The new book Who Wrote Citizen Kane? – Statistical Analysis of Disputed Co-Authorship uses statistical methods to scrutinize the language of the script to determine the individual contributions made by Orson Welles and Herman Mankiewicz.
Authorship of the Academy Award winning screenplay has been hotly debated by film scholars since the publication of Pauline Kael’s flawed Raising Kane in 1971 and subsequent rebuttals by Peter Bogdanovich, The Kane Mutiny, and Joseph McBride, Rough Sledding with Pauline Kael. The argument was settled for many by film historian Robert L Carringer’s exhaustive study of The Scripts of Citizen Kane in 1978. More recently, Harlan Lebo, author of Citizen Kane: A Filmmaker’s Journey, produced an overlay in 2020 that detailed hundreds of differences between the final script and changes Welles made during filming.
In Who Wrote Citizen Kane?, author Warren Buckland takes a scientific approach to the debate.
Buckland subjects the language of the Citizen Kane screenplay to a “forensic” examination. Employing linguistics, basic statistical tests, plus computer technology and software, he identifies the stylistic signature of each author – the combination of consistent and regular linguistic habits that make each author’s writing distinctive.
“The statistical reasoning and analysis carried out in this study have followed straightforward quantitative research practices. I created statistical profles of Mankiewicz and Welles based on linguistic variables that maximally differentiate the two authors. I then compared each author’s profle to the same variables in the disputed text, the Citizen Kane screenplay,” Buckland wrote in his book.
He added, “Like all statistical studies, in my analysis of Mankiewicz, Welles, and Citizen Kane, I set out to identify the underlying unity (consistent patterns and trends) in a voluminous amount of data. I sought to define those patterns in terms of theories of style and to construct arguments that attribute stylistic unity to an author.”
Who Wrote Citizen Kane? is part of the Quantitative Methods in the Humanities and Social Sciences book series. It is designed to foster research-based conversation with all parts of the university campus.
Buckland is Reader of Film Studies at Oxford Brookes University in England. His previous books include Narrative and Narration: Analyzing Cinematic Storytelling, Wes Anderson’s Symbolic Storyworld: A Semiotic Analysis and Directed by Steven Spielberg: Poetics of the Contemporary Hollywood Blockbuster.
Who Wrote Citizen Kane? is available in hardcover or as an ebook for $99 from Springer Books at link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-40224-1. The hardcover is also available online from Amazon.
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