different screenplays?

[Colmena]

I downloaded a CK screenplay, I'm not sure from where, assuming it would be what one finds in the Kael volume... but now I see that it is different, repeatedly and fundamentally. E.g. There's a scene where Kane visits the president! Can anyone identify or/and date this screenplay? -- the one where Kane visits the president.

Also, is Mank's original screenplay, The American, available anywhere?

Speaking of, in _This is OW_, Welles notes that he was unaware of Sturges' The Power and the Glory.
But it's certainly possible that Mank had seen it, and that it was an influence on The American, right?

(BTW, just to make this clear, in referencing Kael and Mank I am not advocating the position that the final script is still essentially Mank's.)

[Roger Ryan]

From my understanding, there were quite a few drafts of the KANE screenplay...probably more than any subsequent Welles film. The one included with the 50th Anniversary Videotape box is different from the one that Kael published as well (I'll have to check to see if it includes a "visit with the president"). The one big scene that Welles wrote himself (the 1929 meeting of Kane, Thatcher and Bernstein) was even written shortly before filming; it's a scene I consider to be one of the best in the film.

[Roger Ryan]

UPDATE: The 50th Anniversary set came with a screenplay dated "June 18th, 1940" and it does indeed contain the scene where Kane meets with the President to protest the leasing of oil reserves. Shortly after the President ignores Kane's pleas, the Inquirer publishes an article accusing the President of "Oil Theft!" ostensibly influencing an assassin to kill the President shortly thereafter. The sequence appears to be inspired by both President McKinley's assassination in 1901 and the "Teapot Dome" oil scandal which happened twenty years later. By the "third revised final script" dated "July 16th, 1940" (the one Kael published), this entire sequence is gone; the only remnant left is Kane's brief mention of "...this whole oil scandal" during one of his breakfasts with Emily.

Given that the screenplay published in THE CITIZEN KANE BOOK is the third revised final script and a letter written by Joseph Breen refers to a "July 9th, 1940" version as the "second revised final script", then the "June 18th, 1940" draft is either the first "final script" or the first revision of that script! Either way, that makes four drafts of what was called "final" and that doesn't count any earlier drafts. Welles would continue to edit and add his own material up to and during the shooting.

[Glenn Anders]

Yes, colmena, as usual, Roger is correct. There were many drafts of the screenplay. One example, which I quote extensively in my Epinions review, concerns the funeral of Kane's son, after a Fascist riot in Italy, in which Kane reads the epitaph on the tomb, an ancient, mordant poem about the foolishness of materialism. And of course, the most famous example of Welles' improvisation on the set of the picture involved his shutting down the shoot for a couple of days while, inspired by a play by his friend, Thornton Wilder, he came up with the montage sequence in which he summarized the marriage of Kane to Emily Norton Kane in a moment or so.

In many ways, the shooting continuity IS the screenplay for CITIZEN KANE.

Glenn

[Colmena]

The screenplay in question, which I found here:

http://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/citizenkane.html

is the one which Carringer identifies as the Fourth Draft in his extremely useful essay "The Scripts of CK." It is the first of the 4 "final" drafts that Roger notes above. The last one, which we find in Kael's The CK Book, is enumerated by Carringer as the Seventh. (Unfortunately, Carringer does not go on to pick out the more important differences between this last draft and the completed film.)

Against Kael, Carringer underlines Welles' contribution to the scripts, which, according to RC, begins with third draft.

One point that neither Carringer nor Kael note, is that Mank and OW discussed this tale *before* Mank retired to Victoriaville to knock out the first draft of The American. Hence CK comes under the crucial influence of Welles' early interest in doing a multifaceted (with alternate pov's) presentation of a notorious public figure, as he first attempted with "Marching Song" in regard to John Brown. This is the so-called "Roshomon" aspect, which Welles brought to CK.

[GlennandersFraser]

Dear Colmena: I become confused, as you have been, by all the scripts and claims for credit in creating the undoubted masterpiece that is CITIZEN KANE. What is important, after all, is that a masterpiece was created, as Orson Welles suggested during his meditation on the timeless, anonymous beauty of Chartres in the conclusion of his F FOR FAKE. That conclusion, among other applications, was a subtle reference, I think, to all the egotism (including his own?), confusion, bitterness, claims, and counter-claims concerning the paternity or motherhood of CITIZEN KANE which swirled around Welles during his lifetime. [And evidence in a small way of the similar masterful qualities F FOR FAKE displayed.]

