Orson Welles, Vol I (92 page)

No production executive will be entitled to share in the screenplay authorship screen credit unless he does the screenplay writing entirely without the collaboration of any other writer
¹⁵

Here again, Welles was saved by the bell: his contract with Mankiewicz had preceded the agreement by three months; it had no force.

It is quite true, as Weissberger and Brady, echoing him, say, that Mankiewicz clearly, in the presence of advisers and witnesses, signed away his rights to a credit. He was paid quite handsomely for doing so. None the less, there is something murky about Welles even contemplating taking the whole credit for the screenplay. Certainly, there were pressures on him to do so: contractual (his deal
specifically required him to write the screenplay) and professional (the tremendous and menacing build-up of publicity positively defying him not to be an all-round genius). The inner pressure, however, was even greater. Writing was something at which he felt he should be good; he never was. A pervasive feeling of déjà lu hangs over everything he wrote. In the light of all his other gifts, this
lack seems unimportant: but not to him. In Houseman’s acute words ‘his ability to push a dramatic situation far beyond its normal level of tension
made him a great director but an inferior dramatist. His story sense was erratic and disorganised; whenever he strayed outside the solid structure of someone else’s work, he ended in formless confusion.’
¹⁶
He was, however, an inspired editor. Most directors,
whether in the theatre or on film, fulfil this function for the writers with whom they work; most directors submit ideas, propose substantial restructuring, suggest phrases, even whole speeches – as, frequently, do the actors. In his Lundberg deposition, Welles describes the rewriting of one of
Citizen Kane
’s scenes: ‘we closed the picture for a day in order to rewrite this scene. This rewriting
was done by myself and the actors involved in the scene.’

The actors did not expect, and did not get, a credit, nor any additional payments. This is all part of the job; this is what they get paid for. It doesn’t warrant a credit. The directors’ credit is: ‘Directed by’, which means that the film, in the last resort, is theirs; the finished film is what they have made of all the ingredients.
There was in Welles a sort of confusion in this area, as if anything less than total authorship would expose him as a fraud. Later, he maintained that he had wanted to credit Houseman, too: ‘I tried to persuade Houseman to put his name on, since he’d been working all this time,’
¹⁷
he told Meryman. ‘But Houseman was more interested in mischief than glory.’ Houseman, for his part, sat down and wrote
Welles a letter: ‘I informed him that if anyone but Mank was to get credit for the script of
Kane
it would be me, and that I was prepared to enforce my claim through the Screenwriters’
¹⁸
Guild on the basis of my writer’s contract with Mercury Productions.’ The next morning he tore the letter up. For Welles, the real dread now was not that he would have to share a credit for the screenplay, but
that he would not get one at all. The dispute was not finally resolved until January of the following year, when Welles and Mankiewicz signed a joint declaration that they wished to confirm the screen credit:

which is how it stands in the film. The order of the names was by Welles’s personal decision. It is of course simply alphabetical;
the other way round would have been a further provocation, and by now Welles was weary of the whole thing.

Meanwhile, principal photography was complete: ‘we close the
picture today stop isnt that wonderful query’ Dick Baer telegrammed Arnold Weissberger on 23 October, a week later than scheduled. It was not a moment too soon, since both Ruth Warrick and Dorothy Comingore were pregnant. On
the last day of shooting, Welles threw a party in Culver City, converting the studio into a Wild West bar; at the climax of the party, a stage-coach appeared, whether in homage to John Ford is not clear. Welles left town the next day: ‘which will give us all a little bit of rest,’
¹⁹
wrote Baer. Welles’s chronic financial instability was responsible for this surprising departure. There was at least
another six weeks’ shooting to be done, mostly special effects, for which the camera crew (minus Toland, whom Goldwyn had reclaimed) was kept on, but no further instalments from RKO being due till delivery of the completed picture, he had to raise some money immediately. He took to the lecture circuit again for a fortnight while preparations for intensive post-production took place without him.
After his tour de force, Welles, in the old theatre joke, was forced to tour. Omaha, Cleveland, Toledo, Fort Worth, San Antonio, Dallas, Houston, Oklahoma, Tulsa, Detroit, Des Moines were the dates.

