98 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 is introduced by a newsreel quoting Coleridge's Kubla Khan, which then hails Kane as 'America's Kubla Khan'.

Which little newspaper among his inherited holdings does young Kane decide to run?

The New York Inquirer was a little paper with a meagre circulation, so within six years Kane lured the rival Chronicle's star staff to it.

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

Governor of New York seemed within Kane's grasp until boss Jim Gettys threatened to expose the affair; Kane refused to withdraw, and lost.

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

Chicago's Municipal Opera House was Kane's gift for Susan's debut; when Leland panned her, Kane finished the bad review himself, printed it and fired him.

Kane's fortune began when a defaulting boarder left his mother the deed to what?

A gold mine thought worthless, the Colorado Lode, made Mary Kane rich, so she handed her young son to banker Thatcher's care.

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

The President of the United States was Emily's uncle, and Kane's business manager predicts that before Kane is through, she'll be a President's wife.

Which 1938 radio broadcast made Welles notorious enough to win an unprecedented Hollywood contract?

The War of the Worlds caught RKO's eye; Welles later joked that copycats abroad were jailed, 'and I got a contract'.

What did Welles famously call the RKO studio when he first surveyed it?

An electric train set was how Welles saw RKO, and at 24 he got control no studio had offered even its biggest names.

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

Heart of Darkness went through weeks of preparation, but RKO turned the project down, so the film was never made.

Who co-wrote the Citizen Kane screenplay with Welles?

Herman J. Mankiewicz dictated the first drafts at a remote desert ranch over 12 weeks, while John Houseman, by his own account, merely edited.

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

Pauline Kael credited the script almost wholly to Welles's co-writer, in an essay written to introduce the published shooting script.

Which silent-film star was widely assumed to be the model for Susan Alexander?

Marion Davies was Hearst's companion, and that assumed portrait was a major reason he tried to destroy Citizen Kane.

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

Joseph Cotten had created the Broadway role Cary Grant played in the film of The Philadelphia Story, and Kane became his feature film debut instead.

Who plays Kane's mother, Mary Kane?

Agnes Moorehead was making her first feature film, like Welles, and recalled that he 'trained us for films at the same time that he was training himself'.

What does a bored Susan Alexander spend her days assembling in Kane's vast mansion?

Jigsaw puzzles fill Susan's empty days, and the film turns them into its metaphor for piecing together a man no single word explains.

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's cinematography is most famous for which technique?

Deep focus wasn't invented for Kane: its cinematographer had already tried the technique on John Ford's The Long Voyage Home.

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

A ceiling, often of muslin hiding the microphones, let the camera look up at rooms without revealing the studio lights overhead.

What did Citizen Kane's cast and crew do whenever RKO executives showed up on set unannounced?

Welles's company started a ball game until the brass left, witnesses recalled; he would not let RKO's executives anywhere near his set.

To start filming without studio interference, what did Welles tell RKO he was only shooting?

Camera tests were the cover story, and five or six of those so-called tests, including the projection-room scene, ended up in the finished film.

Welles injured his ankle in a fall while shooting which Citizen Kane scene?

Shouting at Gettys on the stairs ended in a fall that left Welles directing from a wheelchair and acting in a steel ankle brace.

What happened while Citizen Kane's sled-burning finale was shot at the Selznick studio?

The fire department arrived on the ninth take, Paul Stewart recalled, because the furnace had grown so hot its flue caught fire, to Welles's delight.

Which future Oscar-winning director edited Citizen Kane?

Robert Wise also edited Welles's next film, The Magnificent Ambersons, which RKO took out of Welles's control and finished without him.

Who composed Citizen Kane's score, his first for a film?

Bernard Herrmann was Oscar-nominated for Kane but won that year's award for a different score, The Devil and Daniel Webster.

Susan Alexander's disastrous opera debut uses which opera, invented for Citizen Kane?

Salammbô was a witty pastiche of real opera, its aria pitched deliberately beyond Susan Alexander's small voice.

Which sign on the fence of Kane's estate opens Citizen Kane and returns at its very end?

No Trespassing is the first thing we see, yet the curious camera ignores it and slips straight into the grounds of Kane's estate.

Where does Citizen Kane's reporter find Susan Alexander running a nightclub?

Atlantic City is where a drunken Susan screams at the reporter to get out, refusing to talk about Kane.

Which gossip columnist turned up uninvited to a January 1941 Citizen Kane preview?

Hedda Hopper rushed the news to Hearst, and he complained that he had learned about the film from her rather than from his own columnist, Louella Parsons.

Which studio boss led fellow studio heads in offering to pay RKO to destroy Citizen Kane?

Louis B. Mayer's group offered about $800,000 to burn the negative and every print, yet RKO went ahead and released the film.

