Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Citizen Kane - The Greatest Movie of All Time Almost Didn't Happen

By Red Roberts


If you have a Maytag Appliance I have a site for you. I have recently created a site to help you if you need a part for your Maytag Appliances. I call it -- naturally -- Maytag Parts

Find replacement parts for your Maytag washers, dryers, dishwashers and refrigerators -- all in one place.

But, really, Maytag Washer Parts and the rest are important -- but not really much fun to read about. Right?

So how about the "Greatest Movie Ever Made" which almost didn't get made?

Citizen Kane is considered to be one of the greatest movies ever made. It ranked #1 on the American Film Institutes to 100 films list in 2007.

(Two much better films, Casablanca and The Godfather, came in second and third. Just one man's opinion.)

But Citizen Kane almost never made it to theaters. And when it did, it bombed and was booed .

How did this happen?

For the answer to that, you must understand exactly what the film is really about and the mood of the time in which it was released.

"I'll Give You $800,000 for the Film"

If you've seen the film and know a bit of history, you know that it a thinly veiled expose of the life of newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst.

Orson Welles, despite his fame after the 1939 War of the World's radio broadcast and the attention he got when he "headed to Hollywood," filmed Citizen Kane in almost complete secrecy (it was certainly a different era.)

But as soon as the film was completed, Hearst got wind of it and offered RKO studios $800,000 to destroy the film -- $100,000 more than the picture cost to make.

When this failed he used his influence -- and newspaper empire -- to prevent theaters from showing the film and to turn public opinion against it. Any theater that dared show the film was banned from advertising.

So effective was his smear campaign that even though Citizen Kane received 9 Academy Award nominations, it had a negative, even hostile, reception with the public.

Finally Given Its Due

Upon it's rerelease to theaters in the 1950's Citizen Kane was finally recognized as the modern masterpiece it is. (Rerelasing a film to theaters was a common practice in the era before TV and DVD's. Many films popular films were shown again and again, year after year.)

Even if it's not as good as Casablanca or The Godfather. I'm just sayin'. ;-)

One Last Interesting Note

Orson Welles was known as the Boy Genius because of his superior radio work on The Shadow, Mercury Theater of the Air (which included the famous "War of the Worlds" episode) and, of course, Citizen Kane, all of which he produced before he was 30 years old.

However, Boy Genius is even more accurate than most people know: recent research has discovered that the "Greatest Movie of All Time", Citizen Kane, seems to be based almost entirely upon an original play he wrote while in High School!




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