Matt Connarton Unleashed: Erich Pilcher explores the making of Citizen Kane (1941).

Well, I was always called when I was young as the self styled genius. All I heard about was the self styled genius. So that's what I took seriously, that I was styling myself a genius. And you know, anybody can do that. Toast Jedediah to love on my terms? Was it the only terms anybody ever knows. You know, my first picture would never have been made, never, in a million years, if the producer had lived in Hollywood, had had a knowledge of Hollywood. It was a total accident, total piece of luck, like winning six hundred thousand dollars from a quarter in a jackpot.

And it couldn't go on. And I knew that because they took my next picture away from me and butchered the end of it. I was going to show them that they were wrong. And I have spent the rest of my life showing people trying to prove that what is said is wrong. And that's been an enormous waste of spirit and of energy. That's a mistake that will be corrected one of these dates. Well, I've always hated Hollywood, but I hate almost everything in the modern world, and Hollywood is simply the most pleasant place to live in left.

I don't know how to run a newspaper, mister Patcher. I just try everything I can think of. You know, I am a romantic, and I was a romantic in the early nineteenth century way. I wanted every experience, every kind of thing, and so I went to Hollywood in that spirit, and I should have left in that spirit. There's only one person in the world to decide what I'm going to do, and that's me. I don't believe there is any wisdom and compromise unless you're a politician. And to the extent that movies are politics, I don't belong in movies.

My pictures don't work at all unless they work my way. It's not because I think they're better that way. They simply fall apart unless they're done my way. Oh, it isn't nobility, it's a self protection. You're right, mister Thatcher. I did lose a million dollars last year. I expect to lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars next year. You know, mister Thatcher. At the rate of a million dollars a year, I have to close this place in sixty years. Ask anybody of my age what they feel about themselves when they're young, I think you'll get a very waffly answer.

I think of myself of having been an awfully nice fellow then, and I may have blacked out, you know, whole sections of dreadful behavior, but I've genuinely blocked them out. I don't remember them. I just see myself. There's an Angelically movie from one show. I think I did pretty well under the circumstances. I am going to make King Lear and a picture called The Dreamers, and I'll go on saying that until I don't. But it looks as though it's going to happen. But you know, I've had a wonderful, fascinating life.

I can't comply. I am the luckiest person I know, and I'd rather be remembered as a good guy than as a difficult genius. Those words you just heard were from legendary actor, director, and personal all time favorite of this host Orson Wells. That clip was filmed by Entertainment Tonight, one week prior to the death of Wells. It's reflective and we can hear subtle regrets he has, most particularly with his first film, Citizen Kane. Our story begins in nineteen thirty eight when orson wells radio telling of War of the World's caused nass hysteria.

Because of this, RKO Pictures studio head George Schaefer wanted to work with Wells because he commanded attention. Wells was facing monumental debt due to the failure of his most two recent plays, so he took the Landmark deal for one hundred thousand dollars for two pictures in full creative control. In July of nineteen thirty nine, he began work on his first feature film that would look at a man that had wealth and power, but his inability to love, care, and be open to emotion shelters him and limits his happiness.

That film would be Citizen Kane, and to this day there is controversy surrounding it. It is still unknown if Wells made this film as an attack against then media mogul William Randolph Hurst. To make the film, Wells borrought on Hermann Mankowitz to help write the script, and Greg Toland, a cinematographer. In our next clip from a nineteen seventy the interview on The Dick Cabot Show, Wells discusses making his first film, the issues with Hurst in the studio, and other aspects of note. Though hear how charming Wells can be in self depreciating that is one of the things that allowed Wells to get away with so much and keep some people in the studio behind him during the filming of this film twenty six years old, and you made Citizen Kane and they said you can't do these things.

You can't have the background and focus or whatever it was, or you can't shoot a scene that way, mister Wells or young mister Wells or orson or whatever they call you then and you knew that you could. And how did you know this? Because I didn't know any better. And it's very much in the line with what Jack was saying earlier in the show. It comes from from just, you know, sheer dumbness. You're sure it's got to be your good and your Gretcha's ignorance. There's no authority in the world like it.

But there's got to be something more than that. Technically, I mean, how did you know that? You know technically that the whole bag of movies can be learned in about a day and a half. Kids, you not now, how does it work? How do you do it? You get a guy who knows it and ask him and that's the end of it. It is much harder than taking home movies. It's just about three points fider. And all these guys who do it try to make a big mystery of it because that's they're living. And I have the right to say it because I had in my first picture, Inkane.

