in my first picture in Kane, the greatest cameraman who ever lived, who was Greg Toland. And he came to my office and said, I want to work in your picture. My name is Toland.

I said, why do you, Mr. Toland? He said, because you've never made a picture. And you don't know what cannot be done. And so I said, but I really don't. Can you tell me? He says, there's nothing to it. He gave me the day and a half lessons. And he was right. Showed you how the camera. That's right. Nothing to do.

And so we had the day and a half and there it was. But the only thing was I've been directing in the theater for years and nowadays they have lighting people. So it's true. A lot of what he did was simply because he didn't know you couldn't do that. And so he did things that people thought you couldn't do as a result. And to his credit, Greg Toll and the cinematographer, oh my God, he did so many cool things with the camera in this movie that nobody thought to do before. And it's clear he was so liberated by the exuberance of a young Orson Welles who was willing to try anything to make this movie. And that's why it feels so timeless and modern. They clearly just made an incredible pairing. And I just love this idea that it's, it was ignorance. I love that. There's no

No authority than ignorance. That's so smart. Yeah. In another interview, he said, nothing breeds confidence like ignorance. And he's a very compelling storyteller. Now, I'm going to actually skip through the production of Citizen Kane because while it's interesting, it was really smooth. It lasted 10 weeks over the summer of 1940. They were ahead of schedule a lot of the time, which Orson Welles wanted to be ahead of schedule to avoid the scrutiny of the executives. So he actually, when he was quote, shooting test material, he actually was starting to shoot some scenes.

And then by the time they got on set, they were over a week ahead. Even though he broke his ankle on set at one point and had to be confined to a wheelchair while directing, they still got ahead. And I will just mention a few things that stand out. The production design in this movie is remarkable. The makeup work is revolutionary in this film. And he did an incredible amount of work and research on how they were going to make his character age over time and do it in a way that felt real.

And I mean, I think it looks better than a lot of aging makeup today. That's literally what I said when we were watching it is that the makeup, like, the old age makeup legitimately looks better than like Benjamin Button and these movies that have, you know, hung their hat on the makeup. Like, it was crazy. So obviously the two characters that were most important to age correctly were Orson Wells and Joseph Cotton as Jedediah Leeland. And so Joseph Cotton was 36 at the time. Orson Wells was 26 at the time. And they basically start with their regular ages. And they then have to age them 30 to 40 years.

Wells went to Maurice Siderman, Cedarman, Ciderman, who was a non-union makeup artist who at the time was literally sweeping floors in the makeup department at RKO and experimenting with different forms of latex. And he asked him to work on Citizen Kane. And they developed the latex face application techniques that are now common use in makeup effects. And so when he gets jowly later in the film and the things that they did by tightening the skin on Jedediah Leland's face for his to give him the thinner, more gaunt look at the end of the film, no one had done that before. And it totally revolutionized makeup effects. In fact,

Jedediah Leland, so they shot Joseph Cotton's scenes as the old man first. So he didn't want to start with those scenes because it was his first film. He was a theater actor. And so he turned to Orson Welles and he said, break me in easy. then Orson Wells literally broke his ankle. And so he was confined to a wheelchair, couldn't shoot his scene, so he had to go shoot a scene that didn't require him in it. And those were all of the interview scenes

with Jedediah Leland and Jerry Thompson, where Joseph Cotton's playing the oldest version of himself. Those are his hardest, longest scenes. And people were so convinced by his age that he joked that after the film, he's like, I'll only be able to play a 70-year-old man from here on out. They even gave him contact lenses

that they doused in, milk because his eyes looked too youthful and he actually ended up developing an eye infection from that. Yeah, for sure. Pretty crony. Don't put milk in your eyeballs. Yeah, exactly. But yeah, it's remarkable makeup work. And when you see photos of Orson Wells when he's older, it really looks a lot like what he'd already done as Charles Foster Kane. It should also be noted that during the production of the movie, the most drama was actually coming from outside the movie because like would later happen with Titanic and had really at this point only happened with

birth of a nation, the great dictator and gone with the wind, the press was just ravenous for any stories of what was happening on this production. Nobody could understand this kid who'd never made a movie before was making this expensive movie for the biggest studio on this incredible contract.

