The Battle Over Citizen Kane

• William Randolph Hearst is the person Citizen Kane is based off of
• Transformed newspaper publishing
• used intrigue and manipulation and a little bit of lying
• Orson Welles was a famous movie maker.
• Welles played the lead role in citizen Kane
• got a contract with RKO before he even made a movie
• he was about 20
• William lived on a property half the size of rhode island called the ranch
• Welles was 24 when he started making the film Hearst was 76
• Hearst got everything he wanted when he was a kid.
• William dropped out of Harvard and bought the old newspaper business his father owned
• Will first paper called his paper “Monarch of the Daily’s
• Will was personally shy but his requests were orders
• Will made a woman collapse in the streets just to see how poorly she was treated by the government
• Welles was raised as a genius in his home
• Welles knew the value of a fight
• Welles parents split up when he was 6 ,his mother died when he was nine and his father died when he was 15
• Welles arrived in New York when he was in his late teens
• Staged plays for the common man in New York
• He was strict to the cast
• four men attacked him one night outside the theater
• the plays were a success.
• Voodoo MacBeth was very choreographed
• Welles made money through radio as well as plays
• Welles was the voice of many characters
• Welles hired an ambulance to transport him around
• He ate a lot and drank a lot
• He didn’t get any applause at the end the audience just walked out
• He fixed the play by adding a scene when an innocent person is attacked by a mob
• He used a organ in the background and hit all of the base notes when the person died
• the applause sometimes when on for three minutes
• Hearst decided to run for politics and said we was for representing the little guy
• Hearst eventually got on the congress
• Hearst attacked people in the papers
• Heart called twice in the papers for someone to put a bullet into the president’s head and then someone did
• Hearst ran for mayor, governor and other positions and lost after the assassination
• Orson’s film was designed to attack Hearst like Hearst attacked people in the newspapers
• Orson liked danger
• Orson used a real knife in his play and accidentally stabbed someone
• Orson sometimes skipped rehearsals and showed up days later
• the broadcast tricked many people
• they thought that aliens were attacking earth
• it was a radio broadcast story telling of war of the worlds
• Welles was offered a contract with lots of freedom and he could make any film he wanted
• Citizen Kane portrait Will as someone who was separate from society and kept his wife inside all the type
• Will tried to defend his Wife
• Marion Davies was a “gold digger”
• Marion was taught as a young age to pay a lot of attention to rich gentlemen
• Will made a film starring his wife which was a romantic epic
• Will favored his wife in the papers “he was shoving her down the publics throat “
• she became kind of a joke in the papers
• Hearst had the largest private zoo in the world
• he brought an ancient monastery to his property
• his property was half the size of Rhode island
• His newspapers and magazines were hurt by the great depression
• during the depression Hearst became a symbol of hate for the rich
• FDR made a new law of taxes for people with an income of over a million dollars, This drove him closer to bankruptcy
• Marion started out as a gold digger but she eventually fell in love with Hearst
• Welles arrived in Hollywood at the hight of his status
• A Hearst columnist called Welles the would be genius
•  His contract said that he had to make two films.
• RKO canceled his first film and almost canceled his second
• Welles lashed out at people in times of stress
• Marion Davis was a screenwriter who drank a lot
• Welles added the loss of Kane’s mother because he lost his mother not Hearst
• Many of Hearst’s papers were not true of low
• Hedda Hopper was Luella’s rival
• Luella Parson took three weeks off to take down Citizen Kane
• Hearst threatened the film by gossip about racism, suing and scandals
• RKO pulled the movie and Hearst wanted to buy it
• Hearst threatened to reveal that most of the owners of the movie studio were Jewish
• During this time Welles got more popular
• he got more ideas for more films
• Welles wanted to play the film in tents and call it the movie the theaters don’t want you to see
• Hearst started to insult Welles in the paper
• He claimed that Welles supported communism
• Hearst’s reporters asked is Hearst was a communist and a homosexual
• the FBI opened a file against him and said that he was a threat to the nations security
• Citizen Kane was nominated for nine different rewards
• Orson Welles was once a magician
•  Hearts died in 1951 in Marion Davis’s home
• Welles never got full control of a major film again
• Citizen Kane became popular in the late 1950’s
• Hearst became a vagabond
• begging from everyone for supplies for filmmaking

Docudrama RKO 281

• Orson was nine when his mom died
• Orson created the war of the worlds broadcast
• Welles went to Spain and met a bullfighter
• the bullfighter said that a bullfighters worst enemy was fear
• Welles thought Will was a hypocrite
• Will’s wife didn’t go out of the house much and Will had parties to “Bring the world to her”
• Will’s wife was an alcoholic
• Will practically owned hollywood so it was a big risk to make fun of him in a movie
• Hearst called his mistress rosebud
• Hearst’s wife did puzzles in her free time
• Welles dramatized that he was a bad person by saying in the movie that there was a time when he was innocent
• It was Welles idea to call the main character Kane
• Welles boss, George wanted him to make a film version of war of the worlds
• Welles was filming the film without permission and was two days ahead of schedule
•  Gregg Toland was an amazing film cinematographer worked on citizen Kane
• a camera was destroyed on set so he borrowed another one
• Welles is insecure. He is worried that he won’t be as genius as everyone thinks he is because the people spent so much time and money on him.
• Welles turned his back on his father because he was embarrassed by his father’s drinking problem
• He regretted it after his father died when he was 15
• On a shot he couldn’t get a low enough angle so he dug out the floor
• Luella was a gossip columnist who was funded by Hearst who found out who Citizen Kane was about
• Welles lied to Luella about who the film was about
• Hearst tried to sue Welles
• Once Hearst went crazy and shot someone and killed them but the media made it go away
• Hearst’s suing form was rejected and he found himself in debt
• Hearst used racism in his journal posts
• Many people helped make the film it wasn’t just Welles that came up with everything
• Luella had photo’s of movie stars doing inappropriate things and tried to blackmail RKO into not airing Citizen Kane
• Hearst started to go bankrupt because he failed to sue Citizen Kane
• As Welles started to loose popularity the movie became all that he had left
• Hearst spent tons of money on statues and stuff and went bankrupt
• Hearst spent money on anything he wanted instead of needed
• Hearst’s wife wanted to be in comedies
• she sold a bunch of her jewelry for money
• The bosses at the other studies made an offer of 8000 dollars to buy Citizen Kane to burn it
• Orson gave a great speech and they didn’t take the offer
• Welles wanted to make another film called the life of Christ

Orson Welles Interview

• After he got the contract many people resented him
• The producers didn’t like how he acted, directer and produced
• Toland came to Orson to work on the film
• Orson watched a film forty five times and said that a scene didn’t work but Toland taught him about how film worked in three hours
• Welles tried to destroy Hearst with movies as Hearst tried to destroy people through newspapers
• Sometimes Welles randomly said yes to interview questions when he got bored
• He actually got in an elevator with Hearst the night that his film opened and Welles offered him tickets but Hearst didn’t say anything
• Someone wrote a book attacking citizen Kane and it said that Welles didn’t even write any of citizen Kane, none of this is true of coarse
• They shot ten days of Citizen Kane early by saying that they were doing camera tests
• He made a few films after Citizen Kane