Which New York venue refused to host Citizen Kane's premiere as planned?

Radio City Music Hall backed out, reportedly after pressure from Hearst's columnist Louella Parsons, and the nervous studio postponed the premiere.

How did Hearst respond to Citizen Kane in his newspapers?

Banned any mention of it: Hearst's papers ignored Citizen Kane and even refused advertising for other RKO pictures.

Which film beat Citizen Kane to the Best Picture Oscar for 1941?

How Green Was My Valley was meant to be shot in Wales, but the war forced Fox to build its Welsh mining village in the hills near Malibu.

Which Argentine writer called Citizen Kane '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?

Best Original Screenplay was its only win; Variety blamed the extras who voted, writing that 'the mob prefers a regular guy to a genius'.

Which film ended Citizen Kane's 50-year reign atop the Sight and Sound critics' poll in 2012?

Vertigo held the title for just one decade, until Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman topped the 2022 critics' poll.

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 that he was thinking of colorizing Citizen Kane?

Ted Turner's color tests revived Welles's plea to a friend before his death: 'Don't let Ted Turner deface my movie with his crayons.'

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

The National Film Registry was created by the 1988 National Film Preservation Act, passed amid the uproar over colorizing black-and-white films.

Which Broadway play did Welles direct in March 1941, only for a Hearst paper to brand it propaganda?

Native Son, from Richard Wright's novel, drew Hearst attacks calling Welles a communist, and the FBI kept a file on him for years.

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 Hearst estate agreed to screen Citizen Kane at which of his properties?

Hearst Castle at San Simeon hosted the 2012 screening, 71 years after Hearst had fought to stop the film's release.

Which transition links the short scenes of Citizen Kane's breakfast montage?

Whip pans carry Kane's first marriage from chatty newlyweds to stony silence in about two minutes of screen time.

Citizen Kane's opening newsreel is a parody of which real newsreel series?

The March of Time came from Henry Luce's Time Inc., and Kane's reporters stay faceless in shadow to mock the anonymity of Luce's writers.

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

Thornton Wilder later wrote the libretto when Paul Hindemith turned The Long Christmas Dinner into an opera.

Which Kane associate tells Thompson he still remembers a girl in a white dress glimpsed on a ferry?

Mr. Bernstein tells the story to argue that Kane's dying word could mean some girl he had barely met.

Citizen Kane lost its perfect score on which website in 2021 after an 80-year-old negative review was added?

Rotten Tomatoes cut the film from 100% to 99% when a 1941 Chicago Tribune notice, which found it too eccentric to be entertaining, was added to its archive of glowing reviews.

Citizen Kane's make-up artist gave the elderly Kane lifelike skin pores using a cast of what?

An orange peel supplied the texture: Maurice Seiderman pressed a negative cast of one into the make-up, and Welles, unable to win him a screen credit, thanked him by name in a newspaper advert.

Which object does the dying Charles Foster Kane drop from his hand in Citizen Kane's opening scene?

A snow globe falls as Kane speaks his last word; it once belonged to Susan Alexander, and finding it is what halts his rampage through her bedroom after she leaves him.

Which garage-rock duo built their song The Union Forever almost entirely from lines spoken in Citizen Kane?

The White Stripes put the song on their 2001 album White Blood Cells; Citizen Kane was Jack White's favourite film, and a lawsuit over the borrowed dialogue was once rumoured.

Which star of Sergeant York beat Orson Welles to the Best Actor Oscar for the year of Citizen Kane?

Gary Cooper won as the reluctant 1918 battlefield hero Alvin York in the year's highest-grossing film, which drew eleven Oscar nominations to Citizen Kane's nine.

Which wartime romance ranked second, right behind Citizen Kane, on the AFI's 1998 list of 100 movies?

Casablanca took second place in the poll of more than 1,500 film-industry figures, then slipped to third in the 2007 update when The Godfather overtook it; Kane stayed top both times.

Citizen Kane's opening newsreel shows Kane appearing on a balcony beside which European dictator?

Adolf Hitler shares the balcony with Kane, who returns from a trip to Europe assuring reporters that peace will hold; the film opened seven months before Pearl Harbor.

In 1995 which institution listed Citizen Kane among 45 important films, under the heading Art?

The Vatican drew up the list for cinema's centenary, sorting its choices into religion, values and art, and Pope John Paul II recommended the films for viewing.

Which silent-era pioneer said in 1948 that he loved Citizen Kane, especially the ideas it took from him?

D. W. Griffith had a point: historians note that Kane invented few of its famous techniques, and instead gathered decades of earlier experiments into a single film.

Which Welles follow-up to Citizen Kane did RKO shorten and give a happier ending against his wishes?

