Documentary Focuses On Controversy Surrounding ‘Kane’
There’s a telling moment in the new PBS “American Experience” documentary “The Battle Over Citizen Kane,” when actor Douglas Fairbanks Jr. remembers the time his father asked William Randolph Hearst why he didn’t give up the newspaper business and concentrate on making motion pictures.
Hearst’s reply: “I thought of it, but I decided against it. Because you can crush a man with journalism, and you can’t with motion pictures.”
The fascinating two-hour “Battle Over Citizen Kane” explores how the then-76-year-old Hearst crushed Orson Welles, Hollywood’s “boy wonder” who starred, directed and co-wrote “Citizen Kane.” The landmark 1941 film, considered by many critics and directors to be the greatest movie ever made, painted a brutal portrait of Hearst and his mistress, actress Marion Davies.
“Nobody of our age, in our age, can think of Hearst without thinking of ‘Kane,’ ” says Richard Ben Cramer, co-writer and narrator. “So the two of them are linked, in fact, in our consciousness of the 20th century. They are linked.”
Hearst and Welles were very much cut from the same cloth. Both had been raised to believe they could do everything. Hearst made his name by filling his papers with entertaining, often scandalous and sometimes fictional, stories to sell papers. He eventually controlled the first nationwide chain of newspapers.
Hearst also collected homes, art and women and spent most of his life in his huge California castle, San Simeon, which was built on property half the size of Rhode Island.
Although Hearst was married, his constant companion was Davies, a bright, lively, fun-loving woman whom Hearst made a movie star. Part of Hearst’s rage over “Citizen Kane” was the depiction of Davies’ alter ego as a boozy, no-talent opera singer.
Welles was all of 24 when he came to Hollywood in 1939 and decided to take on Hearst. No stranger to controversy and trouble, Welles made headlines with his inventive, bold New York stage productions of “Macbeth” and “Julius Caesar.” At 23, he terrified the nation with his Halloween radio broadcast of “War of the Worlds.”
It was Welles’ friend, writer Herman Mankiewicz, who had been a guest at San Simeon, who proposed the story of Hearst to Welles.
But as the documentary points out, there’s just as much of Welles embodied in the film’s Charles Foster Kane as there is Hearst.
Welles, says documentary producer and co-writer Thomas Lennon, was excited about the prospect of getting into a fight with Hearst. “He used controversy to take highbrow subject matter or highbrow artistic ambition and make them accessible to large masses of people. That actually is very Hearstian in that he used controversy to get people to read his paper. Welles used controversy to get people to come into his tent - literally, his tent.”
Welles was thrilled when “Kane” came under fire. “He thought it was going very well,” Cramer says. “It was right on his script. The papers were talking about it. The reporters were interviewing him. He was firing off telegrams to RKO. He was threatening to sue. He was a cause celebre. It was perfect Welles controversy.”
But he proved to be no match for Hearst. The publisher pulled out all the stops. He attempted to shut down the production. Hollywood executives, led by MGM’s Louis B. Mayer, tried to purchase the film in order to burn the negative. Pressure was put on exhibitors to refuse to show the movie.
Hearst then started a smear campaign in his papers, attacking Welles’ personal life and his liberal political leanings. Simultaneously, the FBI opened a file on Welles.
“Nobody has made the link between the FBI investigation and the ‘Citizen Kane’ controversy before,” Lennon says. “It was most active in the ‘40s and early ‘50s. By the late ‘50s, Welles was living abroad. He had been taken care of pretty good.”
MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: TV PREVIEW “The American Experience: The Battle Over Citizen Kane” airs on Spokane’s KSPS-Channel 7 Monday at 9 p.m. followed by the movie “Citizen Kane” at 11 p.m.