“I run a couple of newspapers. What do you do?”
Orson Welles had unprecedented freedom as a first-time director from his deal with RKO. He was to write, produce, direct and act in two pictures for the company, with complete autonomy in the hiring of actors, technicians – and he had final cut. Studio head George Schaefer had to greenlight the project and could veto funds above the modest $500,000 budget. To finish Citizen Kane he spent an extra $200,000. The shooting script was based on two separate scripts written by Welles and Herman J. Mankiewicz, that Welles combined into one. It was based on the life of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. Xanadu’s design is based on Hearst’s elaborate California home in San Simeon and Mont St. Michel in France. Hearst was infuriated by this movie and forbid any advertising of it or any RKO movies in his newspapers and even tried to buy the negative from the studio to destroy it. But Welles had previewed the film to rave reviews so it got a limited theater release. Citizen Kane was never reviewed in any Hearst newspaper until the mid-1970s. Despite all the publicity, the film was a box office flop. At the 1941 Academy Awards it was booed every time one of its nine nominations was announced. It was only re-released to the public in the mid-1950s. Gore Vidal claims that “Rosebud” was actually Hearst’s pet-name for long-time mistress Marion Davies’ clitoris. Screenwriter Mankiewicz insisted he took the name from a bicycle he owned as a child. The original nitrate negatives are gone forever, lost in a mysterious fire in the 1970s.
