''The Battle Over Citizen Kane'' is a 1996 American
documentary film
A documentary film or documentary is a non-fictional motion-picture intended to "document reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction, education or maintaining a historical record". Bill Nichols has characterized the documentary in te ...
directed and produced by
Thomas Lennon
Thomas Patrick Lennon (born August 9, 1970) is an American actor, comedian, screenwriter, producer, director, and novelist. He plays Lieutenant Jim Dangle on the series ''Reno 911!''
Lennon is an accomplished screenwriter of several major st ...
and Michael Epstein, from a screenplay by Lennon and
Richard Ben Cramer
Richard Ben Cramer (June 12, 1950 – January 7, 2013) was an American journalist, author, and screenwriter. He was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 1979 for his coverage of the Middle East.
Biography
Cramer was born and r ...
, who also narrates. It chronicles the clash between
Orson Welles
George Orson Welles (May 6, 1915 – October 10, 1985) was an American actor, director, producer, and screenwriter, known for his innovative work in film, radio and theatre. He is considered to be among the greatest and most influential f ...
and
William Randolph Hearst
William Randolph Hearst Sr. (; April 29, 1863 – August 14, 1951) was an American businessman, newspaper publisher, and politician known for developing the nation's largest newspaper chain and media company, Hearst Communications. His flamboya ...
over the production and release of Welles's 1941 film '' Citizen Kane'', which has been considered the greatest film ever made.
''The Battle Over Citizen Kane'' was released as an episode of the eighth season of the television series ''
American Experience
''American Experience'' is a television program airing on the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) in the United States. The program airs documentaries, many of which have won awards, about important or interesting events and people in American his ...
'', airing on
PBS
The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) is an American public broadcaster and non-commercial, free-to-air television network based in Arlington, Virginia. PBS is a publicly funded nonprofit organization and the most prominent provider of educat ...
68th Academy Awards
The 68th Academy Awards ceremony, organized by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), honored the best films of 1995 in the United States and took place on March 25, 1996, at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles beg ...
. The documentary was the basis for the 1999 film ''
RKO 281
''RKO 281'' is a 1999 American historical drama film directed by Benjamin Ross and starring Liev Schreiber, James Cromwell, Melanie Griffith, John Malkovich, Roy Scheider, and Liam Cunningham. The film depicts the troubled production behind the ...
Charles Foster Kane
Charles Foster Kane is a fictional character who is the subject of Orson Welles' 1941 film ''Citizen Kane''. Welles played Kane (receiving an Academy Award nomination), with Buddy Swan playing Kane as a child. Welles also produced, co-wrote an ...
, whose fictional life partially mirrors that of Hearst's, as well as Hearst's longtime rival,
Joseph Pulitzer
Joseph Pulitzer ( ; born Pulitzer József, ; April 10, 1847 – October 29, 1911) was a Hungarian-American politician and newspaper publisher of the '' St. Louis Post-Dispatch'' and the ''New York World''. He became a leading national figure in ...
. However,
Chicago
(''City in a Garden''); I Will
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Chicago Tribune
The ''Chicago Tribune'' is a daily newspaper based in Chicago, Illinois, United States, owned by Tribune Publishing. Founded in 1847, and formerly self-styled as the "World's Greatest Newspaper" (a slogan for which WGN radio and television a ...
'' publisher
Robert R. McCormick
Robert Rutherford "Colonel" McCormick (July 30, 1880 – April 1, 1955) was an American lawyer, businessman and anti-war activist.
A member of the McCormick family of Chicago, McCormick became a lawyer, Republican Chicago alderman, distinguish ...
, and even Welles's own life were used in creating Kane.
In 1939, based partly on the strength of his imaginative and successful New York plays, which were produced under the aegis of the
Mercury Theatre
The Mercury Theatre was an independent repertory theatre company founded in New York City in 1937 by Orson Welles and producer John Houseman. The company produced theatrical presentations, radio programs and motion pictures. The Mercury als ...
(such as an adaptation of
William Shakespeare's
William Shakespeare ( 26 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was an English playwright, poet and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's nation ...
black
Black is a color which results from the absence or complete absorption of visible light. It is an achromatic color, without hue, like white and grey. It is often used symbolically or figuratively to represent darkness. Black and white ...
cast and was set in the
jungle
A jungle is land covered with dense forest and tangled vegetation, usually in tropical climates. Application of the term has varied greatly during the past recent century.
Etymology
The word ''jungle'' originates from the Sanskrit word ''jaá ...
), and the infamy of his October 30, 1938,
radio
Radio is the technology of signaling and communicating using radio waves. Radio waves are electromagnetic waves of frequency between 30 hertz (Hz) and 300 gigahertz (GHz). They are generated by an electronic device called a transmi ...
The War of the Worlds
''The War of the Worlds'' is a science fiction novel by English author H. G. Wells, first serialised in 1897 by ''Pearson's Magazine'' in the UK and by ''Cosmopolitan (magazine), Cosmopolitan'' magazine in the US. The novel's first appear ...
'', which sent residents of Grover's Mill, New Jersey into a panic, Orson Welles was able to negotiate a virtually unheard-of two-picture deal with RKO Pictures, the smallest of the 'big five' major studios in this era. The deal gave him creative control under a budget limit.
''The Battle Over Citizen Kane'' also details the lives of Orson Welles and William Randolph Hearst before ''Citizen Kane'', and Hearst's manipulation of the heads of the four largest Hollywood studios—
Columbia Pictures
Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. is an American film production studio that is a member of the Sony Pictures Motion Picture Group, a division of Sony Pictures Entertainment, which is one of the Big Five studios and a subsidiary of the mu ...
