48 Fun Facts About Citizen Kane

What is Charles Foster Kane's dying word?

Kane whispers 'Rosebud' and drops a snow globe as he dies; newsreel producer Rawlston sends reporter Jerry Thompson to find out what the word meant.

What is the name of Kane's Florida estate?

Xanadu was conjured with photographs of banker Otto Kahn's real Oheka Castle standing in for it on screen.

Which newspaper does the young Kane buy to launch his career in yellow journalism?

Kane takes over the New York Inquirer at 25 because 'it would be fun to run a newspaper', then poaches the rival Chronicle's entire staff within six years.

Which office is Kane running for when his affair with Susan Alexander is exposed?

His rival Jim W. Gettys reveals the affair to Emily and the press, ending the campaign.

Kane builds a large opera house for Susan in which city?

Kane builds the Chicago Municipal Opera House for Susan's debut; Leland, the Chicago Inquirer's drama critic, passes out drunk over his bad notice and Kane finishes it in the same spirit, then fires him.

How old is Kane when he is taken from his Colorado home by the banker Thatcher?

Thatcher's memoir dates the meeting to 1871, when Kane was eight; the boy shoves him with the sled that proves, decades later, to be Rosebud.

Kane's first wife Emily Norton is the niece of whom?

The News on the March newsreel records Kane's 1900 marriage to Emily Norton, niece of the President of the United States; the breakfast montage then charts the marriage's collapse in a few minutes.

Which studio signed Orson Welles in 1939 to a contract granting him final cut?

RKO Pictures' head George Schaefer wanted Welles after the War of the Worlds broadcast; the deal was mocked all over Hollywood.

Welles famously described the RKO studio as what on his first tour?

Touring the lot, Welles said it was 'the greatest electric train set a boy ever had'; he arrived in Hollywood in July 1939 meaning to stay three months, pay off his theatre debts and leave.

Which Joseph Conrad novel did Welles first plan to film at RKO, entirely with a first-person camera?

Heart of Darkness was to be shot entirely through Marlow's eyes, with Welles as both Marlow and Kurtz; RKO shelved it over the budget in late 1939, and The Smiler with a Knife stalled next.

Who co-wrote the Citizen Kane screenplay with Welles?

Herman J. Mankiewicz knew Hearst socially and shared the screenplay credit with Welles on the director's first feature film.

Which critic's 1971 essay 'Raising Kane' reopened the argument over who wrote the script?

Pauline Kael argued in The New Yorker that Mankiewicz deserved nearly all the credit; Robert Carringer's 1978 study of the seven drafts concluded Welles's contribution was 'not only substantial but definitive'.

Which media baron was the primary model for Charles Foster Kane in Orson Welles's 1941 film?

William Randolph Hearst was the main model, though Pulitzer and the Chicago tycoons Samuel Insull and Harold McCormick fed the composite too, along with aspects of the screenwriters' own lives.

Who plays Jedediah Leland, Kane's best friend and drama critic?

Joseph Cotten made his feature debut as Leland, fresh from playing opposite Katharine Hepburn in Broadway's The Philadelphia Story; Welles also cast him in The Magnificent Ambersons.

Who plays Kane's mother, Mary Kane?

Agnes Moorehead, a Mercury Theatre radio regular, made her film debut as Mary Kane; her first of four Oscar nominations came for Welles's next film, The Magnificent Ambersons.

Dorothy Comingore, who plays Susan Alexander, was recommended to Welles by which star?

Charlie Chaplin recommended Comingore to Welles; she had been acting in small parts since 1938 under the name Linda Winters, and Kane was her first major role.

Which then-unknown future star appears as a pipe-smoking reporter in the final scene?

Alan Ladd, a year before Paramount's This Gun for Hire made him a star, is the pipe-smoking reporter in the Xanadu finale; Arthur O'Connell and Louise Currie were also uncredited reporters.

Which John Ford film did Welles say he watched 40 times to teach himself directing?

Welles ran Ford's 1939 western Stagecoach some forty times with technicians explaining each shot: 'I'd learned whatever I knew in the projection room, from Ford,' he said.

Who was the cinematographer on Citizen Kane?

Gregg Toland asked Welles for the job, wanting to work with someone who had never made a movie, and Welles put his name on the same title card as his own.

Citizen Kane is famous for which technique, keeping foreground, background and everything between in sharp focus at once?

Deep focus, achieved with fast lenses, bright arc lighting and small apertures, let Toland hold everything from close foreground to distant background sharp, so Welles could stage scenes in depth.

What did Citizen Kane's sets show that Hollywood sets normally lacked?

Citizen Kane's sets had ceilings, many made of muslin to hide the microphones, so Toland's low-angle shots could look up at them instead of into studio lights.

What did the cast and crew do whenever RKO executives showed up on set unannounced?

Board members had also intercepted the script and leaked a copy to the press.

What was the film's production number, used as its working title at RKO?

The picture was RKO production number 281, so 'RKO 281' served as its working title; the number became the title of HBO's 1999 film about the making of Kane, with Liev Schreiber as Welles.

Welles fell ten feet while shooting which scene, chipping his ankle?

Welles fell ten feet while shooting Kane shouting at Gettys on the stairs, chipping an ankle bone; he directed from a wheelchair for two weeks and wore a steel brace visible in the low-angle scene with Leland.

