Kane links and info

[purplepines]

The publisher of the NY Times 57 year old Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. has said something that I take to be very cryptic:

"I really don't know whether we'll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don't care either."

More: http://www.cyberjournalist.net/news/004038.php

[Glenn Anders]

Nicely and sadly done, Toddy.

CITIZEN KANE provides a parallel in the decline of newspapers for what is going on today in America. All those graphs of contracting Kane enterprises in the tide of the Great Depression are now online, amid the eBaying, Craig-Listing, and twittering miliions of nervous citizens, and it will be interesting, perhaps frighteningly so, to contemplate how a nation so large and amorphous as the United States, in large towns and small, will begin to reconstitute its various ethnic, ideological and religious societies into something our people, the World, has never seen before.

Today's counterparts of Charles Foster Kane, the later Hearsts, Ochs, Sulzberger, and Knights will find other enterprises in which to invest their money for profit, for that is the corporate imperative.

I can't help but think that, as we gather around our electronic fireplaces without newspapers, we shall be more isolated, lonely, and vulnerable than we were in the past. The simplest of transactions, social, financial, personal, will now be out of our hands -- carried on over the Internet, shared with people we have never met in the flesh nor vetted as to who they really are and what they are up to. As I learned in teaching, most of us, certainly in recent decades, have wanted to learn what we already know; hence, the rise of tailored news in the Media and on the Internet. To an extent greater than ever before (but hinted at over the last eight years), people, by and large, will no longer allow themselves to be confused by facts, nor be forced to modify their prejudices by exposure to opposing information, attach their real names to their opinions, nor will they have to justify their beliefs, face to face, The subjects of Culture and Truth will prompt millions upon millions to reach for their guns, an urge Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels was infamously able to utilize in another confused nation.

My fear is that we will be part of an ever more Cowardly New World!

Thank goodness, we know who everyone is at Wellesnet, Toddy.

Glenn

[RayKelly]

http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2012/03/introducing_ebertfest_2012.html

In explaining his choice, Roger Ebert wrote on his blog:

It is often voted the greatest film ever made, but I imagine everyone in the theater will have seen it before. So why show it? Two reasons: (1) More than most films, it benefits from additional viewings. And (2) several years ago, when I could still speak and all of my troubles were in the future, I recorded a commentary track for the Warner Bros. DVD. It was named by Variety's Video Premiere edition as the best commentary track of the year.

It occurred to me that playing the commentary track might be a way to sneak my speaking voice back into Ebertfest. In the early years of the festival, one of my great joys was to participate in the onstage discussions after each film. These days I love the sessions led by our guest moderators. But indulge me and allow my voice to be heard one more time in the Virginia.

Using the scene-by-scene technique, I've often gone through "Kane" and other films with an audience. The ground rules are simple: We show the film. When anyone in the room sees something they want to discuss, they call out "Stop!" and we freeze the frame and discuss it, sometimes nudging the film forward or back one frame at a time. In the early days, we did this on 16mm. Then laserdiscs. Then DVDs. Now we have the new Blu-ray 70th anniversary edition. I make no claims to be a distinguished expert on "Kane," but when you look at a film with thousands of eyes joining you, it's likely that sooner or later you'll have discussed just about everything discussable.

[Le Chiffre]

Good news. I had the pleasure of attending Ebert's fest in 2001, when they showed Kubrick's 2001 in 70mm. Looked great on the big Virginia Theatre screen, and the theatre was packed, with Ebert doing a Q&A with Keir Dullea and Aurthur C. Clarke afterwards. Great atmosphere.

[Le Chiffre]

Nice Q & A seesion with David Bordwell after the showing of the Ebert commentary of KANE:

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/22229046

NYC premiere of Kane:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94Yxv_jik_k

[Colmena]

Here are some quotes from Dos Passos' _The Big Money_, which is part 3 of _USA_(1938). The section is entitled "Poor Little Rich Boy," p417-424. I've selected some of the passages which are esp. relevant to Kane. I'm assuming that Mank and /or Welles read it.

What is notable is how DP presents Hearst as someone who mobilized his millions and his powers as a press mogul to advance his political career, and then to advance the movie career of his woman..., and when neither worked out, retreated to his over-stuffed Castle.

Was this a common overview of Hearst's life, or something that DP articulated for the first time? In either event, it makes the Hearst > Kane similarity unmistakable.

Those runtogether words are DP's. Picked up from Joyce, I assume.

***

When his father asked him what he wanted to do with his life, he said he wanted to run the Examiner which was a moribund sheet in San Francisco which his father had taken over for a bad debt. It didn't seem much to ask. The old man couldn't imagine why Willie wanted the old rag instead of a mine or a ranch, but Mrs Hearst's boy always had his way. Young Hearst went down to the Examiner one day, and turned the office topsy turvy. 419

When there's no news make news. "You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the way," he's supposed to wire Remington in Havana.

