50 Fun Facts About Citizen Kane

What is Charles Foster Kane's dying word?

The newsreel producer sends reporter Jerry Thompson to find out what it meant.

What is the name of Kane's Florida estate?

Photographs of banker Otto Kahn's real Oheka Castle stood in for it on screen.

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

He hires the best journalists in town, poaching most from the rival Chronicle.

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?

Leland is fired for writing a bad review of her debut there; Kane finishes the review himself.

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

He hits Thatcher with the sled that turns out, decades later, to be Rosebud.

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

The famous breakfast montage charts the marriage's collapse across a dozen years in a few minutes.

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

Studio head George Schaefer wanted him 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?

He arrived on 20 July 1939 intending 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?

It died when he couldn't trim $50,000 from the budget; a political thriller, The Smiler with a Knife, stalled next.

Who co-wrote the Citizen Kane screenplay with Welles?

He knew Hearst socially and came to hate him after being exiled from his circle.

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

Robert Carringer's 1978 study of all seven drafts concluded Welles's contribution was 'substantial but definitive'.

Which media baron was the primary model for Charles Foster Kane?

Pulitzer and Chicago tycoons Insull and Harold McCormick contributed to the composite too.

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

It was his feature-film debut, fresh from Broadway's The Philadelphia Story with Katharine Hepburn.

Who plays Kane's mother, Mary Kane?

She was one of ten Mercury Theatre players making their film debuts.

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

She had been acting in small parts since 1938 under the name Linda Winters.

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

Arthur O'Connell and Louise Currie were also among the uncredited reporters.

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

'I'd learned whatever I knew in the projection room - from Ford,' he said.

Who was the cinematographer on Citizen Kane?

He asked Welles for the job, wanting to work with someone who had never made a movie, and shares Welles's title card.

What technique, which the film is famous for, keeps foreground and background sharp at once?

Toland called it 'pan-focus' and said it could hold everything from eighteen inches to two hundred feet.

What unusual thing did every set on Citizen Kane have, breaking studio convention?

Many were made of fabric to hide microphones, and the low angles showed them off.

How did Welles disguise the start of filming from RKO executives in June 1940?

The first 'test' was the projection-room scene, which cost $809 against a test budget of $528.

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?

It later gave its name to a 1999 HBO film about the making of Kane.

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

He directed from a wheelchair for two weeks and wore a steel brace visible in the low-angle scene with Leland.

What happened on the ninth take of the sled-burning finale?

The furnace at the Selznick studio grew so hot the flue caught fire; Welles was delighted.

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

His assistant Mark Robson also went on to a directing career.

Who composed the score, his first for a film?

Welles insisted RKO pay him at Max Steiner's rate, and gave him 12 weeks rather than the usual two or three.

Susan Alexander's opera aria was a parody of an aria from which fictional-sounding but real title?

Herrmann pitched it so high that a real soprano, Jean Forward, had to strain for a top D while dubbing Comingore.

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

Denied a credit by the department head, he got a full-page newspaper thank-you from Welles 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?

Her rival Louella Parsons, Hearst's own Hollywood correspondent, was humiliated at being scooped.

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

The offer, delivered by Nicholas Schenck, would have covered the negative and every print.

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

It finally opened at the RKO Palace on Broadway on 1 May 1941.

How did Hearst respond to the film in his newspapers?

His papers also refused RKO's advertising, and many theatres 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?

He predicted no one would care to see it again; the film later spent 50 years atop the Sight and Sound poll.

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

Variety blamed block voting by screen extras for the shut-out in the other categories.

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

It held the top spot from 1962 to 2002 before Vertigo displaced it.

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

Sartre and Sadoul had initially disparaged it; 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 colorisation row helped pass the 1988 act that created the registry.

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

Hearst papers used the Richard Wright adaptation as a chance to call Welles a communist.

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

Hearst said nothing; Welles told him 'Charles Foster Kane would have accepted' the invitation.

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

It broke a ban that had lasted more than seventy years.

Which stage actress did Welles cast as Kane's first wife, Emily Norton Kane?

Warrick later said she was struck by how much she resembled a photograph of Welles's own mother, and described their relationship as motherly.

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 narrated the fake News on the March newsreel after the real March of Time voice asked for $25,000?

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?

Wilder's play races through some 60 years of one family's life at a single Christmas table.

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

Toland said he had spent two years developing it and used it for the first time on this film; Welles put his name on the same title card as his own.