What happened while the sled-burning finale was shot at the Selznick studio?

The rented furnace grew so hot that its flue caught fire and the fire department arrived; the shot closes the film on the burning Rosebud sled.

Who edited Citizen Kane, later directing West Side Story and The Sound of Music?

Robert Wise edited the film at 26, earning an Oscar nomination; his assistant Mark Robson also became a director, and Wise later won Oscars for West Side Story and The Sound of Music.

Who composed the score, his first for a film?

Bernard Herrmann, Welles's radio composer, got 12 weeks rather than the usual two or three, and Welles insisted RKO pay him at Max Steiner's rate; it earned Herrmann an Oscar nomination.

Susan Alexander's debut aria comes from which opera, invented for the film by Herrmann?

Herrmann wrote an original aria for a fictional opera called Salammbô, pitched so high that soprano Jean Forward, dubbing Comingore, had to strain for the top notes.

Who created the film's ageing make-up despite being only an apprentice at RKO?

Maurice Seiderman, an apprentice in RKO's make-up department, built the ageing make-up and was denied screen credit by department head Mel Berns; Welles thanked him in a full-page newspaper advertisement instead.

Seiderman created the texture of skin pores on old Kane's face using a cast of what?

The oldest incarnation of Kane took three and a half hours to apply each morning.

Which Hearst columnist turned up uninvited to the January 1941 preview and panned the film?

Hedda Hopper came to the January 1941 preview uninvited, called the film a vicious attack on Hearst and alerted him; her rival Louella Parsons, Hearst's own Hollywood columnist, was humiliated at being scooped.

How much did MGM's Louis B. Mayer and other studio heads offer RKO to destroy the film?

Nicholas Schenck relayed an offer of $805,000 from Mayer and other studio heads for RKO to burn the negative and every print; George Schaefer refused.

Which New York venue refused to host the premiere as planned?

Radio City Music Hall, the planned venue, refused to show it under pressure from Hearst's papers, so the film finally opened at the RKO Palace on Broadway on 1 May 1941.

How did Hearst respond to the film in his newspapers?

Hearst's papers banned any mention of Citizen Kane and refused RKO's advertising, and many theatre chains, fearing his reach, would not book the picture.

Which was the only major city where the film made a profit on first release?

It lost about $160,000 during its initial run.

Which Argentine writer called the film 'a labyrinth with no center' in a 1941 review?

Jorge Luis Borges reviewed it in the magazine Sur in 1941, calling it 'a labyrinth with no center' and predicting it would endure as a film no one cares to see again.

Of its nine Academy Award nominations, which single Oscar did Citizen Kane win?

Its only win was Best Original Screenplay, shared by Mankiewicz and Welles; Variety blamed block voting by screen extras for the shut-out in the other eight categories.

For how many decennial Sight and Sound polls did Citizen Kane rank as the greatest film ever made?

Citizen Kane topped five consecutive critics' polls, in 1962, 1972, 1982, 1992 and 2002, before Vertigo displaced it in 2012.

Which French critic's 1946 speech and essays revived the film's reputation in Europe?

André Bazin championed the film from 1946 against Sartre and Georges Sadoul, who had disparaged it, and made its deep-focus realism a pillar of his criticism; the European release had waited until after the war.

Which media mogul said in 1988 'Citizen Kane? I'm thinking of colorizing it'?

Welles had reportedly begged 'don't let Ted Turner deface my movie with his crayons'; only the final reel was ever tinted.

Citizen Kane was among the first 25 films chosen in 1989 for which US honour?

The National Film Registry's inaugural 1989 list of 25 films included Citizen Kane; the colourisation row had helped pass the 1988 National Film Preservation Act that created it.

The Kane sled turned up as a good-luck prop in which Broadway play Welles directed in March 1941?

Welles staged Richard Wright's Native Son, opening on Broadway on 24 March 1941, with the Rosebud sled on stage for luck; Hearst papers used the production to brand him a communist.

Where did Welles claim he once met Hearst by chance on the night of the San Francisco opening?

Welles said he found himself in a hotel elevator with Hearst on the night of the San Francisco opening and invited him along; Hearst said nothing, so Welles told him 'Charles Foster Kane would have accepted'.

In 2012 the tycoon's estate finally screened the film at which of his properties?

Hearst Castle at San Simeon screened the film in its own theatre in March 2012, 71 years after release, ending a ban the family had kept since 1941.

The famous breakfast-table montage condenses how many years of Kane's first marriage into two minutes?

Editor Robert Wise said the sequence took weeks to cut so that the whip pans and overlapping dialogue found the right rhythm.

Who narrates Citizen Kane's News on the March newsreel, cast after the real March of Time voice asked for $25,000?

William Alland, who also plays the reporter Thompson, won the job by imitating Westbrook Van Voorhis on the spot.

Welles admitted the breakfast-scene idea was 'stolen' from The Long Christmas Dinner, a one-act play by whom?

Thornton Wilder's 1931 one-act The Long Christmas Dinner runs through ninety years of one family's Christmas dinners at a single table; Welles admitted the breakfast montage was 'stolen' from it.

What name did Gregg Toland give the technique that kept action sharp from 18 inches to 200 feet away?

Toland called it pan-focus, claiming two years of development with fast lenses, arc lighting and small apertures, and described it in a 1941 American Cinematographer article, 'Realism for Citizen Kane'.