To save you the perhaps harrowing experience of reading my long Epinions review of CITIZEN KANE back in January 2000, let me quote that portion of the review containing results of my own inadequate research into the script's origin. [For really, the script is not the film, as established in the wonder of Welles' editing of several pages of script about Kane's marriage to Emily, whoever wrote them, down to a superb montage of only seconds -- one of the technical glories of CITIZEN KANE.]

Here is my early discussion of the scripting process:


"Welles made peace with Houseman, had him and a secretary haul Mankiewicz out to the desert, far from temptation, to write. The result, AMERICAN, was to be about communication in the broadest sense (and, of course, the lack of it). Count the mediums by which the story is told: every way but by TV. The script went through at least six drafts after the first one, with both Houseman and Welles adding scenes, which had been their practice in radio.

"The general outline of Mank's script followed a jigsaw puzzle of the lives of self-made or lucky plutocrats who dominated America from the Civil War onward: Hearst, observed nearby at his movie unit on the MGM Lot; Reaper King Harold McCormick, who married Edith Rockefeller, and for his Polish mistress, Ganna Walska, bankrolled an opera house in Chicago; John D Rockefeller, Sr, recently dead, whose grandson, Nelson Rockefeller, Jr, Welles knew in New York; Samuel Insull, much in the tabloids for his return to America to face prosecution, having absconded to Greece with a fortune . . . many others -- the railroad giant Huntington! (Anyone who hears the great bronze doors of the Huntington Memorial Library in LA thump shut around closing time knows the chill air of the Thatcher Memorial Library in CITIZEN KANE.)

"The script was a melodramatic love story. (Jim Fisk, after all, quintesential boy plunger of Wall Street, built the Metropolitan Opera House for HIS mistress and was shot to death by a rival on the steps of her apartment house.)

"The hero of AMERICAN was to be seen wooing his first wife Emily, and later, would be found in rather steamy situations: in brothels and love nests. His son was to be involved somehow in an attempt on the life of his granduncle, the President of the United States, and was to die a Fascist, amidst a riot in Rome.

"John Houseman (seen as a kind of insignificant gofer in RKO 281), besides riding herd on Mank, and editing a number of drafts before passing them on to Welles, was put in charge of "The Newsreel." That device became not just the frame of the story but a short subject within the film, a kind of "March of Time" commenting on the hero's life, echoing not only Henry Luce's invention but the "Newsreel" literary innovations of John Dos Passos' USA, one of the most significant novels of the previous decade.

"The Newsreel, "News on the March," was to present the life of Charles Foster Kane in the jig saw fashion we now see used for a celebrity like Hugh Heffner on ENTERTAINMENT TONIGHT.

"Welles himself added and revised scenes, evident from letters and memos among the principals. He wanted the story told in limited first person as he had done in radio. In early talks with Cinematographer Gregg Toland (who volunteered for the project), he worked out a concept for shooting and editing which was developed for the original Mercury proposal, Conrad's HEART OF DARKNESS. It would emphasize light and shadow, as in memory; would present characters in emotional relation to space, size and distance."

And so, you see, Colmena, the mystery who REALLY deserves credit for writing the screenplay of CITIZEN KANE is SOLVED. "It really turned out to be a rather simple thing," as Henry Luce standin Rawlston said. All those claims, protests to The Screenwriters Guild, the threatened law suits are settled, folks; it really was ------ WAIT! WAIT!! Why has no on noticed the true collaborator who deserves most of the credit. SO LOGICAL! It's right there on Page 1 of the "1942 shooting script of CITIZEN KANE" reproduce (courtesy of SCRIBD) on a recent Wellesnet Facepage contribution. It tells us that CITIZEN KANE was written by . . . (wait for it) . . ."JOESEPH L MANKIEWICZ and Orson Welles."