So the studio, liking the publicity, starts feeding them these outlandish statistics on the film, like how many extras we've had, how much plaster's been used, how much latex we were using. But they were trying to keep some stories out of the press. Both lead actresses were pregnant during filming. Oh, interesting. Playing Susan Alexander and his and his first wife, the eye infection that Joseph Leland had. And then, of course, the similarities between Kane and Hurst are becoming

more and more apparent as they're filming the movie. And then beyond that, there are rumors circulating that Herman Mankowitz, Mank, is upset over his lack of credit. And he might be trying to lodge a complaint with the Writers Guild or blackmail Orson Welles into giving him a writing credit. Further complicating things is that somebody has leaked the script to William Randall Hurst. Oh no. Many believe that it was actually Mank, who would have sent it to his friend Charles letterer, leaderer, who he knew was friends with Hearst, and that leader would then share it with Hearst. So Schaefer, who is the head of RKO, was alerted of this and wanting to get ahead of things, asks his legal team to do a deep dive on the similarities between the film and Hurst's life.

Oops, did they come back with everything? Well, let's go through it. Citizen Kane, after an unsuccessful career at the university, he buys the New York Inquirer and tries to gain the confidence of his staff but giving lavish parties. Hurst. After being kicked out of Harvard, he took over the San Francisco Examiner and holds parties for his staff as an act of ingratiation. Cain. He has chorus girls at his party, acts the part of a dandy, becomes enamored by a young woman of lesser social standing. Hurst. As a young man often appeared in public with ladies of the chorus, fell in love with Millicent Wilson, 20 years is younger than he, kick girl from the merry maidens in Paris, and then he married her, and then eventually got together with Marian Davies, who was a direct allegory for Susan Alexander. Kane and Hurst each had one of the largest privately-owned zoos in the United States.

Kane unsuccessfully runs for governor of New York. His campaign is surrounded by political hacks and phony labor endorsements. Politicians wrecked William Randolph Hearst's gubernatorial victory by defrauding him at the polls in 1985 and fraud at the polls is like a big part of that movie. And then the big one is that Hurst fell in love with the 40-year younger than him, Marion Davies, who was a modestly successful actress and he believed wholeheartedly in her. skills and couldn't understand why other people didn't see what he saw. And Kane falls in love with the unsuccessful opera singer Susan Alexander, and he truly sees something in her that other people can't seem to see. And that I think is actually the thing that ends up driving Hearst the most insane in the end. So Schaefer, getting this news decides, though, that they're going to gamble it. Because he's like, you know what, the bad publicity might be good publicity. So they've spent 800 grand on the movie and they're going to see it through and they decide they're going to release it in February of 1941, despite heavy pressure on RKO to drop the project.

On January 3rd, 1941, Wells nervously holds his first critic screening of Citizen Kane. The movie was still not completely edited, and it lacked music, but he needed to screen it for some of these periodicals that would release a review before they would be able to, you know, see it again at the screening. So, unfortunately, this was the era of, like, powerful gossip columnists in Los Angeles, and there are two that we're going to talk about. and news of the screening leaked and Hedda Hopper, who was a former actress and powerful news columnist, was she was like considered to solve very good friends with Orson.

She like flirted with him a lot. And she was like outraged that she hadn't been invited. So she calls the studio and tells Wells that she's coming to the screening. And Wells is terrified of her. And so he's just like, okay, come on over. She comes. They watch the movie. She leaves.