The Magnificent Ambersons lost more than 40 minutes and gained a reshot ending, because Welles's second RKO contract made him a studio employee without control of the edit.

In which US state is the boarding house where Citizen Kane's hero spends his early childhood?

Colorado is where the film places the fictional settlement of Little Salem, and a stove from Mary Kane's boarding house there turns up, valued at two dollars, when his possessions are catalogued.

Which banker becomes young Kane's legal guardian when his mother signs the boy away in Citizen Kane?

Mr. Thatcher raises the boy in luxury and is repaid with defiance: the grown Kane gets himself thrown out of a string of top colleges, then uses his newspaper to attack the banker's own interests.

Citizen Kane shows Kane's newspaper, like Hearst's, helping to push America into which real conflict?

The Spanish–American War is the one Kane promises to supply, a jab at the boast long attributed to Hearst that he would furnish a war if his artist furnished the pictures.

In Citizen Kane, what does Kane do with the opera review his best friend is too drunk to complete?

Kane finishes it himself with every harsh word intact, runs it to prove he has some integrity left, and then sacks the friend who began it.

Which real financial disaster costs Kane control of his newspaper empire in Citizen Kane?

The Wall Street Crash leaves Kane signing his businesses over to the very banker who raised him, though he keeps a measure of say over what his papers publish.

Which bird shrieks across the screen in a jarring cut at the start of the butler's flashback in Citizen Kane?

A cockatoo screeches without warning, one of several jolting cuts that Welles modelled on the montage theories of the Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein.

At which New York arena does Citizen Kane's hero address a packed rally and vow to jail his rival?

Madison Square Garden hosts the speech in which Kane promises to send the party boss to prison; soon afterwards that same boss exposes his affair and the election is lost.

Citizen Kane's newsreel shows Kane denounced as a communist by his old guardian and as what by a rally speaker?

A fascist is the speaker's charge, made in the same month that the banker brands him a communist before Congress; Kane's own reply is that he is simply a loyal citizen of his country.

Which rival newspaper's star staff does Kane lure away over six years in Citizen Kane?

The Chronicle loses its best people to Kane, who collects them like works of art; years later, as the marriage sours, his first wife pointedly reads that same rival paper at breakfast.

Which actress, once billed as Linda Winters, plays Kane's second wife Susan in Citizen Kane?

Dorothy Comingore drew praise as the reluctant opera singer, but her screen career was over within a decade, ended in 1951 by the Hollywood blacklist.

Which future Lieutenant Tragg of TV's Perry Mason plays the party boss who exposes Kane's affair in Citizen Kane?

Ray Collins made his feature debut in the part after years of radio work alongside Welles, and went on to appear in more than 75 films before television made his face famous.

Which actor plays Kane's loyal business manager in Citizen Kane and a villainous lawyer in The Lady from Shanghai?

Everett Sloane came from Welles's radio company to make his feature debut, and the trailer has him appear to sprint straight at the lens before a mirror gives the trick away.

Which actor plays Citizen Kane's reporter, his face kept in shadow, and also voices the newsreel narrator?

William Alland got the narrator job by imitating the real newsreel announcer, who had asked $25,000 for it; he later produced the Creature from the Black Lagoon films.

Which comedy legend saw Citizen Kane's future Susan Alexander act in Carmel and urged her to try Hollywood?

Charlie Chaplin noticed her in a small playhouse in 1938, but only bit parts in B movies followed until Welles gave her the role that made her name.

Which future Oscar winner for The Paper Chase oversaw the first script drafts of Citizen Kane?

John Houseman spent weeks at a ranch on the Mojave River in Victorville, keeping Welles's co-writer, who was nursing a shattered leg, at work on the draft.

Which RKO studio chief, Welles's staunchest champion, is credited with supplying the title Citizen Kane?

George Schaefer worried that the script's one-word working title pointed too plainly at Hearst, several of whose papers carried the same word in their names.

Which Hearst gossip columnist stormed out of a private Citizen Kane screening and threatened RKO with a lawsuit?

Louella Parsons had believed Welles's denials over lunch and was humiliated when her arch-rival saw the film first; an angry letter from Hearst then set her campaign against it in motion.

Hearst's allies threatened to expose Welles's romance with which married star during the fight over Citizen Kane?

Dolores del Río wanted the affair kept quiet until her divorce came through; she stayed at his side through the filming and the storm that followed.

Which founder of Life and Fortune magazines reportedly wanted to buy Citizen Kane and release it himself?

Henry Luce saw it at a press screening in early 1941 and was reportedly ready to pay $1 million; Welles recalled that the publisher and his wife Clare roared with laughter at its mock newsreel.