He found himself in San Antonio, Texas, on the 28th at the same time as a fellow lecturer, H.G. Wells. Someone had the wit to bring them together in a studio. Whatever animosity the author of
The War of the Worlds
may have harboured against Welles – and he had at the time of the notorious broadcast threatened to sue for unauthorised changes – it had disappeared. The old boy couldn’t have been more agreeable, chirping away in his London accent, saying that of all the very pleasant things that have happened to him since he arrived in America, quite the best so far has been meeting ‘my
little namesake’. He dismisses the panic over
The War of the Worlds
as Hallowe’en humour – on both sides (‘that’s the nicest thing a man from England could possibly say about the Men From Mars,’
²⁰
purred Welles, ‘that not only I didn’t mean it, but the American people didn’t mean it’). The younger man betrays a rather nasal, distinctly Mid-Western voice in this chat, quite different from his Narrator
voice, or his poetry voice. He seems a little nervous, but is naturally delighted when Wells brings up the subject of
Citizen Kane
. ‘Mr Wells is doing the nicest kindest thing,’ says Welles. ‘He is making it possible for me to do what here in America is spoken of as a plug.’

HG:
This new picture of yours – you’re the producer, the art director, you’re
EVERYTHING.

OW:
It’s a new sort of
a motion picture with a new method of presentation and a few new technical experiments and a few new methods of telling a picture.

HG:
If I don’t misunderstand you completely there’ll be a lot of jolly good new noises in it.

OW:
I hope there will be a lot of jolly good noises in it … it’s just what the motion pictures need these days. They could well afford these days, some jolly good
new noises … I can think of nothing more desirable. I’m all for it.

It was to implement those jolly new noises that Welles returned to Hollywood (somewhat richer, though large amounts of his earnings had already been disbursed in advances). The shoot had been hugely successful, but it was only the beginning.

It is easy for an inexperienced director to use up all his energy on the dramatic
activity of actually shooting the film; not Welles. He instinctively knew the importance of sound and music, and had planned both carefully in advance. He may not, on the other hand, have immediately realised what he could do with optical technology, but when he did, there was no holding him back. RKO had one of the most advanced special effects departments in the industry, headed by Vernon Walker
(whose speciality was back projection) but effectively dominated by the brilliant innovator Linwood Dunn, pioneer of optical printing. The methods he developed lent themselves to many more purposes than would normally be understood by the phrase ‘special effects’. They did not necessarily concern themselves with the extraordinary or the extra-terrestrial. Their essence was their invisibility
to the naked eye. Almost everything concerning the leopard in Hawks’s
Bringing up Baby
, shot for RKO in 1938, for example, was achieved by superimposing the scenes containing the stars onto previously shot footage containing the leopard and its handler who had been blotted out; all this was Dunn’s work. Welles and he applied their combined brilliance to the footage of
Citizen Kane
, transforming
it to a quite unheard of degree.

A great deal of celluloid wizardry had already been achieved in the camera, things that would normally be achieved optically. Toland was an inventive man, and he was proud of what his camera could do. Many of the remarkable compositions in
Citizen Kane
had been shot by means of double exposures: a foreground figure would be shot, the film would be threaded
through the camera again, and then the background figures would be shot on the same film. Many of the fade-ins and fade-outs were actually created on the set, using
controlled dimmers. Observing Toland at work, Dunn, a forthright man, told Toland that a lot of the effects he was labouring to achieve could much more easily be accomplished by optical printing. Toland loathed the technique because
of the deterioration of the image, and said so. By a strange irony, however, thanks partly to Welles’s passionate embrace of the optical printer, a large number of the scenes Toland shot (up to 50 per cent of the entire film; in some reels 80 to 90 per cent) were modified by Dunn. Some of the elements most espoused by Toland were in fact created optically. ‘Many of
Citizen Kane
’s deep-focus effects
had been created by [Vernon] Walker’s unit,’
²¹
writes David Bordwell in a remarkable account of Toland’s achievements in the cinema of the thirties and forties. ‘Several of the Xanadu shots, ceilings included, were mattes. The shot of Kane firing Leland was done in back-projection … many normally looking scenes were optical composites of units photographed separately.’