And the reviews from the four critics are positive. but turns out how to Hopper is really close friends with Marion Davies and instantly sees the parallels between Susan Alexander and Marion Davies. And so she writes in her column that the film is a vicious and irresponsible attack on a great man. And then she called Hearst herself to tell him that Kane was a crack at him and that Wells was dragging him with the movie. And she set out on this like campaign against Orson Wells afterwards. So Wells is pissed off the wrong person. Now Hurst is fully alerted to what's going on and the

movie's supposed to come out in a month. So meanwhile, Mank is figuring out his next move and he has very different motivations. He's considering extorting him for more money, but more importantly, he wants his name on the movie because a movie that he worked on for the first time in his entire life is being called important and good and eminent and distinguished. And he's like, the one time I do a good thing, my name's not even on it. Um, so, And he also loved the movie. He saw early cuts the film and he was blown away. Apparently he knew this was going to be an amazing movie and he's like, I want my name on it.

Apparently Wells wasn't that concerned with sharing credit, according to the biography that I read, but he was terrified that R.K.O., like I said, was going to sue him if he allowed Mank's name on the movie. Mank, apparently, though, wasn't just going to be satisfied with share credit. He actually decided that he wanted to be the only listed screenwriter. That Wells' name should be taken off the project. And so Wells goes to RKO. He asks for Mank's name to be on the credits as a co-writer. And he even offered to include John Housman.

And John Housman actually politely declined and said I didn't write on it. I just edited. And then Schaefer of RKO said, okay, we'll list Mank as a co-screenwriter. And Wells is like, great, problem solved. He tries to get a hold of Mank, but Mank already has called the Writers Guild and filed for arbitration with them. So the Writers Guild comes in, but then it becomes a whole bunch of nothing because the writer guild just looks at Manx's contract and they're like, oh yeah, no, you can't do anything.

You signed away all of your rights. So then Wells and Manc have to bury the hatchet personally. Wells agrees to have Manc listed as co-screenwriter. But if you notice at the beginning of the credits of the film, Manx not listed as co-screenwriter. Manx's name is the first name listed under screenplay. So apparently what happened? is that the script was typed up and prepped to be sent to the title department for art direction, so that's to have the title cards made in the final film.

And Wells noticed that the legend for that title card read, original screenplay, then underneath that, Orson Wells, and then underneath that, Herman J. Mankowitz. And just before it went to print, he took a pencil, he circled Manx name, and he drew an arrow, and he put it above his own. and he gave Mank first billing. And apparently Mank never thanked him.

But we'll see in Finchers movie if that's the case. So at this same time, Hurst owns a publication called Friday, and they run an article that's entirely fake that just has taken stills from other newspapers and put quotes underneath them that says, point by point, this is a takedown film trying to slander William Randolph Hurst. To add fuel to the fire, the editor, Dan Gilmore, throws film columnist and friend of Orson Wells, also in a gossip columnist queen, Luella Parsons under the bus at the end of this article. He writes, Luella Parsons, Hollywood correspondent for the Hearst newspaper chain, she was

paid by Hearst, has been praising Wells lavishly, giving Citizen Kane a terrific advance buildup. When informed of these outbursts of praise, Wells said, this is something I cannot understand, wait until the woman finds out that that picture's about her boss. Something that Wells never actually said. So he made, like, Hurst is just like making up quotes left and right. But of course, Luella is humiliated. She thinks, like, her boss is going to fire her.

She thinks Wells has backstabbed her. And so she calls Hearst and he says, your job is to make sure this movie doesn't, like, never sees the light a day. We need to make sure this movie's never released. He issues a directive to all of his newspapers around the country that they are going to do no publicity articles or mention of any kind of any RKO film going forward, period. They cancel all articles, all reviews, all advertisements. The next day, Luella Parsons invites herself to a screening of Citizen Kane on the RKO lot.

She, her chauffeur, and two Hearst lawyers watched the movie with Orson Wells. They then book it out of the room before the credits. The chauffeur stays for the credits and then turned to Orson Wells and said, that was a fine picture, Mr. Wells. And then he turned and he drove Luella and her lawyer's home. And of course, when she saw all the details, she relayed them to Hearst. And now that Hurst really knew everything in the film, there's two reasons why we think that Hurst was really furious.

