Welles was a wunderkind, the product of a doomed family unit, cultivated by foster care and wealthy guardianship. He first made his mark on the Irish stage while on holiday and returned home determined to repeat his brief overseas success. A few fortunate events led to greater opportunities, already well documented, which molded him as a performer and director. His mixture of artistic subversion and carefree risk-taking, which worked well on both the stage and in radio, led to the offer of a two-picture deal by RKO at age twenty. It is at this age, two years before the contested premiere of Citizen Kane, that Welles begins to die.
The RKO contract ceded to Welles an enormous amount of discretion except in two areas – the choice of project and budgetary limits – and RKO enforced both on him with a dullard’s touch. For instance, Citizen Kane was not Welles’ first, or even second, choice for his inaugural film. Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness, a Victorian-era thriller set in the Congo and already adapted and narrated by Welles for the Mercury Theater radio program, was his first choice. The studio went along with the idea, up to the point when Welles presented his proposed (presumably ambitious) budget, at which time executives scuttled it.
The next choice was to adapt Nicholas Blake’s (pen name for Cecil Day-Lewis, father of actor Daniel) espionage novel The Smiler with the Knife, but studio executives intervened once more, unsure of Welles’ choice of Lucille Ball for the female lead and of his proposal to record the entire movie using point-of-view shots. The studio finally gave permission to proceed on a project created out of an idea originally offered by writer Herman Mankiewicz as a form of revenge after a falling out with Marion Davies, mistress of William Randolph Hearst.
Mankiewicz, working separately using notes from Welles, produced a screenplay that portrayed a detailed caricature of Hearst. Welles took that screenplay and performed a drastic modification of the Kane character, while leaving in elements of the Hearst legend. The Charles Foster Kane we see in the film is in no way similar in personality or behavior to William Randolph Hearst. Welles took pains to meld several character studies of famous people, as well as a few autobiographical touches, to create Kane.
Those changes didn’t matter. The story goes that a Hearst gossip columnist (either Hedda Hopper or Louella Parsons, depending on which account one believes) went to a preview screening of the film and reported the unflattering portrayal to her boss. Hearst declared war on the entire movie industry, demanding that RKO cancel release of the film. Other studios, in fear of those closely guarded secrets held by the Fourth Estate spilling out into the public, took up a collection and offered to buy the entire project, including negatives and screen tests, from RKO. RKO held firm and released the film in the form of Welles’ final edit, as per contract.
The Hearst newspaper empire ignored the existence of the film and refused to accept advertisements for its showing. Box office results in the US were fair, at best, certainly held down by the muting of the Hearst tabloids. RKO made back its production costs and little else. Word-of-mouth exhibited a mixed reaction, with many in the audience confused by the multiple narrative strands spooling off the reels, while some critics applauded its freshness. Rather than re-release the film for a wider showing the following year, as was customary, the studio put Citizen Kane into storage, not to be seen again for fifteen years. For RKO, this first taste of Orson Welles soured them in future dealings with him.
The second contracted film, The Magnificent Ambersons, turned into a disaster on many levels. First, RKO renegotiated Welles’ final edit approval out of his contract. Also, the project ran behind its production schedule and the studio saw fit to distract Welles with another film, Journey Into Fear, in which he is credited as Producer and co-writer (along with Joseph Cotton), as well as appearing as an actor. Still more distracting, an offer to produce a documentary about South America was made by Nelson Rockefeller and Jock Whitney, who both had a financial interest in RKO. Welles accepted the opportunity, knowing that the Ambersons project still required a final edit. He ended up leaving that task in the hands of the studio while working in Brazil on the Rockefeller/Whitney documentary (It’s All True, which was never completed). The Magnificent Ambersons failed to connect with the audience at the preview of Welles’ rough cut, prompting the studio to remove 40 minutes and add a happy ending, in contrast with the director’s stated vision.