,
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc., also known as Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures and abbreviated as MGM, is an American film, television production, distribution and media company owned by Amazon through MGM Holdings, founded on April 17, 1924 ...
Warner Bros.
Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. (commonly known as Warner Bros. or abbreviated as WB) is an American film and entertainment studio headquartered at the Warner Bros. Studios complex in Burbank, California, and a subsidiary of Warner Bros. D ...
—to combine their efforts and financial strength to buy the camera negative of the film from RKO with the express purpose of destroying it, and how the film affected their lives after the release of the film.
During this period, however, William Randolph Hearst was actually millions of dollars in debt, mainly owing to his excessive spending, particularly on his continuing construction of his already sprawling mansion near
San Simeon, California
San Simeon (Spanish: ''San Simeón'', meaning "St. Simon") is a village and Census-designated place on the Pacific coast of San Luis Obispo County, California, United States. Its position along State Route 1 is about halfway between Los Angeles ...
, which was located on a property approximately half the size of the state of
Rhode Island
Rhode Island (, like ''road'') is a state in the New England region of the Northeastern United States. It is the smallest U.S. state by area and the seventh-least populous, with slightly fewer than 1.1 million residents as of 2020, but it ...
, he kept a mistress over twenty years his junior, the actress
Marion Davies
Marion Davies (born Marion Cecilia Douras; January 3, 1897 – September 22, 1961) was an American actress, producer, screenwriter, and philanthropist. Educated in a religious convent, Davies fled the school to pursue a career as a chorus girl ...
. Davies had been a
silent film
A silent film is a film with no synchronized Sound recording and reproduction, recorded sound (or more generally, no audible dialogue). Though silent films convey narrative and emotion visually, various plot elements (such as a setting or era) ...
-era star, who worked on a number of
talkies
A sound film is a motion picture with synchronized sound, or sound technologically coupled to image, as opposed to a silent film. The first known public exhibition of projected sound films took place in Paris in 1900, but decades passed before ...
, but with less success.
After the release of ''Citizen Kane'' to relatively positive
critical
Critical or Critically may refer to:
*Critical, or critical but stable, medical states
**Critical, or intensive care medicine
*Critical juncture, a discontinuous change studied in the social sciences.
*Critical Software, a company specializing in ...
reviews and largely indifferent popular response, Orson Welles moved on to his second project, ''
The Magnificent Ambersons
''The Magnificent Ambersons'' is a 1918 novel by Booth Tarkington, the second in his ''Growth'' trilogy after ''The Turmoil'' (1915) and before ''The Midlander'' (1923, retitled ''National Avenue'' in 1927). It won the Pulitzer Prize for fict ...
''. However, after ''Citizen Kane'' did not become a money-maker, ''The Magnificent Ambersons'' was wrested from his control; this time he did not have the right of final cut. RKO re-edited the film itself and released it. William Randolph Hearst died in 1951; Orson Welles died in 1985.
Reception
''The Battle Over Citizen Kane'' was extremely well received by critics, and nominated for the 1995 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
The documentary received some criticism by scholars and critics, including
Jonathan Rosenbaum
Jonathan Rosenbaum (born February 27, 1943) is an American film critic and author. Rosenbaum was the head film critic for ''The Chicago Reader'' from 1987 to 2008, when he retired. He has published and edited numerous books about cinema and has ...
, for trying to tie the personalities of Welles and Hearst too closely together. "Perhaps the cardinal failing of ''The Battle Over Citizen Kane'', a 1996 Oscar-nominated documentary, is its nearly groundless argument that Hearst and Welles had a lot of things in common," Rosenbaum wrote.
David Walsh observed, "This sort of superficial comparison—a cat has a head, a dog has a head, therefore a cat equals a dog—conceals far more than it reveals. … The documentary filmmakers fail to make any reference to this social and political context. Furthermore, because they identify success with a stable career and a steady income, they think Welles's subsequent work hardly worth considering."
Film scholar
James Naremore James Naremore, born James Otis Naremore, is a film, English and Comparative Literature scholar based at Indiana University. Now retired, he retains the titles of Chancellors' Professor of Communication and Culture, English, and Comparative Literat ...
served as a consultant for ''The Battle Over Citizen Kane'' but condemned it after seeing the finished film. While praising its use of archival footage, he dismissed the central thesis that Welles and Hearst were alike, which he described as "a tabloid trick worthy of 'News on the March'. … Among the many things it ignores or obfuscates is the fact that Welles was a political progressive who used most of the money he earned in the movies to create some of the most important works of art of the twentieth century (including the films he directed after ''Kane''). Hearst, on the other hand, was a political reactionary who used the vast fortune he had inherited to assemble a relatively unremarkable private art collection."
"We can only hope that someday a good documentary on the making of ''Kane'' will be available", Naremore concluded.
Home media
On September 25, 2001, Warner Bros. Home Entertainment released a restored version of ''Citizen Kane'' taken from the best available print (the original nitrate print was destroyed in a fire) and released with ''The Battle Over Citizen Kane'' as a two-
DVD
The DVD (common abbreviation for Digital Video Disc or Digital Versatile Disc) is a digital optical disc data storage format. It was invented and developed in 1995 and first released on November 1, 1996, in Japan. The medium can store any kind ...
set. The documentary was subsequently included in both the DVD and Blu-ray editions of the 2011 70th anniversary re-issue of the film (although in the case of the Blu-ray release, the documentary was retained in standard definition and included as a bonus DVD).
American Experience
''American Experience'' is a television program airing on the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) in the United States. The program airs documentaries, many of which have won awards, about important or interesting events and people in American his ...