The first was that the movie portrayed Kane's death. And Hurst was terrified of dying. He was 78 years old. He was not in great health. He was near the end. In fact, the word death was barred. But the bigger thing was that the portrayal of Susan Alexander in the film, she's a talentless opera girl who ends up leaving Kane because she hates him.

and she ends up an alcoholic, and he felt that this was such an unfair portrayal of the young Marion Davies, an actress who was 40 years, his junior. And he was terrified that she would leave him, and he had been similarly captivated by her acting talent. He would often sit for hours in his private screening room, watching her films by himself, laughing or crying at how brilliant she was, and he couldn't understand how other people didn't think she was as great as he did. And it was almost like sadly romantic in that scene where Kane watching,

Susan perform in the opera house he's built for her, and he starts, and he's clapping furiously at the end of the performance, you can see why this would just terrify Hearst and infuriate him to the endth degree. The war against this movie only escalates from here. I will say, what's interesting to me about all of this is that it's not, like, Charles Foster Kane is not an evil person at the end of the movie. No. We'll get to that. It's a very sympathetic portrayal in my opinion. It's very sympathetic. It's not particularly, it does not make him a villain.

It's not like a cartoon performance of William Randolph Hearst. It's not even particularly negative. Like it's just a very human examination. It's about the destructions of our ideals, you know, for the right reasons we do the wrong things that so much of this film's about. Yeah. But Hurst was not about to be slandered. And so he recruits Louis B. Mayer, the Schenck brothers, Daryl Zannick, who headed Fox, and David O. Selznick to stop Citizen Kane. And they were all terrified of the damage that Hurst could do to the film industry. Not only did he control the money, this guy controlled the press. So when they had an actress who had like a fuck up or got caught with the wrong guy out at night,

like he would decide if they ran or didn't run the paper the story the next day. In fact, these men actually all came together and they approached Schaefer and they said, we will pay you $805,000 to destroy all prints of this film and burn the negative. Oh my God. They said, we will pay you almost a million dollars, and Schaefer realized that's when he knew the movie was going to be successful, so he turned them down. Luella then called every member of the RKO board herself and threatened them with fictional accounts of their lives that would be published in Hearst Papers and magazines around the

country. She threatened the manager of Radio City Music Hall in New York, telling him that if he screened the film, no Hurst Paper would ever accept advertising for, nor would it review any film that played in the hall thereafter. It was even rumored that she contacted Nelson Rockefeller, who owned a large chunk of RKO stock, and asked Harry Warner of Warner Brothers to refuse to screen the film in any of his theaters. Remember, the studios owned a lot of the theaters at this time. She told Will Hayes of the MPA, the Motion of Picture Association, to stop the film on the grounds that you can't make, grounds that you can't make the picture about a living person that failed. But Schaefer,

after being reassured by his legal team that Hearst would never actually take legal action, confirmed the release of the film, and then Hurst escalated his threats. They became increasingly personal. Wells was threatened with an expose about his affair with the then-married actress, Dolores Del Rio, and Wells himself was still married. The Hollywood reporter ran a front-page story

on January 13th that Hurst Papers planned to run a series of editorials attacking Hollywood for hiring refugees and immigrants for jobs that should go to Americans. Who does this sound like? Refugees who had fled an increasingly fascist Europe for Haven in America. This man is swinging his power in the way that Kane would or in the way that Donald Trump does now. It's remarkable. Here is Orson Welles himself on the most outlandish

tactic that was taken against him during this time. Could I just check one other thing with you? Is it true that the Hursts tried to actually have the film destroyed before it was? They tried to have it destroyed. They even tried to frame me. In one town, I was doing some kind of date. I don't know what bond tour or lecture. It's some kind of a... And I was in a nightclub afterwards waiting to go back to my hotel. I have a little supper. A waiter came up and says, a police officer wants to see you.

Well, I tried to hide because if that ever happens, I'm sure I'm guilty. I don't know how you are about it. Absolutely. And then I see a cop. I know I did it. There was no way out of it. I had to go see him.