In 1942, there was an upheaval in the executive hierarchy at RKO, and every one with a remaining fondness for Welles saw himself on the outside, as an accounting of the three Welles projects turned in a deficit of nearly $2 million. Time moved on and Welles found plenty of work as an actor (He, along with Joseph Cotton, has the distinct honor of acting in the number one movie on the list of both the American and British Film Institutes – Citizen Kane for the AFI and The Third Man for the BFI). He also performed occasionally behind the camera (most notably as writer/director of The Stranger and Touch of Evil). We remember his final years, hawking a California winery and appearing as a guest on television talk shows, not sitting on as much as surrounding the chair across from the host, while performing minor parlor tricks.
Could it all have been different for him and for Hollywood? If we could alter certain elements, would it produce any real gain? For instance, did the movie Citizen Kane benefit so much from the gargantuan portrayal of the Kane estate Xanadu, that carbon copy of Hearst’s famous San Simeon retreat? Would the movie have suffered greatly if Welles chose a less comparable form of residential isolation? It was there, in the opening newsreel sequence, that everyone in the audience, not just Hopper or Parsons, could see the similarity to Hearst forming. Welles saw it and chose to ignore what he saw, content that his revision of the character would dampen any direct comparisons. It was his first mistake.
The screenplay credit for Herman Mankiewicz was also a signal for Hearst that an ill wind blew through the sprocket holes. The feud between the writer and Davies (and, by extension, Hearst) was well known in their respective circles. As it stands, the final screenplay bore very little resemblance to the one turned in by Mankiewicz. Could Welles have bought him off the credit, at least to the extent of employing an on-screen pseudonym? On the other hand, is it possible that these people, especially Mankiewicz, were so arrogantly perched in a shadow that they sat blind to the enormous power of the Hearst media machine?
What would a large box office result and timely re-release have meant to the studio? Or Hearst’s silence, for that matter? RKO probably wouldn’t have put Welles on a leash, one that he struggled against during the Ambersons episode, before escaping to Buenos Aires. What would it have meant to Hollywood to have a film of a similar impact to Citizen Kane released so soon afterward? Could The Magnificent Ambersons been the bookend piece Welles needed to not only ensure a blank check moving forward, but to also change the perspective of developing filmmakers in a way that encouraged a heightened level of artistic risk-taking?
In 1956, RKO Pictures rereleased Citizen Kane and it was at this time that the movie was widely acclaimed as a work of high art and cinematic genius. Unfortunately, television had already taken away a large portion of the audience from movie theaters, to the extent that the studios finally lifted their ban on television appearances by film actors that same year.
The studios were shrinking. Louis B. Mayer was out at MGM and would soon be gone from the earth. Darryl F. Zanuck left 20th Century Fox to start his own production company. Warner Brothers sold the rights to all their pre-1950 films. RKO Pictures was undergoing a transformation into a multi-media holding company; indeed, all of the studios were turning to television either for investment purposes or as an outlet for alternative productions. Hollywood was in full retreat, able to compete only with lavishly expensive, high-risk extravaganzas and flawed technological gimmicks, such as Cinerama.
Here we have an intersection in the timeline, just when Citizen Kane becomes viewed as iconic, long past its ability to encourage a new direction and save the infrastructure that helped to create it. It is impossible to estimate the degree to which an initial financial success for Welles may have influenced the bean-counters and voices of studio authority in terms of artistic license. It is just as impossible to imagine the great works lost to fate due to the miscalculations of everyone involved, including Welles. It is a loss on so incalculably large a scale that it rivals the deaths of past civilizations. Consider this: is the loss of the contents of the Great Library of Alexandria any less hurtful if we find that the library existed only as an idea in the mind of one man?
Orson Welles knew his place and, to his credit, he understood his own role in the ironical turn that led from a promising beginning to an unsatisfying end. That he sipped from the poison cup slowly and continued to interact, if only in the most peripheral forms of conversation, is of some benefit. Generations of people heard the man speak of his short triumph and lasting failure, giving us all an opportunity to mourn the truth and blissfully dream the lie of the happier ending.
Abstract Invention by Charlie Accetta is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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