‘Telling Orson about
the optical printer was the kiss of death,’
²²
said Dunn. He might have said ‘kiss of life’. Welles had discovered a means of introducing almost limitless improvements to what he had shot. Dunn told him that he could do ‘anything at all’ with optical printing; the only obstacles were time and money. The processes involved are slow and complex. Robert Carringer cites a memo from Vernon Walker to
the front office, explaining that the delays in completing its share of work are due to Welles’s intransigence and his habit of coming up with new ideas after the fact. One of the most extraordinary of these is in the sequence at the Thatcher Memorial Library. The camera pans down a monumental statue of Thatcher onto the female guard. Both the statue and the pan are entirely the work of Dunn. As
Toland shot it, the scene started on the guard. Dunn made a miniature model of Thatcher (George Colouris, who was paid for sitting for it) and perfectly matched the base of the statue with what had been shot. This is breathtaking, and it accounts for scene after scene: the famous crane shot over the roof and into Susan Alexander’s night-club is two separate shots linked by an apparent flash of lightning;
the pan up into the wings during the opera sequence is another.

Welles the conjuror delighted in the informal name of optical effects: ‘trick shots’. Dunn was a sorcerer, to be sure, (if a slightly grumpy one) and Welles, enchanted by the process, wanted to join in. Dunn acknowledged his apprentice’s talent, revealed in ‘flashes of inspiration’: when confronted with the blurred effect of shooting
closer and closer, optically, on the glass globe containing the snow scene, Welles suggested superimposing more snow onto it. The
result was a triumph. As his own producer, of course, Welles was able to authorise all the extra work. Again, what is striking is his insistence on his complete satisfaction with the results. This is the ‘intransigence’ noted by Vernon Walker. ‘I was months and months
and months turning down versions of them, day after day, until they got good enough,’
²³
Welles told Bogdanovich. ‘Trick work
can
be good enough, but you must be brutal about it. Just refuse it, refuse it till it gets better.’ For a tyro to deal so surely and uncompromisingly with a seasoned pro like Dunn is remarkable; he, and many of his colleagues, while neither specially liking nor admiring
Welles, acknowledged that they had learned a great deal from him. He pushed them further than they knew they could go. Not that he knew where he was going; he just knew it could be better. As far as Dunn’s and Walker’s department is concerned, their contribution to the film is immeasurable. It also explains, as David Bordwell points out, why Toland’s other films (in which he didn’t use optical effects)
lack such extreme depth of focus. A lot of the film as it stands is a kind of trompe-l’oeil, a visual conjuring trick. Even more than most films,
Citizen Kane
is not quite all it seems to be.

Special effects thus proved more important to the film than editing in the formal sense. Welles started filming with a senior editor, George Crone, at his side, but it soon became apparent that he was
too slow for Welles, and was replaced by whizz kid Robert Wise, only a year older than Welles, hotfoot from working on
The Hunchback of Notre-Dame
, RKO’s blockbuster of the previous year, where he had equal editing credit with Robert Hamilton. He brought with him his assistant, Mark Robson. Both men became directors in their own right within a couple of years of their work on
Citizen Kane
. Though,
as Welles said, there was, because of the way he shot it, ‘nothing to cut in
Citizen Kane
’ by comparison with many movies, the all-important question of rhythm exercised the department for many weeks under Welles’s ruthless if erratic guidance. One frame more or less can transform a sequence; Welles would not rest until he was perfectly satisfied with the results.

The flashiest piece of editing
in the film, the pastiche
News on the March
newsreel was, by another brilliant directorial decision, farmed out to actual newsreel editors with their idiosyncratic cutting style; the music came from RKO’s stock library. In further pursuit of authenticity, he had tried to hire Van Vorhees, the actual voice of
The March of Time
, but his fee was prohibitive, so the cry of Vakhtangov! was heard again.
Bill Alland did a creditable impersonation, aided by
Houseman’s wickedly parodistic text (which is not far from Wolcott Gibbs’s celebrated send-up of
Time
-ese: ‘Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind!’).
²⁴
Mankiewicz, Pauline Kael reports, had wanted to use the
News on the March
sequence as a summary of the transformation of popular journalism: pre-Hearst, Hearst, and then Luce; Hearst’s
own Hearst-Metrodome news film,
News of the Day
is mocked in the title, as much as Luce’s
March of Time
. Formally speaking, it is interesting to note that the newsreel within the film offers a synopsis of the story in advance, in the Greek manner; this was scarcely in the authors’ minds at the time. As Houseman says: ‘if you’re going to do a chronicle picture about a great man, you almost inevitably
were going to use
The March of Time
.’ The crucial thing, private parodistic jokes apart, was to make it convincing. Toland’s Realism was the criterion. It was Wise and Robson, in pursuit of that realism, who shocked their colleagues by dragging the completed sequence across the studio floor and trampling on it, in order to create the authentically grainy and battered effect. The result of all
this was the single most impressive, most spoken-of element in the movie.