And he took me aside. And he said, Orston. I don't know why they always call me Austin. He says, don't go back to your hotel room. Yeah. I said, why. He says they've got a minor staked out there and a photographer.

A lady? Luckily a lady, I think. I prefer to tell it that way. Oh, no, I meant ER as opposed to OR. I'm sorry. And they were going to frame me. I would have been in jail if the, you know, were the cops waiting to jump in and arrest me.

That was not Mr. Hurst itself, it was somebody in that town who thought he'd get in good with the boss by doing a favor. Wow. I don't think Hurst would have stooped to that. So they had planned on setting him up with an underage girl and taking photos of him in his hotel room. And Hurst eventually kind of wised up to the fact that all of this harassment was merely adding up to further publicity for the film and he slowly dropped his attacks.

However, his threats were successful and they did stymie the release of the movie. So Radio City Music Hall refused to screen Kane for its premiere. Other exhibitors refused to screen the film as well. There were over 500 theaters around the country that just said, no, we're not going to do it. We're not going to risk legal action. And so in March of that year, 1941, RKO still hadn't released the movie. Wells actually threatened the board of governors of RKO with a lawsuit. Schaefer stood by Wells.

He wanted to release the film. RKO delayed further. And Wells then desperate offered to buy the movie for a million dollars and distributed it himself. And the studio finally agreed to release the film on May 1st, but the damage was done. Further hurting the film, they promoted it as a love story, which confused people. Yeah, what? Hearst Papers refused to run any advertisements for the film. They had over a circulation of 30 million at this point in time, so they couldn't get advertising in front of people.

You know, they got a fraction of the theaters that they would have gotten for another film. The movie was poorly attended, especially in rural areas. And it's a dark movie. It had a dark message and it has a dark heart and you got to understand this was a moment in time where we are going the united states is about to enter world war two and so people weren't necessarily looking for a movie that was cynical about the american dream because ultimately citizen kane is about a man who is very idealistic and then is undone by those very ideals within the american system so the film actually lost 160 000 in its initial run even though it was very released to positive reviews. It was nominated for nine Academy Awards, but in another insult,

the film only won for Best Original Screenplay, which Mank got the primary credit on, and Wells got second billing. And it said that block voting by extras and other groups, so there were incredible a number of extras that got to vote for actor and best picture, and then large groups of other, like lower paid workers on the technical awards. And they didn't like the fact that that Wells was at the time viewed to have brought negative attention and pressure on the film industry in trying to get this movie made because he was bringing on the ire of William Randolph Hurst who'd been a friend to the film industry and they all voted against him. They were like basically fuck this guy. So he did not win any of the major awards. So then due to World War II,

Citizen Kane wasn't released in Europe until 1946. Apparently the Europeans didn't really get it. It's a very American film. Yeah. And so really by 1942, once you get through the Oscars, the movie was largely forgotten in the United States. Orson Welles' original contract with RKO lapsed. So Kane would be the only film that he'd do with them, for which he'd have final cut.

It's said that Hearst actually screened the film at San Simeon shortly before it's released, devastated not by its portrayal of him, but of how it made out Marion Davis, his young love. And 40 years later, Orson Welles admitted that his portrayal of his portrayal of Susan Alexander Cain as a Marion Davies type was a dirty trick that he played on William Randolph Hurst to enrage him. There's also an unsubstantiated rumor that Hearst's pet name for Davies was, what do you think? I don't know. Rosebud. Oh, wow. It's a rumor, unsubstantiated. It should be noted that when the film premiered in San Francisco, Orson Wells found himself in an elevator with William

Randolph Hurst, just the two of them at the Fairmont Hotel. and he turned to William Randolph Hurst and he said he introduced himself because Hurst had known his father and Hurst was quiet and he said would you like to come to the premiere and Hurst didn't respond and then he got out of the elevator and apparently Wells called after him Kane would have accepted that's the difference between you wow that's the last time that they spoke so in the mid-1950s RKO became one of the first studios to sell its library of films to television and this actually fundamentally changed how we think of Citizen Kane. In 1956, Citizen Kane began a series of reruns on TV.