Which rare privilege in his 1939 RKO contract let Welles release Citizen Kane exactly as he wished?

Final cut meant no executive could trim a frame without his consent, or even view the rushes until he chose; his next contract, signed after Kane, took the right away.

Which German silent classic did Welles order from the Museum of Modern Art to study before Citizen Kane?

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari served as his primer: he checked it against a handmade textbook of film technique that a production advisor had hurriedly compiled for him.

Asked where a first-time director found the confidence to make Citizen Kane, Welles gave which one-word answer?

Ignorance, he explained, is the surest source of confidence, because it is only once you know something about a profession that you turn timid or careful.

In a rare gesture, Welles shared his own director's title card on Citizen Kane with which member of the crew?

The cinematographer had volunteered for the job, walking into the newcomer's office to ask for it because he wanted to work with someone who had never made a picture.

Which California city's zoo and Balboa Park supplied some of the few location shots in Citizen Kane?

San Diego provided rare outdoor scenery for a production shot almost entirely indoors, most of it on the sound stage that is numbered 19 on the Paramount lot.

Welles insisted Citizen Kane's first-time composer be paid at the same rate as which Hollywood veteran?

Max Steiner set the benchmark because RKO, noting that the newcomer had never scored a picture, had wanted to pay him only a small fee.

In which country did Welles first hear the tune that became Citizen Kane's rousing newspaper-party song?

Mexico gave him the melody, a song by Pepe Guízar, and new words were written for the picture; the same tune plays under the trailer and the end titles.

Welles said his first idea for Citizen Kane was the one later used by which Kurosawa film of clashing testimonies?

Rashomon reached screens in 1950, nine years after Kane, and its director had not yet seen Welles's film when he made it.

Susan Alexander struggles through an aria from which Rossini opera during her singing lesson in Citizen Kane?

The Barber of Seville supplies the showpiece her despairing coach cannot get her through; for her stage debut the film's composer wrote a new aria pitched cruelly beyond her range.

Welles's four-minute trailer for Citizen Kane, a set tour he narrates unseen, famously contains none of what?

Scenes from the film were left out entirely, almost unheard of at the time; instead the cast, out of costume, appear in specially shot rehearsals, and Welles never shows his face.

Which director made the 2020 Netflix drama about writing Citizen Kane from his late father's script?

David Fincher shot it in monochrome, a condition that had sunk his first attempt to make it in the late 1990s; it led that year's Oscar field with ten nominations.

Which actor played Orson Welles in the 1999 HBO film about the battle to get Citizen Kane released?

Liev Schreiber starred opposite James Cromwell as Hearst and John Malkovich as the co-writer, in a film named after the studio's own production number for Kane.

Besides Hearst, which rival press baron of the yellow-journalism era helped inspire Citizen Kane's hero?

Joseph Pulitzer is named beside Hearst as a model for the composite character, who also borrows from two Midwestern tycoons and from the lives of the men who wrote him.

Kane's stern banker guardian in Citizen Kane was, by one account, loosely based on which real financier?

J. P. Morgan was the model only in a general sense: an old-fashioned nineteenth-century capitalist with ties to high finance and the railroad companies.

Which revered European director called Citizen Kane a total bore and dismissed its performances as worthless?

Ingmar Bergman also called the respect the film commands unbelievable, a rare dissent: the Japanese master Yasujirō Ozu named it his favourite foreign picture.

Which Italian film topped the first Sight and Sound poll in 1952, a decade before Citizen Kane took over?

Bicycle Thieves won that first vote while Kane finished as a runner-up outside the top ten; from 1962 Welles's film then led every poll for half a century.

Which assistant editor on Citizen Kane went on to direct Peyton Place and the disaster film Earthquake?

Mark Robson went on to help trim Welles's next picture against the director's wishes, then got his own start directing low-budget horror for the producer Val Lewton.

Which device did effects artist Linwood Dunn use to sharpen Citizen Kane shots that the lens alone could not?

An optical printer let him layer one strip of film over another, and he claimed that up to 80 percent of some reels went through it, work long credited to the man behind the lens.

Citizen Kane finally opened on 1 May 1941 at which Broadway theatre, after its first venue backed out?

The Palace, an RKO house, hosted the opening at a moment when many exhibitors, afraid of a libel suit from Hearst, refused to show the film at all.

After chipping his ankle in a fall on the Citizen Kane set, Welles directed for two weeks from what?

A wheelchair kept him working, and when he went back to acting he wore a steel brace that can be glimpsed in the low-angle scene after Kane loses the election.

Citizen Kane was the very first title released, on LaserDisc in 1984, by which prestige home-video label?

The Criterion Collection launched with Kane and followed it with King Kong; in 2021 the film came back to the label as one of its first 4K discs.