After 76 years, William Randolph Hearst III broke his family’s public silence on Citizen Kane during a screening of the Orson Welles masterpiece at the San Francisco International Film Festival on Thursday night.
Citizen Kane was inspired, in part, by the life of Hearst’s grandfather, publisher William Randolph Hearst. The late publisher’s forces attempted to block the release of Citizen Kane and worked to derail Welles’ Hollywood career.
For years, Citizen Kane was not mentioned in Hearst-owned publications, but the younger Hearst openly discussed the movie with film critic David Thomson (Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles) at the film festival.
“Inevitably, someone wants to ask me what I think and I usually disappoint them by saying how much I love the movie,” Hearst told the crowd at the YBCA Theater. “It’s just a great movie, a great story. It’s not meant to be a documentary. But I do think it’s quite accurate in the way it portrays the newspaper business.”
The chairman of the Hearst Corp. and former editor and publisher of the San Francisco Examiner, said he did not see Citizen Kane until he was in college.
“You can tell in the first 15 seconds that you’re in good hands,” Hearst said of the movie. “The performances and the writing are very good. It’s always amazing to me that Orson had this obvious gift.”
He said he enjoyed Welles’ other films. “I’ve seen many of his films, including the lesser-known ones like Mr. Arkadin, and they all had that stamp of something important happening. Someone’s in complete control of the story. They just take you away.”
Hearst, 67, was just 2 years old when his grandfather died in 1951. His understanding of the link between the family and Welles’ famous film was shaped by his late father, William Randolph Hearst Jr., who did not appreciate that people viewed Citizen Kane as a biography.
“As a kid, I picked up on the awkwardness of my father being asked about Citizen Kane,” Hearst said.
Just as Citizen Kane was a “forbidden subject,” so was the relationship between William Randolph Hearst and mistress Marion Davies, he added.
“I do remember my parents talking about someone named ‘MD,’ and I thought maybe there was a doctor in the family,” he said. “It took me much longer to realize who they were really talking about.”
Material compiled from San Francisco International Film Festival, IndieWire and The Hollywood Reporter was used in this report.
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