The greatest cameraman who ever lived was Greg Toland, and he came to my office and said, I want to work in your picture. My name is Tooland I said, why do you, mister Toland? He said, because you've never made a picture and you don't know what cannot be done. And so I said, but I really don't. Can you tell me? Says, there's nothing to it, and he gave me the day and a half lessons. Then he was right, the camera, that's right to do. And so we had the day and a half and there it was. But the only thing was I've been directing in the theater for years and I nowadays they have lighting people.

We did then, and I had some of the greatest lighting people in fact, I think, but many of the shows I lit myself, and I was supervised at and I thought a director did that in a movie. So for the first ten days I was moving the lights around, you see, and Toland was behind me, fixing it up and changing the readings and saying, shut up, let him go on. I want to see what he's up to, which was very chic of him, I think. And then somebody told me, and then I went and got on my knees and apologized and everything.

I thought, that's what the directors did. Because if you see a picture by Ford, for example, you were speaking of Jack Ford earlier, he said, oh, must be in a one hundred cameramen in his long career, and almost every forward picture you can tell from the look of it that it's a forward picture, just from the physical look of it. His signature is on it. You know. When every list of great films, of course, many of them lead with Citizen Kane and say it's it's the finest film made. Do you agree? No, certainly not My next one is though, that's no, not the not the one after that, the one I am preparing at this moment, or the next one that's going to make history.

Could you give us the title of that I have decided what it is yet. Oh now, could I just check one other thing with you? Is it true that the Hursts tried to actually have the film destroyed before it was They tried to have it destroyed. They even tried to frame me one well, in one town, I was doing some kind of date I don't know what, bond tour, lecture, some kind of a gig, and I was in a nightclub afterwards, waiting to go back to my hotel. I have a little supper, and waiter came up, says, as a police officer wants to see you.

Well, I tried to hide because if that ever happens, I'm sure I'm guilty. I don't know how you are about it, but you know absolutely. Then I see a cop. I know I did it. There was no way out of it. I had to go see him, and he took me aside, and he said, Austin, I don't know why. They almost called me as He says, don't go back to your hotel room. And I said why. He says, they've got a minor staked out there and a photographer, a lady. Luckily a lady. I think I prefer to tell it that way. I mean as opposed to r and they were going to frame me.

I would have been in jail if the you know, were the cops waiting to jump in and arrest me. That was not mister Hurst itself. It was somebody in that town who thought he'd get in good with the boss by doing by doing a favorite. I don't think Hurst would have stooped to that, would you change? Oh. I did have a conversation with him about about the picture, which was in an elevator in San Francisco the night had opened. We found ourselves going up together and he'd know my father. I never met him, you know, And I introduced myself the things you'll do when you're young, you know, And I said, would you like to come to the opening tonight?

And he didn't answer, and I said, well, mister Kane would have come. And that's the difference between the two people, because the character of Charles Foster k had enough class to have gone to the opening, but he just very uptight. That was the end of that. It wasn't really about him. It was made up of a lot of people. What's the last time you saw it? I saw it that opening in San Francisco and I snuck out right after it started. I've never seen a picture of mine after I've finished it. You haven't seen Citizen Kane in all these years.

No picture I've ever made except as an actor. But I never seen a picture I've directed. Only words yeah, well a thousand times in the cutting room. But why wouldn't want to say it now? Because I like to sit here and think how good it must have been? You know? Cool? Is there is there any chance that you would change any of it or do any of it again? Of course everything you'd want to change everything, I think, you know, don't you want to change things after you've done them? And a movie catvic No, that was the whole thing.

I just and I like to think, oh, yes, and all those great pictures, and I know if I saw them. Oh. The battle with Hurst is the key controversy with this film. Hurst owned newspapers, magazines, and radio stations across the United States, and with that came major influence. If anyone dared cross him or at the slightest perceived disrespect, Hurst, with his power and influence, could take down anyone or anything. Wells in this film used several allusions to Hurst from the large incomplete mansion named Xanadu to King's second wives obsession with puzzles.

Even the word Rosebud, a Hollywood legend that Hurst gave this pet name to his mistress's genitalia, were all fell by many to be shots at Hurst. To keep this in other activities secret, Wells had to employ some secretive techniques, as explained in this clip from the documentary The Battle Over Citizen King. When Menkowitz proposed the story of Hurst, Wells seized on this as his last best chance. It was perfect, an American saga, a giant who brings ruin to all and to himself. Housman was dispatched a babysit mank in a little desert town called Victorville, you know Mac, which was a drunk jake Rosie keep him off the Booswell he wrote this thing, and Hausman and myself were sort of the go between.