That same year, it was re-released theatrically because Wells was performing as King Lear on Broadway, and they wanted to do it as cross-promotion. Oh, man, I bet he was good in that. An American film critic, Andrew Seris, wrote this new piece of film criticism about Citizen Kane calling it the great American film and the work that influenced the cinema more profoundly than any American film since Birth of a Nation,

because we had now had 15 years of movies afterwards that had all clearly stolen from what Wells had done. He predicted the direction of the film industry. And suddenly, Citizen Kane was in the zeitgeist and it was being re-evaluated by critics and moviegoers. The re-release brought it into profitability, and it was slowly revealed to have inspired more and more up-and-coming directors

than any other film in history. In the decades since, it has been referenced by everyone, from Les Blank to Kenneth Brana, Paul Greengrass, Woody Allen, Michael Mann, Sam Mendez, Paul Schrader, Martin Scorsese, Stanley Kubrick, Yazuziro Ozo, if you like Ozu's

films, he calls it his favorite non-Japanese film. Truffaut called it an outside influence. Luke Beeson, the Cohen brothers, Coppola de Palma, Stephen Frears, Sergio Leone, Ridley Scott, Spielberg,

they all claim to have stolen from it. In fact, there's only one great director I could find who said that he didn't like the movie, and that was Ingmar Bergman, who called the film. He said the film was a total bore. The amount of respect that movie has

is absolutely unbelievable. Wow, Angmar and my mom should talk. Clearly. So, as I mentioned, Orson was 26 when Citizen Kane was released. He followed it up with the magnificent Ambersons, which is really a great movie, if you guys haven't seen it. It was widely considered a masterpiece nominated for four Academy Awards, but yet again, it was a box office failure.

It lost $600,000. He then acted in and produced Journey Into Fear, which is a spy thriller. And then his career kind of just was checkered from there. there on out. You know, he had a falling out with RKO over a project that went south, set in South America. He made a successful film in 1946 called The Stranger, which Quentin Tarantino clearly pulled from for Inglorious Bastards. Here's the log line. It's about a war crimes investigator tracking a high-raking Nazi fugitive to a Connecticut town, which is like clearly where Christoph Waltz's character is going to go at the end of Inglorious Bastards.

And then Wells kept working for years and years, and he made other films, we'll get to, but he struggled more and more to get his. projects financed. While filming Othello in 1950, the production got shut down multiple times due to lack of funding. He shot some low budget movies in Europe, took television projects for the BBC. In 1956, he returns to Hollywood and he makes Touch of Evil, which is also so ahead of its time. It has one of the most amazing one-er opening shots in the history of film, if you guys haven't seen it. Again, dismissed by American critics only to be re-evaluated later being like, oh my God, this movie was so ahead of its time. And so far,

Finally, one of his last projects that he tried to take on was Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote, which he began shooting in Mexico in 1959 and 1960. He worked on it for a decade on and off. He had a completely done and edited version at one point, but then the lunar landing happened. And apparently in his movie, Pancho and Don Quixote wind up on the moon at one point. I don't know, but he thought that then the lunar landing ruined that, so he burned all reels of that cut. He died having a bunch of incomplete projects under his belt that were never really realized, and it seems like his greatest works had been done in the first half, if not like the first five years of his career.

So I think we oftentimes now remember him as the one-time Wonderkind who died a bit of a joke, making these Paul Masson champagne commercials. But as you so astutely pointed out earlier, you could say the same thing for Charles Foster Kane. young, idealistic man who's going to do great things, who's written this code of ethics at the beginning of the film, who dies by himself surrounded by his artifacts in Zanadu. There's a theory in behavioral economics called peak end theorem, and it states that an experience is evaluated and remembered based on the peak or most intense point of the experience and or the ending of the experience. And I think it's definitely the case with how we think about and remember people who have achieved great things. At his peak at 26 years old, Orson

Wells directed Citizen Kane, the greatest film ever made. But at his end, he died obese and struggling to find financing for his projects, drinking too much, and failing to remember his lines for a bad California wine commercial. I think that in the end, what Citizen Kane does so well, and as you pointed out, why it's so silly for Hearst to attack the film, is that Charles Foster Kane is an utterly sympathetic character. He is so beautifully rendered and three-dimensional and driven by love and the need to be loved and the need to love that he drove himself into solitude.