His editorials hammered at malefactors of great wealth, trusts, the G.O.P., Mark Hanna and McKinley so shrilly that when McKinley was assassinated most Republicans in some way considered Hearst responsible for his death. Hearst retorted by renaming the Morning Journal the American and stepping back into the limelight wearing a frockcoat and a tengallon hat, presidential timber, the millionaire candidate of the common man.

["The American" was Mank's original title for CK. Kane being responsible for the presidential assassination was a major plot point in the early drafts, which ends up as a brief bit in the "News on the March" bio.]

In nineteen-eight he was running revelations about Standard Oil, the Archbold letters that proved that the trusts were greasing the palms of the politicians in a big way. He was the candidate of the Independence Party, made up almost exclusively, so his enemies claimed, of Hearst employees.
(His fellowmillionaires felt he was a traitor to his class but when he was taxed with his treason, he answered:
You know, I believe in property, and you know where I stand on personal fortunes, but isn't it better that I should represent in this country the dissatisfied than have somebody else do it who might not have the same real property relations that I may have?)

[I'll be saying more about this esp important passage in another post.]

In spite of spraying hundreds of thousand of dollars into movie-studios he failed to put over his favorite moviestar as America's sweet heart.
And more and more the emperor of newsprint retired to his fief of San Simeon of the Pacific Coast, where he assembled a zoo, continue to dabble in movingpictures, collected warehouses full of tapestries, Mexican saddles, bricabrac, china, brocade, embroidery, old chests of drawers, tables and chair, the loot of dead Europe,
built an Andalusian palace and a Moorish banquethall and there spends his last years amid the relaxing adulations of screenstars, admen, screenwriters, publicitymen, columnists, millionaire editors, a monarch of that new El Dorado...

[NB: "the loot of dead Europe"]

Until he dies the magnificent enlesslyrolling printing presses will pour out print for him, the whirring everywhere projectors will spit images for him,
a spent Caesar grown old with spending...

[Le Chiffre]

Thanks for the excerpts, Colmena. Pauline Kael's RAISING KANE points out that, although it was Ferdinand Lundberg who sued Welles and Mankewicz for plagiarism, John Dos Passos probably could have too. The Lundberg trial resulted in a hung jury, but he would up getting $15,000 out of RKO anyway, to avoid a retrial.

[Colmena]

You're welcome, Mteal.

So I was wondering Lundberg influenced Dos Passos, or vice versa?
But Imperial Hearst and The Big Money both came out in 1936, which suggests that their negative assessments of Hearst were arrived at independently. I.e. They could have both been relying upon journalism written against Hearst. I'm sure there was plenty of that, prior to '36.

I've also been reading Huxley's _After Many a Summer Dies the Swan_ but it seems like the relevance to Hearst only applies to Huxley's physical description of a version of San Simeon.

[tonyw]

http://dcairns.wordpress.com/2013/09/28 ... ment-67041

This is the first in what looks like an excellent series of close readings. The accompanying comments are definitely of interest.

[Le Chiffre]

I quite agree, Tony. I finally had a chance to really peruse the Shadowplay blog, including some of the entries going back to Dec 2007. I think it's an amazing, and prolific website, with many other Welles-related entries, besides the new Kane series, which is very interesting itself so far. Here are the other parts of the Kane series:

Mondo Kane #2:
http://dcairns.wordpress.com/2013/10/05 ... the-march/

Mondo Kane #3:
http://dcairns.wordpress.com/2013/10/12 ... -rancho-1/

Mondo Kane #4:
http://dcairns.wordpress.com/2013/10/19 ... l-library/

Mondo Kane #5:
http://dcairns.wordpress.com/2013/10/26 ... lude=24392

Mondo Kane #6:
http://dcairns.wordpress.com/2013/11/02 ... lude=24675

Mondo Kane #7:
http://dcairns.wordpress.com/2013/11/09 ... lude=24349

Mondo Kane #8:
http://dcairns.wordpress.com/2013/11/16 ... -xanadu-2/

[Wellesnet]

David Cairns concludes the excellent 9-part series on "Citizen Kane" at his Shadowplay website:

http://dcairns.wordpress.com/2013/11/23 ... 9-rosebud/

[Wellesnet]

http://www.wellesnet.com/?p=9168

[Wellesnet]

The draft Citizen Kane script sold for 98,500 pounds, or $164,797, at auction, according to Sotheby's.

[Wellesnet]

It was likely right around the time of the 1934 Woodstock Summer Theatre Fest that Orson Welles first encountered the Thorne Rooms, which had been installed the year before at Chicago's Art Institute, a place where Welles would briefly study drawing and painting a couple of years later.

From Barbra Leaming's "Orson Welles", Leaming relates on how Welles instructed her to go to the Art Institute in 1984 when she was in Chicago as part of her Welles book tour:







She also discusses the influence of the Thorne Rooms on the visual style of "Citizen Kane":

[Roger Ryan]

I feel the opening shot of the dinner table scene from AMBERSONS (the first sequence shot for the film) is another example of Welles framing his set to look like a Thorne Room miniature.

Here's a moment from later in the scene that nearly replicates the framing of the opening shot...