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 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.