We would drive up to get the part of the script from bring it back to Rushamton, back and forth. Mank called his script American, which was the title Hurst always claimed for himself. But as Hausman remembered, we were also creating a vehicle suited to a man who at twenty four was only slightly less fabulous than the hero he would be portraying, And the deeper we penetrated into the heart of Charles Foster Kane, the closer we seemed to come to the identity of Orson Wells. As Wells got the pages from Victorville, he attacked the script with all of his craft and with all of his life to that point.

The boy's loss of his mother that never happened to Hurst, It happened to Wells. He visualized himself as that character. See once he could see himself playing that character. I mean that was it, you know. I think they thought that they could get away with I don't think they really realized how touchy the old man was, and that this was Hollywood. Then it would be hell to pay. They knew enough to run it by the lawyers. From that point of view, they weren't at risk anyway. If Hurst sued, that would be great.

The film would be news everywhere. They'd write in some lines about Marion's drinking and those horrid puzzles. No one in Hollywood could miss the joke. They'd even put in Rosebud, the secret word, which they claimed was Hurst's pet name. For Marion's private parts. They'd drive the old man crazy, turned the town on its ear. Got called in on Monday morning by Jim Wilkinson, the head of the editing department. My boss was saying, listen, you know that fellow Orson Welles has come to the studio. I said, yeah, I know, I'm seeing him.

Well, he's pulled a fast food on the studio. I said, what do you mean. He said, well, he's got this new picture and he asked him for okay to make three what he called test for this picture. And they gave the okay and he shot the tests, so called tests, and he said they looked at the scenes and realized there's scenes for the picture. They're not just tests, so they've come him a green light to go ahead and make the picture.

I never saw anybody more focused. He knew exactly what he wanted, and he and Greg Tolan were on a completely single wavelength. I never forget the day I came in and that they had sawed a hole out of the board floor, which you could do, and they were both in their hands and knees throwing out the dirt like children in a sandbox. He was totally absorbed in himself with the picture of what he was doing. But you couldn't look at those rushes coming in every day those films shot the day before. They were not realizing they were getting something quite extraordinary about the photography and the angles and the shooting.

One of us. It was just one of us.

He was at okaio with his drug blosh deals and he would not let the executives with that studio come anywhere near the set. They came in and the oce and said, who's got a who's got a baseball? Let's play some catch. So so everybody started to playing catch. But of course it jove the breast, absolutely looney. With his sound stage closed, with control over everything on his set, Wells thought, at last he had his project in hand. Nothing stopped it. After one fall down a flight of steps, he acted in steel ankle braces and directed from a wheelchair.

He still said he hated Hollywood, but at the studio he'd found the biggest magic kid on earth. Then, much like today, nothing stays secret in Hollywood. Eventually the word got at out in Hurst immediately went on the attack. He refused to allow his newspapers and radio stations to advertise the film. He sicked his gossip columnists from many newspapers on RKO Pictures and Wells, and he threatened to blackmail studio heads with photos in evidence of them committing sexually deviant behavior. This led to other studios trying to buy the film from RKO Pictures to destroy it.

In our final clip for Today, from the HBO film RKO two eighty one, which is a biopic about the making of Citizen Kane Wells played by liv Schreiber, makes an impassioned plea to the heads of the major studios to let his film be released as he made it good. Afternoon today, er

man from Germany invaded Greece. He's already swallowed UH, Poland Denmark, Norway and Belgium. He is bombing London as I speak. Everywhere this man goes he crushes the life and the freedom of his subjects. He shows yellow stars and their lapels, He takes their voices. MM. In this country we uh, we still have our voices. We can argue with them, and we can sing, and we can be heard because we are for the moment free. No one can tell us what to say or how to say it,

can they? Gentlemen? I am one voice. That is all. My picture is one voice, one view, one opinion, nothing more. Men are dying in Europe now and Americans soon will be, so that we can surmount the tyrants and the dictators. Will you send a message across America that one man can take away our voices? So who is mister Hurst and who is mister Wells? Well? Mister Hurst built a palace of brick and mortar, and little wars and corpses piled high. Mister Wells built a palace of illusion. Sir, what we call a matte paintings, a camera trick.

It's nothing, nothing but a dream. Today you have the chance to let the dream triumph. Thank you. Was it successful or did Hurst win in his battle to destroy it? And what is the everlasting legacy of this picture? I hope you will join me next week when we will answer those questions and kickstart our month long tribute to Orson Wells with the review of, in my opinion, in the opinion of many others, the greatest film of all time, Citizen Kane for W. M. N. H. And Mat Connorton Unleashed. This has been a classic film revue with Eric Pilcher

Matt Connarton Unleashed: Erich Pilcher explores the making of Citizen Kane (1941).

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