Citizen Kane/Trivia

• Creator Backlash: Welles wasn't that big on the film. He preferred some of his later work, like his adaptation of Kafka's The Trial. In a 1960 interview, he said, "I'm ashamed of Rosebud. I think it's a rather tawdry device. It's the thing I like least in Kane. It's kind of a dollar-book Freudian gag, you know. It doesn't stand up very well."
• Dyeing for Your Art: To simulate heavy drunkenness, Cotten stayed awake for 24 straight hours, resulting in some unscripted flubbery (that caused Welles to grin despite himself).
• Hey, It's That Guy!:
  • Agnes Moorehead, who appears as Kane's mother, became a longtime character actress who later starred as Endora on Bewitched.
  • Ruth Warrick, Kane's first wife, later became famous to soap opera audiences as Phoebe Tyler on All My Children, a role she played for thirty-five years.
  • The great character actor Alan Ladd appears briefly as an extra near the beginning of the film in the projection room and again smoking a pipe near the end.
• Magnum Opus Dissonance: Orson Welles saw Chimes At Midnight as his masterpiece.
• Star-Making Role: Joseph Cotten, who went on to a long and very successful career as a leading man in Hollywood. In fact Kane was a Star Making Role to some extent for most of the cast, since the bulk of them were members of Welles' Mercury Theatre troupe and they were all making their film debuts together.
  • Welles himself is an interesting aversion. He was a star since age 16, and became famous for his theatre and (cough) |radio, and had in fact made three films prior to this (a bizarre short in 1934, a 40-minute film that was intended to be part of a hybrid stage play/movie performance in 1938, and he narrated a version of Swiss Family Robinson a year before Kane came out), but the movie almost destroyed his career.
• Throw It In: Joseph Cotten stumbling over the word "criticism". It was a genuine flub, but fortunately both he and Welles stayed in character (albeit Welles grins) and Cotten follows up with a brilliant ad-lib "I AM drunk", so it stayed in the film as-is.
• Troubled Production: Barely averted - the screenplay might never have been finished had Welles' co-producer Herman Mankiewitz not broken his leg and been cooped up in Welles' home; Mankiewitz was known to disappear for weeks at a time due to his drinking and gambling problems.
• What Might Have Been: Originally, the movie was going to be based on the life of Howard Hughes with Cotten in the lead. Eventually, Welles realized nobody would believe most of the stuff Hughes had done, so he decided to make Kane a media baron instead.
  • Also, Welles was originally going to make an adaptation of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness but the executives didn't believe they could possibly stretch a budget far enough to cover it, so he made Kane instead.
• Word of Dante: Sort of. People assume Marion Davies had a bad career, as her expy in the film shows. In fact, Marion Davies was widely considered a talented actress and comedienne, independent of all the publicity Hearst arranged for her.
  • Hearst did push Davies towards melodramatic leading-lady roles. Davies - along with many others - recognized that her real gift was for light comedy.