* * * * * * * *

Such a simple explanation, so logical! Herman's younger brother, Joe, a successful screenwriter, excellent businessman, and eventually a Top Director, got tired of all the snaky arguments and troubles old Herman had gotten himself into (AGAIN). He said: "Give me that damn piece of (bleep). I'll re-write it over the weekend, Joe. Then, you'll be paid, and we'll be free of those nuts at Mercury!"

[I'M JUST KIDDING, GANG, BUT WHAT A TYPO! AND WHY HASN'T ANYONE CORRECTED IT AFTER ALL THESE YEARS? Go look for yourselves. I'm not making it up.]

Did I ever tell you how when I was nine, in 1940, I scrawled out a script entitled CITIZEN WELLES, and sent it into a Hollywood contest. The Bastards stole it -- cheated me! Oh, well, that's another story, and I don't want to further muddy the waters . . . .

Your Old Pal of Yore -- Glenn Anders [who has to work under the name of glennandersfraser1 now]

[Colmena]

Dear glenandersfraser,

Yes, I read your epinions review.... shortly after I arrived here, and thanks again for that.

While it may seem that way.... I'm really not concerned with arguing against Kael as to Mank's complete claim upon the script. I take it that her thesis has been refuted. And as a result her "Raising Kane" was not included in her Library of America volume?

Rather,
I've been preoccupied with an intensive study of CK, and what does interest me is how Welles alters the various drafts, and then how, in turn, the completed movie is altered from the last draft.

For instance, the largest and most significant difference between the movie and the last draft comes in the Thatcher chapter, where we find that Kane's revelation of his two secrets to Thatcher (re "you're talking to two people") is preceded by the assault of the muckraking headlines, and then followed by the scene in 1929 when Kane signs over the bulk of his empire to Thatcher. So you end up with this new rise and fall pattern which is not in the screenplay, and which prefigures the entire tale.

[GlennandersFraser]

Colmena: Call me Glenn.

The process, then, which your have become obsessed in analyzing (as to some degree have most of us) deals with the refinement of the often wordy, blustering screenplay begun as AMERICAN into all the versions of the script gave us the marvelous film we have at the end. As I've tried to suggest to you, that process is mostly one of cutting down the formal dialogue scenes by eliminating them or making them work VISUALLY. The final actual filming of the script then adds several brilliant touches like the the one you point out, where Kane's indulgences finally break down his power and control of his Newspaper Empire in the 1929 Collapse, leaving an embittered, broken plutocrat in place of the vigorous hands-on idealist who once exposed himself the corruption of the robber barons he so despised. He feels that Thatcher and entrenched fortune have entirely defeated him, excusing or ignoring on some level the effects that almost boundless wealth and power have wreaked upon his soul. The process is one of . . . simplify, simplify, simplify.

But, as an aside, does it not seem extraordinary to you (as I would have hoped it would have to my old-time colleagues here) that an archive of record like SCRIBD credits the draft it chooses to reproduce to "Joseph L. Mankiewicz" rather than his brother Herman? Is it not strange that no one that I know of has pointed out this typo in the intervening 72 years. Was it an honest typo? or did someone in the Mercury Players unit just play one last little trick on all the (often) argumentative participants in the creation of the final product we hail as CITIZEN KANE?

A small revelation but one that, I think, deserves discussion and explanation; even perhaps a tiny footnote in your own thorough research, Colmena.

Press on!

Glenn

[Colmena]

Hello Glenn,

Thanks for your characterization of how Welles altered what Mank delivered, and thanks for alerting me to this other source for a screenplay online, the one at Scribd, which I just downloaded.

This also proves to be the fourth draft, i.e. the first final. (I was hoping for a different draft, of course.) Perhaps these two were scanned from the text that Roger points to, above? I doubt that that text had the wrong Mank, and my source, the one I link to, gets it right. So, perhaps someone did that switch as a joke, a playful jeux? Just to see if someone else (yourself) would be alert enough to catch it?

Colmena

[sierra]

Mankiewicz made his contempt for Hearst too obvious and Welles took a lot of that stuff out. Mankiewicz made the character two-dimensional and totally unsympathetic because all he had in mind was Hearst. Welles supposedly did really want to keep the funeral of Kane's son in the picture but the budget wouldn't allow it. The set would have been too expensive.