He was complex and human, and that was the point of the story. I think we've entered into an era where we have little tolerance for nuance and complexity in one another and in the people that we've looked up to. We think Wells was either a slob who ate himself to death, or he was the greatest director of all time. He was either an unprecedented success or he was a late-in-life failure, and the reality is he was clearly both of these things and a million different things in between. He was artistically brilliant, but he was also petty.

and cruel sometimes. He could have grace and decency one time giving Herman J. Mancovitz first billing on his best movie, but he was also a womanizer and a cheat, and he was clearly an arrogant son of a bitch. And I love that he is that complex, and I love that this movie makes out Kane and Hearst, by extension, to be that complex, because people are that complex. And I think ultimately, the reason that that movie is so future-proof is because it feels much more nuanced than even a lot of movies that get released today. You hit the nail on the head. Not only is it very sort of subtle and different in the way that it's filmed. It's also, you know, I think about the movies that came out around this time, one of them being gone with the wind, which is one that I'm

sure we will cover. And while that is a very interesting and in its own ways, groundbreaking movie, because she was a very unlikable female lead, she was really unlikable. Like it wasn't, there, there wasn't a ton of complexity to those characters. And to see this particular character was really interesting because he is a narcissistic asshole. However, he's human. He's not necessarily a bad person. Yeah, it was, it was amazing. I can't believe it took me until I'm 31 years old to watch it, but I'm glad I did.

Better late than never. So Lizzie, what was your favorite what went right? I got to go with the makeup. I mean, overall, it was, it was wonderful. He's so good. but man, I was blown away by the old age makeup for everyone. Because it's so subtle. They don't, just the way that they got like the crinkling of the skin around the eyes.

I mean, it's really amazing. Like, it, I couldn't believe. I had a hard time even understanding at the beginning that it was Orson Welles playing all the different ages because they looked so good. So, yeah, kudos to that man whose name I can't remember. Yes. I would say because we've talked about all the technical things, the acting style feels so modern still. And his performance as he's so understated as Charles Foster Kane. The scene when no one's clapping for Susan Alexander after she's done her performance and she's going out for what should be, you know, kind of her encore clap to collect her flowers.

And he starts clapping and then he just claps harder. and harder until his head's in shadow as he's standing out there. It's so heartbreaking. It's so good. And he's so incredible. And to think he was directing himself through all of that. He had such a command over his body and performance. But obviously there's so much more to choose from.

Guys, if you haven't seen it, please watch Citizen Kane. Now, of course, the person who has seen it in its finished form now as many times as you, Lizzie, is Orson Wells himself, who famously refused to. to watch his films after they were completed. And here is Orson Wells talking about that. We'll send you out with this one, you guys. What's the last time you saw it? I saw it that opening in San Francisco,

and I snuck out right after it started. I've never seen a picture of mine after I finished it. You haven't seen Citizen Kane in all these years? No picture I've ever made, except as an actor, but never seen a picture I've directed. Only once. Yeah, well, a thousand times in the cutting room. Yeah.

But why wouldn't you want to see it now? Because I like to sit here and think how good at my. must have been. Is there ever, is there any chance that you would change any of it or do any of it again? Of course, everything you'd want to change everything, I think. You know, don't you want to change things after you've done them and a movie can't be it? No, that was the whole thing.

And I like to think, oh yes, and all those great pictures and I know if I saw them, I know if I saw them, oh, the confidence would go. What went wrong is a Sad Boone podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Editing and music by David Bowman. cover art from Euthano U.S.