BERNARD HERRMANN on working with ORSON WELLES and CITIZEN KANE

People always tell me how difficult Orson Welles is. The only people I’ve ever met worth working for were difficult people—because they’re interested in achieving something. Just spare me the charmers. Welles in every other way might be difficult, but when it comes to making artistic decisions he’s like the Rock of Gibraltar.                                                            —Bernard […]

Gore Vidal on ROSEBUD – what did it REALLY mean?

The ever witty, brilliant friend of Orson Welles, writer Gore Vidal, wrote a review in 1989 of Frank Brady’s Citizen Welles and Welles own script for The Big Brass Ring. The article itself is fairly well known (it was reprinted in Interviews with Welles), but if you haven’t read it, it can be accessed here: […]

The Citizen Kane Trailer

� There is a fascinating article on the Citizen Kane trailer in the Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Volume 15, No. 2. The article runs from pages 96 to 113, and is the first article to my knowledge to�focus on�a Welles trailer. The author remarks that only recently are trailers becoming understood as works of […]

ORSON WELLES writing about Marion Davies

Shortly after receiving the AFI’s Life Acheivement award in 1975, Orson Welles was asked to contribute a foreword to Marion Davies oral history, The Times We Had. In his foreword, Welles reflects on what people assumed where some of the Hearst like elements in Citizen Kane, and purports that only one scene in Kane “was […]